PSCRP-BESA Reports No 228 (August 31, 2026)
The “Access to Leadership Positions and Career Trajectories among Georgian and American Women in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries,” authored by Salome Tcharbadze, PhD Student at the International Black Sea University in Tbilisi, Georgia, and Prof. Dr. Tamar Shioshvili, Professor at the same institution, offers a rigorous qualitative comparative examination of the institutional, organizational, and care-related mechanisms that condition women’s progression into managerial and senior leadership roles across two markedly different national settings. Drawing primarily upon peer-reviewed scholarship, official statistical publications, and institutional reports issued between 2020 and 2026, supplemented by selected foundational theoretical contributions, the study situates contemporary patterns within the longer historical arc of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its analytical architecture rests upon five interrelated dimensions—organizational culture and promotion practices, caregiving responsibilities and care infrastructure, flexible work arrangements, intersectional inequalities, and structural access to professional development opportunities—while adopting a life-course perspective that traces cumulative disadvantage from educational attainment through labour-market entry, first promotion, family formation, mid-career advancement, and eventual senior leadership selection.
The research strategy is that of a structured comparative literature review and policy analysis rather than the generation of original survey or interview data. Sources were identified through keyword-driven searches, screened for relevance, methodological quality, and institutional credibility, and subjected to thematic coding that isolates both convergent patterns and context-specific mechanisms. Key concepts are carefully defined: career trajectories are understood as cumulative sequences of educational, occupational, and professional transitions; leadership access encompasses not merely formal titles but equal opportunity for authority, strategic decision-making, and advancement; caregiving responsibilities denote unpaid or underpaid activities of childcare, eldercare, and household management; flexible work arrangements comprise remote, hybrid, and alternative scheduling practices; and intersectional inequalities capture the interaction of gender with race, ethnicity, class, region, disability, and related social positions. Theoretical grounding is provided by gendered organization theory, role congruity theory, work-family conflict theory, and intersectionality, which together demonstrate that leadership inequality is embedded in routine organizational practices, stereotypical expectations, and the uneven distribution of unpaid care rather than in deficits of women’s qualifications or ambition.
In the United States, the analysis reveals measurable gains in women’s representation at senior corporate levels, alongside persistent fragility in the early pipeline, particularly at the first transition into management—the so-called “broken rung.” Unequal access to sponsorship, motherhood-related evaluation penalties, and racialized barriers continue to constrain cumulative career mobility even when formal anti-discrimination frameworks and extensive data infrastructures are present. Flexible and hybrid arrangements may sustain employment continuity yet risk diminishing visibility, informal mentoring, and promotion prospects when performance systems remain oriented toward physical presence. In Georgia, high levels of female educational attainment and formal legal equality coexist with substantial unpaid care burdens, occupational segregation, pronounced regional disparities between Tbilisi and rural municipalities, limited care infrastructure, and enduring patriarchal expectations that assign domestic labor disproportionately to women. Economic inactivity, informal employment, and restricted access to professional networks outside major urban centers further narrow the pool of women able to accumulate the continuous experience required for senior roles. Across both contexts, the study shows that relatively modest institutional disadvantages experienced early in the career trajectory compound over time, producing underrepresentation in leadership that cannot be explained by individual motivation or credentials alone.
The authors conclude that sustainable leadership equality demands institutional redesign rather than symbolic measures. Transparent promotion criteria, systematic sponsorship mechanisms, accessible and geographically distributed care services, gender-responsive labour policies, pay transparency, and explicit protections against flexibility-related stigma are identified as essential. Care infrastructure must be reconceived as part of the economic architecture that enables uninterrupted professional trajectories; flexible work must be governed by outcome-based evaluation rather than proximity bias; and leadership development must incorporate regional and digital inclusion so that gains are not confined to already privileged urban cohorts. The comparative perspective underscores that similar gendered outcomes may arise through divergent institutional histories—corporate pipeline dynamics and racialized evaluation in the United States, post-Soviet labour-market transition, family norms, and spatial inequality in Georgia—yet both cases illustrate the cumulative character of career disadvantage and the necessity of intervening before the executive level.
This comparative analysis of post-Soviet Georgian and American women’s leadership trajectories supplies Israeli scholarship and policy communities with transferable insights into institutional redesign that can inform gender-equality initiatives within multi-ethnic societies and regional cooperation frameworks across the post-Soviet space.
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The “Between Astana and Beijing: Russia’s Strategy to Build a New Economic Bloc in Eurasia,” is authored by Ahmed Al-Sayed Al-Haj, affiliated with advanced research institutions specializing in Eurasian geopolitical and economic processes. The research undertakes a systematic examination of the strategic implications of the Russian presidential visit to Kazakhstan from 27 to 29 May 2026, which followed directly upon high-level engagements in China. Through close analysis of official statements, bilateral agreements, and multilateral frameworks within the Eurasian Economic Union, the study reconstructs the contours of a coherent Russian policy aimed at consolidating an integrated continental economic architecture extending from Eastern Europe across Russia and Central Asia to China and the Asia-Pacific region. Particular attention is devoted to Kazakhstan’s pivotal geographic and economic position as the indispensable link connecting Russian industrial and resource capacities with Chinese markets and manufacturing hubs, while simultaneously serving as a key node in emerging transcontinental transport, energy, and logistics corridors.
The investigation proceeds by mapping the principal outcomes of the Astana summit, foremost among them the adoption of the Joint Statement on the Seven Pillars of Friendship and Good-Neighborliness in the Twenty-First Century and the conclusion of fifteen cooperation documents. These instruments establish a long-term institutional foundation grounded in mutual respect for sovereignty, strategic trust, expanded economic cooperation, cultural exchange, and the reinforcement of regional stability. Central to the agreements is the commitment to construct Kazakhstan’s first nuclear power plant under long-term financing and industrial partnership arrangements valued at approximately fifteen billion dollars, involving Rosatom and Kazatomprom and leveraging Kazakhstan’s possession of more than forty percent of global uranium reserves. Parallel advances are recorded in oil, gas, electricity, hydroelectric, and strategic mineral sectors, with explicit emphasis on moving beyond raw-material exports toward higher-value processing industries, battery production, and advanced technological applications. Financial and digital dimensions receive equal weight: central-bank memoranda on countering fraudulent transactions signal a shared orientation toward payment systems less dependent on external networks, while pilot projects in autonomous cross-border transport and coordinated modernization of customs and logistics infrastructures accelerate the operationalization of the International North–South Transport Corridor.
The research further situates these bilateral achievements within the broader Eurasian integration process. Discussions at the Eurasian Economic Forum and the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council prioritized technological innovation, logistical connectivity, and industrial project financing, underscoring Moscow’s pursuit of a networked economic space in which Kazakhstan functions as the principal geographic and institutional hinge. Complementary analysis of the emerging Russia–Kazakhstan–China triangle reveals mutually reinforcing roles: Russia contributes natural resources together with industrial and technological capabilities; China supplies the largest consumer market and global manufacturing base; and Kazakhstan furnishes the terrestrial corridors that bind the two. Concrete projects, including the proposed gas transit route capable of delivering up to thirty-five billion cubic meters annually through Kazakh territory, expanded oil shipments, and joint railway modernization led by Kazakhstan Temir Zholy and Russian Railways, illustrate the progressive densification of energy flows, transport networks, and industrial interdependence across the three states.
The authors conclude that the visits to Beijing and Astana constitute interconnected elements of a single strategic design whose cumulative effect will gradually reconfigure the economic geography of Eurasia. Realization of this design, however, remains contingent upon the capacity of Moscow and Astana to navigate residual geopolitical balances, secure sustainable project financing, manage competition among alternative trade corridors, and adapt to rapid technological change. Kazakhstan’s multi-vector foreign policy, while enhancing its international standing and investment attractiveness, simultaneously imposes calibrated limits on the depth of exclusive alignment with any single partner. Disparities among Eurasian Economic Union members and the parallel existence of competing regional initiatives further condition the pace of integration. Nevertheless, the practical system of energy, logistics, and industrial linkages already taking shape possesses the potential to generate durable mutual dependence and to redefine the long-term contours of continental economic space.
For Israel, the consolidation of this Eurasian economic architecture carries direct relevance to strategic diversification of energy and transit partnerships, the monitoring of evolving Central Asian connectivity, and the calibration of diplomatic and economic engagement across a region of growing systemic importance.
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“Cosmopolitics as the Co-Production of Action” is a research article by anthropologists Olga Ulturgasheva (University of Manchester) and Barbara Bodenhorn (University of Cambridge), published on July 29, 2026, in the journal Frontiers in Climate.
This scholarly article presents a fundamental rethinking of how action, decision-making, and collective response become possible in contexts of radical environmental uncertainty and intensified governance pressures. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, oral histories, ceremonial narratives, and remembered accounts from Eveny reindeer herders in northeastern Siberia, Yup’ik communities in southwestern Alaska, Iñupiaq whalers on the North Slope of Alaska, and Coast Salish peoples of the Pacific Northwest, the authors develop a comparative analysis that challenges dominant frameworks of risk management, expert control, and technocratic governance. The research demonstrates that Indigenous cosmopolitan practices offer a sophisticated alternative to conventional approaches that privilege human authority, prediction, and mastery over environmental systems.
The study is grounded in extensive field research conducted over several decades, with Ulutargasheva’s work focusing particularly on Eveny communities in northeastern Siberia and Bodenhorn’s long-term engagement with Iñupiaq whaling communities in Arctic Alaska. The authors position their intervention within broader theoretical conversations concerning cosmopolitics, political ontology, multiple worlds theory, and Indigenous environmental relations, engaging with the work of Isabelle Stengers, Marisol de la Cadena, Mario Blaser, Annemarie Mol, and Bruno Latour while extending these frameworks through detailed ethnographic attention to Arctic and Sub-Arctic contexts.
The article’s central argument is that cosmopolitics should be understood not primarily as an abstract recognition of plural ontologies or as a philosophical acknowledgment of multiple worldviews, but rather as the practical co-production of action through relations among humans, animals, weather, ice, land, technologies, spirits, memories, and institutions. This represents a significant departure from conventional accounts of co-production, which typically focus on how differently positioned human actors jointly produce knowledge. The authors argue for a more demanding understanding: action itself is composed through heterogeneous relations, and the question is not only whose knowledge is recognized but how beings with different capacities for sensing, refusing, warning, moving, and withholding participate in what happens next.
Methodologically, the article proceeds through four cumulative propositions developed through different ethnographic fields. First, analysis of dog-team and reindeer herding accounts demonstrates how authority becomes redistributed under conditions where human judgement can fail, as exemplified by stories in which dogs refuse to proceed in blinding snowstorms and reindeer halt before thaw-softened ground that humans cannot perceive as dangerous. These cases show that hesitation, stopping, waiting, and yielding are not the opposites of action but practical modes through which safer action becomes possible. The Eveny concept of nyammin, translated as coordination of movement, shared rhythm, or collective effort, provides an analytic anchor for understanding how authority passes between humans, animals, and shifting environmental conditions.
Second, border-crossing narratives and Eveny cryospheric memory develop a politics of perception, demonstrating that sovereignty, kinship, and historical recognition are negotiated through atmospheric opacity, animal sensorium, light, cold, sound, and the uneven power to decide what counts as evidence. Stories of crossing the Bering Strait by dog sled during the Cold War show how snowstorms were strategically used to disrupt state surveillance, with dogs serving as co-leaders whose sensing recalibrated action in real time. The analysis of churilan, the time of ghosts during extreme winter cold, reveals how the cryosphere functions as both archive and agent, making historical violence perceptible through seasonal transformations of light, sound, and atmosphere.
Third, Iñupiaq whaling ethics demonstrate that cosmopolitical action is inseparable from the maintenance of conditions of welcome, requiring collective labour through which whales, humans, institutions, journalists, scientists, and regulators become mutually consequential. Whales are understood as participants in fields of deliberation and evaluation that reorganize what counts as good practice, making human action answerable to more-than-human judgement. The article shows how whaling ethics encompass both moral registers of sharing, restraint, and ceremonial practice and political registers of negotiating regulatory frameworks that often misrecognize the practice by reducing tradition to tools while missing the relational ethics that make whaling meaningful.
Fourth, Eagle/Wolf narratives and ceremonial accounts move the argument beyond human-centred reciprocity, showing collaboration as transformation across species, elements, and forms of life. Accounts from both Iñupiaq Messenger Feast traditions and Coast Salish storytelling present scenarios in which animals instruct, transform, and constrain action, sometimes with humans at the centre and sometimes at the margins, demonstrating that agency, instruction, and obligation can circulate in ways that do not take humans as the inevitable reference point.
The authors conclude that cosmopolitics names an operative practice for living with volatility rather than a theory of plural ontologies awaiting acknowledgement. They argue that preparedness lies not in prediction or control alone but in flexibility: the capacity to shift tactics, redistribute authority, and remain receptive to multiple forms of communication from more-than-human beings. Stengers’ concept of ralentissement, or slowing down, is given practical force through the Eveny concept of nyammin, showing that hesitation is not passivity but an active discipline of remaining answerable to signs, refusals, absences, and presences that dominant institutions often treat as background. The pause, halt, or refusal is not a delay before action but the very means through which safer action is produced.
This study offers significant methodological and theoretical contributions to understanding how diverse populations navigate intersecting pressures of environmental change, governance regimes, and historical legacies of colonialism. The research demonstrates that Indigenous knowledge practices are not stable archives of environmental wisdom but dynamic modes of flexible coordination under shifting conditions, requiring ongoing negotiation among human, animal, and environmental participants. The co-production of action framework provides an alternative to dominant technocratic approaches that privilege prediction, standardization, and expert control while discounting situated warnings embedded in human-animal-land relations.
Significance for Israel: The article’s framework of co-produced action and distributed authority offers valuable perspectives for understanding conflict resolution, environmental governance, and security challenges in contested regions, highlighting how inclusive and multi-actor approaches can inform strategic decision-making in complex geopolitical environments.
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“European Union for Armenia: Values, Confidence, Prosperity,” authored by Sergey Minasyan and published as a KAS Policy Paper in Yerevan in July 2026 under the auspices of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, examines the evolving trajectory of Armenia’s partnership with the European Union in the period 2024–2026. The study situates this partnership within a broader analytical framework that integrates domestic political processes, institutional reform dynamics, security recalibrations, and economic structural constraints, while drawing comparative insights from the experiences of Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine as Eastern Partnership states that have advanced toward candidate status. Through a careful assessment of legislative, institutional, and societal dimensions, the research demonstrates that Armenia has attained an unprecedented level of engagement with European structures for a non-candidate country, marked by the implementation of the Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement, the deployment of civilian monitoring and partnership missions, the initiation of the visa liberalisation process, the adoption of a national EU Integration Act, and the formalisation of a bilateral Strategic Agenda. The analysis further incorporates the significance of the May 2026 European Political Community and EU–Armenia summits hosted in Yerevan, as well as the consolidation of a renewed reform mandate following the June 2026 parliamentary elections.
The central finding of the inquiry is that the primary constraints on Armenia’s European trajectory have shifted from external availability of engagement to domestic factors, including the quality of governance, the durability of democratic institutions, the credibility of reform implementation, and the capacity of political actors to sustain public trust across an uneven integration process. While regional security developments and the consequences of earlier crises accelerated Armenia’s orientation toward Europe, the long-term value of the partnership resides in its potential to strengthen institutions, improve governance standards, diversify economic relations, enhance societal resilience, and expand opportunities for citizens. The author underscores the necessity of calibrated expectations: the European Union does not function as a collective defence organisation and the existing partnership framework offers neither membership perspectives nor the full conditionality associated with association agreements. Comparative examination of the three Eastern Partnership cases reveals a recurrent gap between formal legislative approximation and actual institutional behaviour, illustrating that reform durability depends upon independent institutions, active civil society, and sustained domestic demand for accountability rather than external declarations alone.
In the domain of governance, the text identifies judicial independence, anti-corruption enforcement, and the closing of the gap between formal standards and everyday administrative practice as decisive tests of credibility. Public opinion data indicate broad yet relatively shallow support for closer European ties, accompanied by concerns that modernisation benefits may accrue unevenly. Strategic communication is presented as a structural rather than merely technical challenge, essential for converting symbolic association with European norms into durable societal consent. In the security sphere, the analysis provides an honest accounting of European instruments, emphasising their contribution to transparency, hybrid-threat resilience, and institutional capacity-building while clarifying the absence of collective defence guarantees. Economic assessment highlights opportunities in digital services, renewable energy, and connectivity under the Resilience and Growth Plan, tempered by the legal and structural constraints of Eurasian Economic Union membership, residual dependencies, and the need for carefully sequenced diversification that mitigates adjustment costs for households and regions outside the capital.
The author’s conclusions affirm that the partnership’s potential remains genuine, yet its outcome will be determined less by bilateral statements than by the quality of Armenian institutions, the management of regional frameworks, and the willingness of both sides to communicate realistic parameters to their respective publics. Four priorities are singled out for the coming decade: completion of visa liberalisation, meaningful judicial reform, continued energy diversification, and deeper integration into European digital and innovation ecosystems, all underpinned by more effective domestic communication. The study thus contributes a sober, multi-dimensional evaluation of post-Soviet European integration dynamics under conditions of incomplete institutional consolidation and competing external frameworks.
For Israeli strategic analysis, the text illuminates South Caucasus realignments and resilience-building mechanisms that bear upon regional stability, energy corridors, and the management of hybrid challenges relevant to Israel’s broader security environment.
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The article “Moralized Patriarchy in Kazakhstan” authored by Aigul Zabirova, Doctor of Sociological Sciences and Chief Research Fellow at the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies under the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan in Astana. The text appears in the Journal of International Women’s Studies, Volume 28, Issue 3, 2026, archived in the Virtual Commons of Bridgewater State University. Zabirova’s research profile focuses on gender, religiosity, values and post-Soviet social transformation in Central Asia, and for this study she designed the gender-related survey modules and conducted the analytical work, while field implementation was performed by the Center for Applied Research TALAP.
The research addresses the persistence and transformation of patriarchal norms in contemporary Kazakhstan against the background of prolonged formal gender equality promotion during the Soviet period and subsequent nation-building after independence. Empirically it draws on the 2024 national survey “Values and Identity in Kazakhstan” commissioned by the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies, with fieldwork between 11 May and 22 June 2024 among a probability sample of 8,101 adults aged eighteen and above covering all seventeen regions and the cities of Astana, Almaty and Shymkent. The study examines attitudes toward maternal employment, priorities in schooling for boys and girls, the principle of men’s priority in employment when jobs are scarce, and expectations concerning breadwinning and male headship. Analytically the author employs distribution analysis across four domains, cross-tabulation with association measures, and a binary logistic regression model using a dichotomized traditionalism index ranging from zero as egalitarian to one as traditional, derived from a broader zero to four scale capturing breadth of traditional orientations across domains. Ten sociodemographic predictors are tested, including sex, age, education, type of settlement, religiosity, income and region, with model fit significantly above the null and classification accuracy of seventy four percent, though with asymmetry in predicting egalitarian versus traditional responses.
The core theoretical innovation is the formulation of moralized patriarchy and the mechanism of moralized patriarchal compromise. Drawing on gender regime theory and the concepts of patriarchal bargain and moral economy, Zabirova argues that the Kazakhstani gender order represents a stable hybrid in which expansion of women’s education and labor market participation coexists with continued legitimation of men’s symbolic authority within the family. Hierarchy is not reproduced through open coercion but through an ethical vocabulary of duty, care, responsibility, virtue and family harmony. Women’s work, once framed as civic obligation in the Soviet era supported by nurseries and social services, is now justified as contribution to household well-being and cultural continuity, while men’s primacy is reframed as protective responsibility. The compromise absorbs modernization rather than resisting it, embedding women’s advancement within expectations that their public activity not unsettle men’s symbolic role as providers. Regional differences are pronounced, with odds of traditionalism two to three times higher in southern and western Kazakhstan than in northern and metropolitan areas, reflecting varied combinations of Islamic moral frames, Soviet employment legacy and contemporary official discourse on family values and spiritual revival.
Conclusions indicate that individuals are simultaneously traditional and modern, endorsing women’s education and employment while preserving belief in men’s economic priority and women’s responsibility for domestic cohesion. Traditional attitudes are more common among men, older cohorts, rural residents, highly religious respondents and populations in the south and west, whereas university education, urban residence and higher income reduce traditionalism, education being the strongest equalizing factor. The author contends that modernization does not necessarily weaken patriarchy but may reshape it, making inequality less visible institutionally and more rooted in everyday moral expectations that provide a sense of stability amid rapid change. Comparative discussion situates Kazakhstan alongside Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, Poland and Hungary as examples of domesticated modernity where family remains the carrier of moral order and where modernization, religious revival and cultural nationalism occur simultaneously. Policy implications highlight the need to shift traditional values discourse toward responsible fatherhood and partnership, invest in childcare, care infrastructure and flexible work, and promote reciprocity in care and recognition of unpaid labor to align national practice with goals of gender equality and inclusive economic growth. For Israel, the study offers comparative lessons on balancing modernization, tradition and cohesion in diverse societies, relevant to family policy, social resilience and sustainable development.