IASOC Presents: Evolving forms of Policing and Social Control in the Post-Soviet Region

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract

The evolution in the social organization of violence in the post-Soviet region has gone through various stages: from the fragmentation of the state monopoly of violence in the early 1990s, to the privatization of policing functions and the reassertion of traditional forms of policing often through the prism of police reform. Such changes have taken place at different speeds and have not been uniform across the region. In the present day social control is produced through a nexus of actors through, beyond, and below the state. This panel looks at the fragmentation of the auspices as well as providers of policing, and on the cooperation, competition or opposition of various law-enforcement agencies with societal forms of social control. The papers look at vigilantism and citizen-police relationships as well as attitudes to such forms of enforcement. This panel brings together empirical papers on Russia, Kazakhstan and Georgia.

Sub Unit

• Area VIII: Policing / 54: Police, Communities, and Legitimacy

Individual Presentations

• Policing, Youth Activism and Vigilantism in Russia - Gilles Favarel-Garrigues, CNRS, Sciences Po-CERI

• Creating Sociability after Socialism: Zero Tolerance Policing and Hooliganism in Kazakhstan - Gavin Slade, University of Glasgow

• Trust a Thief or the Law? Efficiency, Norms, and Private Versus Public Justice in Georgia - Alexander Kupatadze, St. Andrews University, UK

• Citizen Control of the Police in Russia - Anne Le Huerou, Unversité Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense, CERCEC

Chair

• Vincenzo Ruggiero, Middlesex University

Discussant

• Svetlana Stephenson, London Metropolitan University