December 2016 Book Review Round up -- Part One!
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H-Soyuz December 2016 Book Review Round Up -- Part One! Discussion published by Jennifer Carroll on Monday, December 19, 2016 Dear Soyuz Members, Please find below the monthly book review round up for December 2016, Part 1! This is our first round up in several weeks, so we have many new titles and reviews to share. For this reason, the December 2016 round up will be divided into two parts. This, the first of our 2-part round up for the end of 2016, includes 101 reviews from the following four journals: Europe-Asia Studies Vol 68 Issue 7: Reviews 1-12 Europe-Asia Studies Vol 68 Issue 8: Reviews 13-24 Europe-Asia Studies Vol 68 Issue 9: Reviews 25-26 Slavic Review Vol 75 Issue 3: Reviews 37-88 European Education Vol 48 Issue 3: Review 89 European Education Vol 48 Issue 4: Review 90 Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society Vol 2, Issue 2: Reviews 91-101 Our next round-up, to be published shortly, will include recently published reviews from the Slavic and East European Journal; East European Jewish Affairs; Central Asian Survey; Religion, State, and Society; and Nationalities Papers. I also have the pleasure of announcing a new book written by a Soyuz Member:Kamil Wielecki’s Coping with Uncertainty: Petty Traders in Post-Soviet Russia. Please join me in congratulating Kamil on his new book! As always, if you have recently published a book, OR if there is a journal, which we have not included in this round up but which you think deserves our attention, please email me directly at [email protected]. Best, Jennifer Carroll Soyuz Book Review Editor Europe-Asia Studies Vol 68 Issue 7 Citation: Jennifer Carroll. December 2016 Book Review Round Up -- Part One!. H-Soyuz. 12-19-2016. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11423/discussions/157343/december-2016-book-review-round-part-one Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Soyuz 1) Upravlenie vysshim obrazovaniem i naukoi: opyt, problemy, perspektivy.Robert M. Nizhegorodtsev & Semen D. Reznik (eds). 2015, Moscow: INFPA. AND Vysshee yuridicheskoe obrazovanie v Kazakhstane v 21 veke: reformy, problemy i perspektivy. Maksut S. Narikbayev & Sergei F. Udartsev (eds), 2914, Astana: Foliant. AND Sistema vysshego technicheskogo obrazovaniya Kazakhstana: dvizhenie po spirali. By Ernest A. Serikov. 2015, Almaty: Ak Shagyl. (review by Rafis Abazov & Ulukbek Aliev) “The books under review reflect heated debates within the Eurasian space on the current situation in higher education, and on directions for much-needed reforms to make the national higher education systems in the region more globally competitive and more adaptive to the challenges of the twenty- first century. Two countries…These three books represent a very small sample of the mainstream views on the various approaches to and policy debates on directions for policy change, management of higher education, and recent developments in the field, using the examples of specialised law universities and polytechnic universities. All three works are written by leading experts in the field who focus on the realisation of long-term policy reforms in their respective countries.” 2) Compliance Patterns with EU Anti-Discrimination Legislation, by Vanja Petričević. 2015: New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan (review by Laura Asarite). “The goal of this book is to contribute to explanations for discrepancies in compliance with EU anti- discrimination legislation across the EU member states. Petričević sets out to examine multiple factors influencing the level of compliance. By doing so she touches on a very crucial linkage—the inability to comply with EU legislation and the level of discrimination across the EU which accordingly poses threats to the unity of the EU. It must be noted that this book concentrates in particular on ethno-racial discrimination.” 3) Post-Communist Romania at Twenty-Five. Linking Past, Present, and Future. Lavinia Stan & Diane Vancea (eds). 2015, London: Lexington Books (review by Endre Borbáth). “Two and a half decades after the Romanian regime change, Stan and Vancea convened some of the leading academics working on post-communist Romania to evaluate the country’s transition. The volume they assembled puts under scrutiny a wide range of aspects of Romania’s post-communist transition, from the expectations formulated in the beginning of the 1990s to the realities of the recent years of post-EU accession. Broadly speaking, the volume depicts an ambivalent post- communist democracy, which, although failing to live up to the expectations formulated in 1989, outperforms many other former communist regimes.” 4) The European Union’s Normative Power in Central Asia. Promoting Values and Defending Interests. By Georgiy Voloshin. 2014, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (review by Fabienne Bossuyt). Citation: Jennifer Carroll. December 2016 Book Review Round Up -- Part One!. H-Soyuz. 12-19-2016. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11423/discussions/157343/december-2016-book-review-round-part-one Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Soyuz “Anchored in the commonly-used framework of ‘Normative Power Europe’ (NPE) developed by Ian Manners, the book seeks to examine whether the EU has any normative power in Central Asia. The author frames the central research question in terms of ‘effectiveness’: is the EU’s normative power in Central Asia effective, and if not, why not?” 5) Between Europe & Asia. The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism. Mark Bassin, Sergey Glebov, Marlene Laruelle (eds). 2015, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press (review by Edward C. Holland). “This volume extends academic understanding of Eurasianism as an ideology and intellectual project in interwar Europe. In contradistinction to recent work on Eurasianism in its contemporary form, as articulated in the writings of Aleksandr Dugin and others, its remit is almost exclusively historical; Dugin is not the subject of sustained discussion until the volume’s final two chapters. In turn, the pieces collected here provide an appropriate intellectual counterbalance to other recent work characterised by embroidered claims of neo-Eurasianism’s influence on contemporary Russian foreign policy.” 6) Rocking St. Petersburg. Transcultural Flows and Identity Politics in Post-Soviet Popular Music. By David-Emil Wickström. 2014, Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag (review by Natalia Khalymonchik). “This book is an example of academic work inspired and driven by expertise in the area that lies in real life outside of academia. The author intermingles musicology, anthropology and area studies in one book and combines his academic background with the most extended form of participant observation.” 7) Russia: Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security, IMEMO Supplement to the Russian Edition of the SIPRI Yearbook 2013. Alexei Arbatov & Sergey Oznobishchev (eds). 2014, Moscow: IMEMO RAN (review by Steven J. Main). “Any publication by this prestigious academic body is worthy of serious attention and analysis. However, this one has not only dated badly—a lot of the sections were written prior to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, military intervention in eastern Ukraine, air war over Syria etc.—but has been extremely poorly edited, proofread and, in places, translated. Whoever is in charge of such ‘details’ should either get a new team in place—who know all the relevant English and Russian vocabulary and who have the necessary skill to proofread and edit the works into proper written English—or outsource the work to a specialised body, which can do the necessary and vital editing and proofreading work.” 8) Inequalities During and After Transition in Central and Eastern Europe. Cristiano Perugini & Fabrizio Pompei (eds). 2015, New York, NY: Palgrage Macmillan (review by Ákos Máté). “While the discussion [of the 2008 financial crisis] tended to focus on Western economies or the North–South divide, this edited volume aims to broaden the scope by examining the situation in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) and Baltic countries. This is a welcome addition to the ongoing discussion, since it focuses on a region where inequality is often assumed to be a less pressing issue due to the common state socialist past.” Citation: Jennifer Carroll. December 2016 Book Review Round Up -- Part One!. H-Soyuz. 12-19-2016. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11423/discussions/157343/december-2016-book-review-round-part-one Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-Soyuz 9) Civic and Uncivic Values in Kosovo. History, Politics, and Value Transformation. Sabrina P. Ramet, Albert Simkus & Ola Listhaug (eds). 2015, Budapest & New York, NY: Central European University Press (review by Michael Potter). “The flurry of (mostly Western-authored) histories and accounts of conflict in the western Balkans in the 1990s and early 2000s has given way to more diverse and informative works covering a variety of aspects of societies in the former Yugoslav space. This collection of essays is the sixth in a series looking at civic values in Yugoslav successor states and provides a broad range of insights into the social and political spheres in Kosovo.” 10) Eurasian Regionalisms and Russian Foreign Policy.Mikhail A. Molchanov, 2015, Farnham & Burlington, VT: Ashgate (review by Vsevolod Samokhvalov). “Several studies have been published about Eurasian integration. Most of them, however,