PSCRP-BESA Reports No 207 (May 31, 2026)
Just as in the previous issue of our monitoring, readers saw many studies of Central Asia, the April issue contains a significant amount of material on the western flank of the post-Soviet space. As with last month, this wasn’t some kind of editorial tactic—it’s clear that sometimes coincidences drive the logic of a piece more powerfully than the intended message.
However, it wasn’t geography, but worldview and ideology, that took center stage in the April issue of our monitoring. We tried to cover these topics sparingly—they are too sensitive and complex for unbiased analysis.
But, clearly, the global shortage of worldview narratives and megaconcepts that each of us observes makes the demand for new ideologies so powerful that researchers simply can’t ignore it.
In the Ethiopian International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research (Volume 13, Issue 1, January 2026), Muahammadqodir Sheraliyev and Senior Lecturer Farrukh Ganiev of the Academy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Uzbekistan present a policy-oriented analysis titled “Improvement of the Preventive Inspector’s Mechanism for Early Prevention of Offenses in Improving the Criminogenic Situation in the Regions“.
The article examines the evolving role of prevention inspectors – local police officers responsible for community-level crime prevention – in Uzbekistan’s mahallas (neighborhood communities), particularly in areas designated with a complex “red” criminogenic status. Drawing on recent presidential decrees (PP-1 and PP-253 of 2025), the authors analyze how these officers can shift from reactive law enforcement to proactive, data-driven early intervention. The study addresses core questions about the causes of regional crime spikes, the limitations of fragmented information systems, and the potential of enhanced inter-agency cooperation, digital tools, and community structures like the “mahalla seven” to stabilize high-risk environments.
Methodologically, the work combines descriptive policy review with practical recommendations. It references official statistics from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, pilot project outcomes from Tashkent districts, and selected academic literature while proposing concrete institutional innovations. Rather than empirical fieldwork, the piece functions as an applied criminological brief advocating systemic modernization aligned with Uzbekistan’s “New Uzbekistan” development strategy.
The central argument is that prevention inspectors must become coordinators of targeted early prevention rather than mere registrars of offenses. Key proposals include creating a unified digital platform (“Mahalla-Prevention 2.0”) integrating databases from multiple ministries, implementing AI-supported risk mapping and patrol optimization, adopting CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) principles, and strengthening the inspector’s leadership over multidisciplinary teams addressing unemployment, family conflicts, youth issues, and social rehabilitation. The authors cite pilot data showing significant reductions in repeat offenses and project broader crime rate declines if these mechanisms are scaled nationwide by 2026–2030.
This research contributes to post-Soviet criminology by illustrating how Central Asian states are adapting Soviet-era administrative structures to contemporary challenges of urbanization, migration, and socio-economic transition. For Israeli readers, the article offers comparative insights relevant to managing security and social cohesion in multi-ethnic, multi-confessional societies facing similar issues of localized crime, radicalization risks, and community policing. Uzbekistan’s emphasis on mahalla-level prevention resonates with Israeli discussions on neighborhood resilience and early intervention against emerging threats, while the focus on digital governance and inter-agency coordination holds lessons for hybrid security models in volatile regional environments. As Central Asia remains strategically significant for Israel – due to its position between major powers and shared concerns over extremism and instability – this Uzbek case study enriches scholarly thought on how post-Soviet states are reconfiguring internal security architectures in the 21st century.
Daria Blinova and colleagues from the University of Delaware and University of Pennsylvania introduce a major new resource for the study of authoritarian political communication in their arXiv preprint (2605.15886v1, 15 May 2026).
The team, led by Benjamin E. Bagozzi as corresponding author, has assembled an ambitious dataset of interlinked multimodal materials drawn from official Russian government sources. It encompasses two large corpora: speeches and associated images from the Kremlin website spanning late 1999 to September 2025, and materials from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (mid.ru) covering 2004 to October 2025. In total, the collection includes over 15,600 English-language and 19,300 Russian-language speeches, paired with tens of thousands of images, harmonized metadata (dates, speakers, geolocations, official tags), and cross-lingual identifiers that link parallel Russian and English versions of the same communications.
The researchers employed systematic webscraping of the official sites, careful data cleaning, and a human-in-the-loop multimodal topic modeling approach using BERTopic. A Russian politics expert then refined and grouped the resulting latent topics into higher-level categories, with validation against official Kremlin tags and expert review. This methodology enables precise linkage between texts and visuals while preserving original language variations, allowing analysts to examine not only content but also deliberate differences in messaging across domestic and international audiences.
The resulting resource offers rich insights into the evolution of Russian elite rhetoric on domestic and foreign policy priorities. By facilitating comparisons between Kremlin and Foreign Ministry outputs, as well as Russian versus English versions of speeches, the dataset illuminates strategies of audience differentiation, framing, and legitimation in an authoritarian context. Its multimodal and multilingual character addresses critical gaps in existing text- or image-only collections, providing a testbed for temporal, spatial, and cross-lingual analyses of signaling and propaganda.
This work makes a valuable contribution to computational social science and the study of authoritarian politics by supplying analysis-ready, transparently documented data with validated topical annotations. For Israeli academic readers, the dataset holds particular relevance amid ongoing regional dynamics involving Russia – from the conflict in Ukraine and its ripple effects on global energy and security, to Moscow’s posture in Syria and the broader Middle East. Understanding the nuances of Russian official discourse, including how it tailors narratives for different audiences, equips scholars to better assess Moscow’s strategic intentions, hybrid influence operations, and implications for Israel’s national security environment in the post-Soviet space. The resource promises to enrich empirical research on conflict rhetoric and great-power competition in ways directly pertinent to Israeli strategic studies.
Karsten Brüggemann’s text “Doing It the ‘Baltic Way’: Internationalism and the Soviet Roots of the Singing Revolution”, published in “Ethnic Relations in the Baltic Reconsidered” (Central European University Press, 2026), offers a nuanced reinterpretation of the late Soviet era in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
Brüggemann, Professor of Estonian and General History at Tallinn University and President of the Baltische Historische Kommission, draws on extensive secondary literature, archival sources, and studies of cultural practices to challenge the dominant national memory narrative of straightforward anti-Soviet resistance. Instead, he examines how Soviet nationalities policy – particularly the ideology of “friendship of peoples” and internationalism – paradoxically sustained and even cultivated national identities in the Baltic SSRs.
The study addresses a central paradox: how a supposedly denationalizing regime enabled the mobilization that culminated in the 1989 Baltic Way human chain. Brüggemann demonstrates that everyday “banal nationalism” (invoking Michael Billig) flourished within Soviet institutions through song festivals, professional trilateral networks, folklore events like the Baltica festival, and cultural initiatives that blended socialist form with national content. These structures, originally designed to integrate the Baltic republics into *Sovetskaia Pribaltika*, created personal and institutional ties among elites that proved crucial during perestroika. Popular fronts drew heavily on members of the Soviet creative and scientific intelligentsia who had learned to operate effectively within the system.
A key argument is that Soviet internationalism did not erase national particularity but provided material support and legitimate frameworks for its expression, ultimately facilitating the transition from reformist support for perestroika to demands for sovereignty and independence. The chapter highlights how local elites used official channels – such as inter-republican conferences, student festivals, and cultural exchanges – to build transnational Baltic solidarity that transcended, yet emerged from, the Soviet context.
This work makes a valuable contribution to post-Soviet studies by moving beyond binary resistance-collaboration frameworks toward a more sophisticated understanding of hybrid identities and institutional legacies in late socialism. For Israeli academic readers, Brüggemann’s analysis holds particular relevance amid ongoing debates about ethnic relations, nation-building, and minority policies in multi-ethnic states. It illuminates mechanisms through which imperial structures can inadvertently foster national consciousness – insights pertinent to understanding dynamics in Russia’s near abroad, frozen conflicts, and the complex interplay between central authority and peripheral identities in the post-Soviet space. By historicizing the Baltic path to independence, the chapter enriches scholarly discourse on how cultural and network capital can transform seemingly stable multinational entities.
“The Geopoliticisation of Domestic Issues in the Baltic Sea Region and Central and Eastern Europe” by Joakim Ekman, Thomas Sedelius, and Kjetil Duvold, published online on 20 May 2026 in “East European Politics”, serves as the introduction to a timely special issue examining how conflict Russia and Ukraine has reshaped political life in post-Soviet and neighbouring spaces.
The authors, affiliated with Södertörn University and Dalarna University in Sweden, conceptualise “geopoliticisation” as the process by which domestic conflicts, preferences, and debates are reframed through the lens of geopolitical rivalries – particularly the value-based divide between the West/EU and Russia. Drawing on Cadier’s earlier work, they trace how an initially non-geopolitical EU Eastern Partnership evolved into a site of contestation after 2014, accelerating dramatically with the 2022 full-scale invasion. The introduction synthesises contributions analysing party strategies, public opinion, elite dynamics, and electoral behaviour across multiple national contexts, addressing three core questions: how domestic issues are interpreted geopolitically, which actors drive these processes, and what implications arise for democracy and political competition.
Key insights reveal the pervasive embedding of geopolitical orientations in everyday politics. Examples include the Sweden Democrats’ strategic shift toward NATO support ahead of elections, public attitudes toward strongman rule in semi-presidential systems, the Georgian Dream government’s use of “declarative Europeanisation” alongside affective geopolitics to sustain power, sharply polarised elite alignments in Belarus, and the pro-EU referendum victory in Moldova despite Russian interference. The authors highlight regional variations – strong pro-Ukrainian stances in the Baltic states and Poland versus more ambiguous positions further south – rooted in historical legacies and contemporary domestic incentives.
This special issue makes a valuable contribution by bridging the gap between international geopolitics and domestic political analysis, demonstrating that geopolitical frames increasingly co-constitute internal conflicts rather than merely overlaying them. For Israeli readers, the research holds particular resonance amid Israel’s own navigation of great-power rivalries and hybrid threats in the post-Soviet space. Patterns of autocratisation in hybrid regimes, elite manipulation of geopolitical narratives, and the resilience (or fragility) of democratic attitudes offer analytical parallels relevant to understanding Russian influence operations, energy dependencies, and the interplay between external alignments and internal stability – dynamics that continue to shape strategic calculations in Israel and beyond.
“Negotiating Traditional and Western Values in Social Media: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Kazakhstani Influencers’ Content” by Zhaskairat Burkitbayev and Zhomart Simtikov of Abai Kazakh National Pedagogical University in Almaty, Kazakhstan, together with Ayhan Kaya of Istanbul Bilgi University, Türkiye, was published in “Frontiers in Political Science” in April 2026.
The study examines how Kazakhstani social media influencers navigate tensions between traditional Kazakh norms – rooted in nomadic heritage, Islamic ethics, and Soviet legacies – and Western liberal values such as individualism, consumerism, gender egalitarianism, and secularism. Focusing on Instagram and TikTok, the authors ask what discursive strategies influencers employ, in which domains (particularly gender roles, sexuality, consumption, and religiosity) conflicts emerge most sharply, and how audiences respond. Employing critical discourse analysis, they scrutinize 500 posts and 3,000 comments from 50 influencers active between 2023 and 2024, combining linguistic, visual, and multimodal examination with attention to platform affordances and broader political-economic contexts.
The analysis identifies four main strategies: selective Westernization, neotraditionalist discourse (often commodifying ethnicity as “brand capital”), cosmopolitan-liberal advocacy, and ambivalent positioning that openly acknowledges unresolved tensions. Rather than achieving coherent synthesis, influencers frequently produce what the authors term “strategic incoherence” – the simultaneous maintenance of partially incompatible value positions through mechanisms like semantic reframing, temporal compartmentalization (e.g., religious content during Ramadan alongside secular lifestyle posts), and contextual maneuvering across platforms. Gender emerges as the central arena of contention, with female influencers crafting postfeminist articulations that blend empowerment narratives with reassurances to traditional expectations. Audience comments cluster into conservative-oppositional, liberal-supportive, and conciliatory positions, reflecting generational, educational, and urban-rural divides.
This research makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on value transformation and digital culture in under-studied post-Soviet Central Asian contexts. By linking local discursive agency to the structuring forces of platform capitalism and global cultural hierarchies, it illuminates processes of hybridization that defy simple narratives of Westernization or tradition preservation. For Israeli academic readers and strategic analysts, the study holds particular relevance amid Israel’s engagement with post-Soviet states and the broader Eurasian space. Kazakhstan and its neighbors represent a complex arena where Russian, Chinese, Islamic, and Western influences intersect; understanding how digital platforms mediate cultural and value conflicts offers insights into societal resilience, identity politics, and soft-power dynamics that shape regional stability and potential partnerships in an era of shifting global alignments.
“Infrastructure Failure in Times of Development as Derisking: Is Failing Early the Best We Can Hope For?” by Lela Rekhviashvili (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig) and Evelina Gambino (University of Cambridge), published online on 18 May 2026 in “New Political Economy”.
In this timely article, Rekhviashvili and Gambino examine the intersection of renewable energy infrastructure, financial derisking mechanisms, and project failure through the lens of the cancelled Namakhvani hydropower plant (HPP) in Georgia’s Rioni Valley. The authors interrogate what failure signifies in an era of “development as derisking,” where states assume substantial risks to attract private investment in green infrastructure, while questioning whether early project cancellation might limit long-term extraction and harm.
Drawing on extensive participant observation with the Rioni Valley Movement (RVM), interviews with activists and experts, analysis of leaked project agreements, and NGO legal assessments, the study blends activist scholarship with political economy. The researchers demonstrate how the 2019 agreement between the Georgian state and the Turkish-Norwegian consortium Enka Renewables exemplified derisking: the state provided land, water resources, tax exemptions, power purchase guarantees, and compensation for political and force majeure events, while imposing minimal obligations on the investor regarding local employment, environmental safeguards, or energy security benefits.
The central argument is twofold. First, derisking actively contributes to failure by socializing risks onto public budgets and local communities, weakening state oversight, and fueling social resistance. Second, and more provocatively, derisking enables investors to extract value even from failed projects – evidenced by Enka’s successful arbitration claim of approximately USD 383 million for a project barely underway. The authors highlight how the RVM came to view early cancellation as a relative success, protecting the valley from deeper socio-ecological devastation while exposing the extractivist logic underlying green transition financing in peripheral economies.
This research advances debates on infrastructure-led development and the Wall Street Consensus by showing that failure itself becomes a site of accumulation under derisking regimes. It enriches post-Soviet studies by linking contemporary green infrastructure pushes to longer histories of uneven transition, privatization, and dependency in Georgia.
For Israeli readers, the article offers valuable insights into the political economy of energy infrastructure in the post-Soviet space. Georgia’s struggles with hydropower megaprojects, foreign investment arbitration, and authoritarian responses to environmental protest resonate with broader regional dynamics involving energy security, great-power competition, and the tensions between climate goals and local sovereignty – issues that intersect with Israel’s strategic interests in Caucasian stability, diversified energy routes, and understanding resistance patterns in contested development contexts.
Dmitry Didenko’s article “The Evolution of Well-Being in Russia/USSR (19th–21st Centuries)” , published in «Social Evolution & History» (Vol. 25 No. 1, March 2026, pp. 63–91), offers a multidisciplinary historical analysis of Russian societal development through the lens of augmented well-being concepts drawn from welfare and happiness economics.
Affiliated with the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow, Didenko bridges history, economics, and sociology to examine how material and non-material dimensions of well-being evolved across the late Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods. The study addresses core questions about the continuity and non-linearity of modernization processes, the limitations of GDP-centric metrics, and whether the Easterlin paradox—where happiness plateaus despite rising income—manifests in the Russian context.
Methodologically, Didenko combines conventional quantitative indicators, such as Historical Human Development Index (HIHD) estimates from Prados de la Escosura and Mironov, life expectancy series, educational enrollment and attainment data, and homicide rates as a proxy for personal security, with innovative content analysis of digitized Russian-language Google Books. This allows him to track public interest in environmental quality and construct a Happiness Index based on the relative frequency of positive versus negative sentiment terms.
The article’s central argument is that Russia achieved remarkable catch-up in human development during key phases (particularly the late 19th century, 1920s–1950s, and post-2000s recovery), yet progress remained uneven and vulnerable to systemic shocks. Education showed the most sustained gains, while health improvements stagnated after the 1960s and personal security fluctuated sharply with state capacity, peaking during periods of institutional breakdown (1917, 1990s). Environmental concerns rose with industrialization but declined amid post-Soviet deindustrialization. Happiness indices reveal cyclical patterns tied to major historical events, ultimately supporting the Easterlin paradox in Russia, where subjective well-being decoupled from further material growth at a relatively low threshold.
Didenko highlights non-linear “wave-like” dynamics across the three historical periods, with transitions often triggering downturns in well-being measures. This nuanced, data-rich portrait enriches the modernization paradigm by incorporating subjective and institutional factors.
For Israeli readers, the study holds particular relevance amid ongoing strategic interest in the post-Soviet space. Understanding the internal social and perceptual dynamics shaping Russian state resilience, public sentiment, and long-term stability offers valuable context for analyzing Moscow’s foreign policy behavior, energy politics, and influence across Eurasia—factors that intersect directly with Israel’s security environment and regional diplomacy.