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Analysis of strategic culture facilitates a comprehensive understanding of a nation’s security identity and patterns of policy conduct. Though strategic culture changes over time, why and how these mutations take place has not been researched much so far. This book sheds light on the reasons why specific features of a country’s strategic thinking remain rigid while others transform.
The national strategic cultures of post-communist Eastern Europe have been exposed to a panoply of shocks and shifts. Romania’s communist regime cultivated a uniquely thorny relationship with the Soviet Union, which facilitated the development of a national security narrative legitimizing a highly isolationist foreign policy. These factors have heavily weighed on Romanian post-communist strategic thinking and complicated the transition process.
At first glance, Romania went through an astonishing adaptation to novel security challenges. Ultimately, however, its traditional national strategic thinking remained in some ways constant. Core features of Romania’s strategic culture—such as the state-nation constellation—were the most resilient to change. In contrast, the intermediary features—such as the understanding of security and role conception—as well as outer layers—such as the foreign policy orientation and guidelines to using force—of strategic culture were more prone to influence by shocks, shifts, and norm entrepreneurs.

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Religion and magic have often played important roles in Baltic, Eastern European, and post- USSR societies like those in Russia, Romania, Serbia, Latvia, Kyrgyzstan, and Estonia. Taken together, the studies presented in this collection suggest that the idea that religion and magic are connected to each other in some consistent, universal way may be nothing more than a reminiscence from nineteenth century anthropology. Further, these studies challenge another part of anthropology’s historical legacy: the idea that magic is something that modernity and modernization will transcend. Rather, these studies suggest instead that magic is a form of work that brings modernity into being and helps render it intelligible to those who find themselves engaged in its creation.
This volume brings together historical (pre- and post-1989), ethnographic, and areal studies which look at the divergent roles of state, culture, society, tradition, and the individual in enactments of magic and religion. Assessing the role magic and religion have played in the countries of Eastern Europe and beyond before and after the Cold War, it is an absorbing read for scholars of anthropology and history as well as ethnology.

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Religion and magic have played important roles within Eastern European societies where social reality and socio-political balance may differ greatly from those in the West. Although often thought of as being two distinct, even antagonistic forces, religion and magic find ways to work together.
By taking on various examples in the multicultural settings of post-Soviet and post-socialist spaces, this collection brings together diverse historical and ethnographic analyses of orthodoxy and heterodoxy from the pre- and post-1989 periods, studies on the relationship of religious and state institutions to individuals practicing alternative forms of spirituality, and examples of borderlands as spaces of ambiguity.
This volume is at the crossroads of anthropology, history, as well as cultural memory studies. Its archival and field research results help us understand how repurposing religious and magic practices worked into the transition that countries in Eastern Europe and beyond have experienced after the end of the Cold War.

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Extant research continues to perpetuate a myth of Sub-Saharan African countries (SSACs) as ever stuck in the past and with incurable growth maladies. However, during the years just before the great global recession some of these countries performed better than countries in other regions. What explains this turnaround? How can it be ignited everywhere in the region and made to stick? The Political Economy of Economic Performance is among a few competitors that celebrate the successes of the region and argue for the positive economics of performance of at least some countries. Organized around two themes which are pursued in six chapters, the book provides a comprehensive, balanced, and thorough analysis of the factors and forces behind the unusually good performance of SSACs just before the great global recession, and shows that there is a way forward for them. The book makes a significant contribution to both policy and research, because while its structure is scholarly and logical, with a writing style that is coherent and easily understandable to all interested readers worldwide.

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This special issue deals with the phenomenon of violence in the post-Soviet space. The central preoccupation is to examine both political and legal discourses and practices of internal and external violence, broadly conceived, in this space. Simultaneously the special issue aspires to situate these discourses and practices in the broader literature on political violence and ethnic and separatist conflict, and to examine these from political, legal, and security studies perspectives.
The issue approaches the problem of violence in the post-Soviet space from three perspectives: The international-structural, inter-state, and domestic-political. The contributors focus on structural sources of violence: The relevance of the self-determination principle, the role of democratization, and the relationship between violent behavior inside and outside the state. They also analyze the role of the Russian Federation in generating, perpetuating, and mitigating political violence. Finally, they adopt a bottom-up approach, exploring how non-state actors contribute to political violence.

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What is “I AM MBARE”?
I AM MBARE is a Non-Governmental Organisation which was formed in 2015 by young people from the community of Mbare in order to initiate a positive face of the community. Our vision: Turn Mbare into a healthy and vibrant place to live, where the rights and well-being of each member of the community are respected.