PSCRP-BESA Reports No 193 (March 24, 2026)
In February, a number of the works we review below were devoted to the analysis of post-communist countries, the study of the concept of “socialist heritage,” and the discourse of leaders during crises.
Jelena Džankić, Eleanor Knott & Szabolcs Pogonyi. “Citizenship in the global struggles for democracy.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (March 2026)
This introductory article to a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies presents the results and structure of a long-term research project (CITDEM) examining the relationship between citizenship regimes and democratic backsliding, with particular attention to post-communist and post-colonial contexts.
The authors—affiliated with the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (European University Institute, Florence, Italy); the Department of Methodology (London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK); and the Department of Philosophy (Central European University, Vienna, Austria)—develop a three-component analytical model organized around three factors shaping the relationship between citizenship and democracy: identity politics, political projects, and economic interests, corresponding respectively to the formation, instrumentalization, and exploitation of citizenship regimes.
The authors begin from a seemingly paradoxical empirical observation derived from a systematic analysis of citizenship legislation in 20 post-communist countries between 1990 and 2021: citizenship regimes tend to remain stable during periods of democratization, but, paradoxically, become more open—rather than more restrictive—during periods of democratic backsliding. This pattern challenges the prevailing assumption in the citizenship and migration literature that more inclusive membership policies inherently signal democratic progress.
The central argument is that illiberal and autocratizing regimes may deliberately expand access to citizenship—granting it to diaspora populations, ethnic kin abroad, or wealthy investors—not to deepen democratic participation, but to manipulate electorates, consolidate political power, project geopolitical influence, or generate revenue. Conversely, restrictions on citizenship do not necessarily indicate democratic decline. The relationship between citizenship and democracy is thus characterized as complex, non-linear, and highly context-dependent.
A number of case studies directly concern the post-Soviet space, making this special issue particularly relevant for analysts of regional security and political dynamics—although the brevity of this monitoring report allows us only to recommend that readers examine these sections independently.
The article situates post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav cases within the global context of democratic decline. The authors cite Lührmann and Lindberg’s estimate that more than one-third of the world’s population currently lives under conditions of deteriorating civil liberties and political rights. In this context, citizenship is positioned as both a barometer and a mechanism of democratic health: its manipulation reflects the weakening of formal democratic institutions while simultaneously accelerating that process.
The mechanisms described—passportization, extraterritorial ethnic citizenship, and citizenship-by-investment—have direct relevance for strategic analysis in Israel.
More broadly, the question of how citizenship regimes interact with disputes over sovereignty and minority protection frameworks has direct implications for Israel’s own legal and diplomatic environment, including ongoing international pressure regarding residency, citizenship, and the political rights of the Arab population. The article’s analytical framework—distinguishing between the formation, instrumentalization, and exploitation of citizenship—offers a universal vocabulary for comparative assessment of such dynamics.
Xidong Ma, Yukun Zhang, Yan Li & Runheng Hu. “Formation and development of the socialist heritage concept: a chronological and thematic theoretical review.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2026, forthcoming). DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-06774-3
The article, published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Springer Nature), presents a systematic review of sources tracing the emergence and consolidation of the concept of “socialist heritage” (SH) as both an academic and political category. Drawing on 29 official documents from major international heritage organizations—including ICOMOS, DOCOMOMO, UNESCO, and UIA—as well as 137 multilingual theoretical sources, the authors reconstruct the conceptual trajectory of SH from the early 1990s to the present.
The methodological rigor of the study is notable: it follows the PRISMA methodology and employs thematic synthesis rather than simplified automated bibliometric analysis, which the authors justify in terms of interpretive accuracy.
The authors define socialist heritage as “the remnants of the material outcomes of large-scale socialist construction carried out in socialist countries,” including architecture, urban planning, monuments, green spaces, infrastructure, and landscapes. A key contribution of the study is its tracing of the concept’s evolution from its formal articulation at an ICOMOS expert meeting in Warsaw in 2013, where ICOMOS member Natalia Dushkina introduced the umbrella term “socialist heritage” to encompass structures ranging from socialist realism and socialist modernism to pre-Soviet avant-garde movements across the former socialist bloc.
This positioning has important analytical implications for the study of post-Soviet conflicts: it treats landmark architectural objects not merely as artifacts, but as politically encoded spatial instruments whose post-regime fate becomes a focal point of identity संघर्ष.
The article identifies three stages in the development of the concept (referred to as the “social seam”), each corresponding to broader political dynamics in the post-Soviet space.
The first stage (early 1990s–early 2010s) is characterized as a period of field research and value assessment, concentrated primarily in Russia and Germany. Throughout this phase, no unified conceptual term existed, and scholarly activity remained fragmented by period and geography.
The second stage (early–mid 2010s) marked formal conceptualization and institutional recognition. The April 2013 Warsaw meeting became a key milestone, producing both Dushkina’s definition and the establishment of the ICOMOS ISC20C “Socialist Heritage Initiative.”
The third stage (late 2010s–present) involves the development of practical preservation methodologies. ICOMOS has progressively expanded early warning mechanisms for endangered heritage sites. The 2020 “Historic Thematic Framework of the 20th Century,” prepared by ICOMOS ISC20C and the Getty Conservation Institute, provided a structured tool for integrating historical heritage into broader cultural heritage assessments.
Several aspects of this study are particularly relevant for analysts tracking conflicts and political processes across the former Soviet Union. The article systematically demonstrates—using source-based examples—how the demolition, preservation, or repurposing of Soviet-era monuments and infrastructure has served as a field of political contestation in Ukraine, the Baltic states, Georgia, and Belarus, across both active and latent conflict zones.
From the perspective of Israel’s analytical interests, the issues discussed intersect with several related challenges. The instrumentalization of archaeological heritage—materialized historical memory—in struggles over identity and territorial legitimacy is directly relevant to Israel. The article’s concept of “dissonant heritage”—structures recognized as historically significant but politically contested—provides a comparative framework applicable to similar debates in Israel.
GEOpolitics (Issue No. 28, March 2026)
In this section, we depart slightly from the usual format of our monitoring and present not just a single work, but a publication by our colleagues—a periodic analytical journal.
GEOpolitics is a Tbilisi-based analytical journal focused on Georgia’s foreign policy, security dynamics in the South Caucasus, and the broader geopolitical landscape of the post-Soviet period. The journal positions itself as committed to Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic integration and democratization. Its contributors include former Georgian ambassadors, deputy ministers, and scholars affiliated with Georgian and European institutions.
The best way to present the journal is through an example, and we have selected Tornike Gordadze’s article “Iran’s Uncertain Future and the Fragile Geopolitics of the South Caucasus.”
Gordadze takes as his starting point the coordinated U.S.–Israeli air and missile strikes of February 28, 2026, targeting Iranian military infrastructure and political leadership, including reports of the elimination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other senior figures. The article constructs a scenario-based model with three trajectories—orderly pragmatic transition, chaotic state collapse, and hard authoritarian succession—and assesses their implications for actors in the South Caucasus.
He begins with a methodological caution, drawing on Robert Malley’s observation that Western policymakers have historically misjudged both the resilience and fragility of Middle Eastern regimes, citing the U.S. miscalculation of Assad’s trajectory in Syria as a structurally analogous case. This serves as a warning against deterministic confidence in any of the three scenarios.
Under an orderly transition scenario, Russia would lose a partner for sanctions evasion; Iran’s reintegration into global energy markets would depress oil prices and indirectly weaken Russia’s war economy; and Georgia could re-anchor itself within Western frameworks, losing its intermediary role in sanctions “gray zones.” Armenia would benefit most, gaining a normalized southern border and increased strategic autonomy. Azerbaijan would benefit from reduced ideological hostility from Tehran, although Iranian opposition to extraterritorial corridor projects would likely persist even under a reformist government.
In the collapse scenario, Armenia is identified as the most vulnerable actor, losing its main non-hostile southern border and facing increased coercive pressure from the Azerbaijani–Turkish axis. Azerbaijan faces a paradox of short-term tactical gains offset by risks of ethnic resistance from the large Azerbaijani population in Iran and broader regional destabilization. Georgia would face migration pressure, increased organized crime, and heightened Western scrutiny of its role as a sanctions-evasion platform.
In the authoritarian succession scenario, Gordadze argues that Russia retains a tactical partner without significant strategic gains, while Georgia risks entrenchment within an authoritarian axis linking Russia, China, and nationalist Iran—regardless of Georgian societal preferences.
The study explicitly links the Iranian question to Russia’s war economy, noting that any escalation or transition in Tehran will affect Eurasian transit corridors, energy markets, and the resilience of Russian military logistics. It concludes with a recommendation that U.S. and European policymakers treat Iran not as a self-contained regional issue, but as a structural variable within the Eurasian order.
For the Begin-Sadat Center, the article provides a direct analytical assessment of the consequences of Israeli military actions in the South Caucasus—an aspect rarely addressed in the region’s strategic literature. Its geographic focus adds a layer of analysis often absent in Israeli and American assessments of strikes on Iran: namely, the secondary effects on post-Soviet conflict geography, Russia’s strategic positioning, and the interconnection frameworks embedding both Western and Israeli interests. The analysis of Georgia’s evolving rapprochement with Iran—including public expressions of solidarity with Tehran by Georgia’s Deputy Foreign Minister following Israeli strikes—documents a diplomatic posture that warrants close monitoring from the standpoint of strategic interests.
The GEOpolitics journal is published monthly .
Tsvetkova, N. “Historical analogies as markers of decisions: an LLM-assisted analysis in foreign policy.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2026, forthcoming). DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-06930-9
The article, forthcoming in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, makes what we consider a genuinely groundbreaking methodological and conceptual contribution to the study of foreign policy decision-making. It argues that historical analogies function not merely as cognitive or rhetorical tools, but as observable markers of already-forming political decisions.
The author contends that the repeated appearance of specific historical analogies in leaders’ discourse during crises reflects the consolidation of a policy course before it becomes visible in official statements or overt actions.
The study analyzes 1,100 official documents—499 from the Clinton presidency, 375 from Putin’s presidency, and 226 from Xi Jinping’s presidency—using an OpenAI GPT-based procedure to identify potential analogies, which were then manually verified and coded as cognitive, rhetorical, or signaling.
The operational definition treats a historical analogy as a comparison between a past event and a current political situation, excluding purely descriptive references and metaphors lacking explicit policy relevance. The three-part coding scheme distinguishes: cognitive use (diagnosing a situation and structuring options), rhetorical use (justifying decisions ex post or mobilizing support), and signaling use (articulated before a decision and subsequently repeated, serving as a correlational marker of an emerging choice).
All runs were conducted using GPT-4.0 via the ChatGPT web interface in August 2024, with key prompts repeated two to three times and all extracted data manually validated. As a reliability check, prompts were re-run on a newer model (GPT-5 “Thinking,” October 2025), yielding identical results.
The article situates itself within two established traditions of foreign policy analysis. The cognitive tradition (Hong, 1992; Jervis, 2017) argues that historical analogies help leaders make decisions under pressure by providing ready-made frameworks, albeit with risks of misapplication. The rhetorical tradition sees analogies as tools for mobilization and legitimation, shaping public opinion for external audiences.
Building on these, the study proposes a third perspective: when leaders draw an analogy—linking a current crisis to a specific past event—it indicates that the analogy has already structured their decision-making process to such an extent that they have, consciously or not, committed to acting in accordance with that historical precedent.
While the article provides extensive illustrative material, the brevity of this review allows us only to recommend that readers explore it independently.
The study offers a methodologically reproducible and conceptually grounded tool for analyzing leadership intent in foreign policy based on open-source information. More broadly, the idea that recurring historical analogies may serve as observable correlates of settled political decisions provides a potentially valuable additional instrument for analytical institutions engaged in early warning assessment of state behavior in conflict regions, including the post-Soviet space—and, of course, the broader Middle East.
Calderwood, E., Bell, T. R., Bone, J., & Lundberg, G. H. (2025). “Why Russian? Language choice and enrollment in U.S. universities.” Russian Language Journal, Vol. 75, No. 2
This study—whose fieldwork was conducted at Brigham Young University and six other U.S. universities during the Fall 2024 semester—appeared in print late last year but has only now become available online, and is therefore included in our February monitoring.
The report examines motivational and deterrent factors influencing American students’ decisions to study Russian in the current geopolitical context. While primarily pedagogical and sociolinguistic, its findings bear on a broader strategic question: whether the ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict—now in its fourth year—is reshaping Western societies’ investment in Russian-language human capital, a resource directly relevant to intelligence, diplomacy, conflict analysis, and civil society engagement in the post-Soviet space.
Data were collected using two custom-designed Qualtrics surveys conducted in Fall 2024, combining structured multiple-choice questions with opportunities for open-ended responses. Analysis included descriptive quantitative data and thematic coding of qualitative responses.
The study formulates two research questions: which factors facilitate or hinder enrollment in Russian language courses, and what measurable impact, if any, the Russia–Ukraine war has had on student engagement.
Across both groups, the dominant motivational cluster was integrative rather than instrumental: students cited cultural curiosity, desire to communicate with Russian speakers, interest in travel to Russian-speaking countries, and prior language-learning experience as primary drivers. Career-oriented motivations, while present, were secondary. The authors note this represents a measurable shift from the pre-conflict baseline (Merrill, 2013), where career advancement ranked first—indicating that the current cohort is primarily driven by affective and interpersonal, rather than strategic and professional, incentives.
Among students who considered but ultimately rejected studying Russian, the main deterrent was preference for another language rather than active rejection of Russian itself. Secondary deterrents included scheduling constraints, perceived grammatical difficulty, and uncertainty about professional utility. The war in Ukraine was not cited as a primary reason for отказ.
Only 14% of current Russian learners reported mixed feelings about studying the language; just three respondents expressed concern about using Russian in public. One of the most operationally significant findings is that 88.2% of active learners intend to continue their studies regardless of political developments.
From the perspective of a research center focused on the post-Soviet space, the study offers several analytically significant insights. Chief among them is the dual motivational response to the conflict: while a minority of students reported increased motivation to study Russian as a critical language, the majority experienced primarily logistical rather than ideological effects. This suggests that American civil society has not developed a “language embargo” against Russian comparable to, for example, the suppression of German language instruction in the United States during World War I.
Alexander Shpunt is an Israeli and Russian researcher and expert in the theory and practice of information and analytical work in the field of politics and resides in Haifa. Since 2016 he has served as a professor at the National Research University “Moscow Higher School of Economics. In 1999–2011 he also served as the executive director of the “Effective Policy Foundation”, the largest think tank in the RF at that time, and in 2011 founded and headed the Institute of Political Analysis Tools, specializing in systems for monitoring political behavior.