Rethinking post-communist regimes – a roundtable discussion

The work of Bálint Magyar and Bálint Madlovics has laid down a major challenge to understandings of regimes in Central and Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space as defined by democracy and autocracy, or hybrid forms combining democratic and authoritarian elements. Instead, they suggest, the distinct historical circumstances of the post-communist world, mean that conventional political science conceptions of regimes, must be re-thought in terms of typologies which consider the prevalence of fused forms of patronal power embracing economy, state, and society.

In this roundtable event , jointly organised by UCL SSEES Politics and Sociology and SSEES-ing NOW seminar series, Magyar and Madlovics discuss the inspiration, evolution and implications of their work in conversation with leading specialists on the post-communist region(s) with backgrounds spanning political science, sociology and political ethnography.

This event will take place in-person and will also be livestreamed online.

Speakers

Dr Bálint Magyar (Central European University)

Bálint Magyar is a Senior Research Fellow at CEU Democracy Institute,and holds a doctorate in Political Economy (1980) from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. He has published and edited numerous books on post-communist mafia states since 2013 and was an Open Society Fellow carrying out comparative studies in this field (2015-2016), Hans Speier Visiting Professor at New School (2017), Senior Fellow at CEU Institute for Advanced Study (2018-2019), and Research Fellow at Financial Research Institute (2010-2020). He was formally an activist in Hungary’s anti-communist dissident movement, founder of the liberal party of Hungary (SZDSZ, 1988), Member of Hungarian Parliament (1990-2010), and Minister of Education (1996-1998, 2002-2006).

Dr Bálint Madlovics (Central European University)

Bálint Madlovics is a junior research fellow at the CEU Democracy Institute. He holds an MA in political science (2018) from Central European University, a BA in economics (2016) from Corvinus University, and a BA in sociology (2021) from Eötvös Loránd University. The research partner of sociologist and DI fellow Bálint Magyar, Madlovics is the co-author of The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes (CEU Press, 2020) and A Concise Field Guide to Post-Communist Regimes (CEU Press, 2022). He has published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Public Choice since 2019 and contributed chapters to various reports and edited volumes since 2015.

Prof Henry E. Hale (George Washington University)

Henry E. Hale is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, at the Elliot School of International Affairs at the George Washington University and director of the Elliott School's Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES)

He has spent extensive time conducting field research in post-Soviet Eurasia and is currently working on identity politics and political system change, with a special focus now on public opinion dynamics in Russia and Ukraine. His work has won two prizes from the American Political Science Association and includes the books The Zelensky Effect (Hurst/Oxford 2022) (with Olga Onuch) and Patronal Politics (Cambridge, 2015).

For the period 2009-23, he served as director or co-director of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia). Prior to joining George Washington, he taught at Indiana University (2000-2005), the European University at St. Petersburg, Russia (1999), and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (1997-98). He is also chair of the editorial board of Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization.

Prof Alena Ledeneva (UCL SSEES)

Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at UCL SSEES. She is an internationally renowned expert on informal governance in Russia and beyond. Her research interests include corruption, informal economy, economic crime, informal practices in corporate governance, and role of networks and patron-client relationships in Russia and around the globe. Her books Russia's Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange (Cambridge University Press, 1998), How Russia Really Works: Informal Practices in the 1990s (Cornell University Press, 2006), and Can Russia Modernize? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

She received her PhD in Social and Political Theory from Cambridge University (1996) and joined the UCL in 1999. She was a pillar leader of the EC funded research projects: ANTICORRP.eu (2012-2017), an expert in the INFORM project in West Balkans (2016-2019) and MARKETS (2020-), the Marie Curie Innovative training network project, run by nine European universities and local NGOs in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. She is founding director of the UCL FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity and the Global Informality Project (in-formality.com) and editor-in-chief of the Global Encyclopedia of Informality (UCL Press, 2018.)

Dr Sherrill Stroschein (UCL Political Science)

Sherrill is Reader in Politics in the UCL Department of Political Science. She joined UCL in 2005 as Programme Coordinator of the MSc in Democracy and Comparative Politics. She received my PhD from Columbia University in 2000 and was previously an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies (2003-2005) and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Ohio University (2001-2005).,

Her research examines the dynamics of ethnic or religious identity in politics and she especially interested in states where democratic structures are incrementally replaced with more authoritarian control or patronal rule. She has published in journals such as Perspectives on Politics, Party Politics, Nations and Nationalism, Europe-Asia Studies and Ethnopolitics. Her first book Ethnic Struggle, Coexistence, and Democratization in Eastern Europe examined how contention helped forge common rules and institutions in democratic transitions in the ethnically-mixed states of Romania, Slovakia, and (Western) Ukraine. She is currently finishing a book manuscript on the entrenchment of party control across states, focusing on Albanian enclave cites in North Macedonia and Hungarian enclave cities in Serbia, Romania, and Slovakia.

Chair

Dr Seán Hanley (UCL SSEES)