Publication Roundup

Reminding YOU to read ME, of course

This Will Be Brief

Today’s newsletter is focused on the ‘news’ part of the term, namely a brief overview of some of the articles I’ve managed to get out the door in the last year(-ish). As a humble, ‘junior-grade academic,’ my publication record is politely called “burgeoning” or perhaps “incipient.” That being said, I do want to make sure that what I’ve written is getting to the right audiences. The only way to build name-recognition and reputation is from the ground up, I suppose.

To this end, I’ve collected a few pieces of interest in this newsletter issue for you to peruse and explore, should you be so interested. Some are short commentary pieces in online outlets, others are substantive analytic work or peer-reviewed academic articles. You may be interested in one topic, but not the other, or just one kind of format. Tl;dr rules certainly apply to the larger pieces, in fairness. If you’re uninterested, or are already a voracious Waller reader, then you can skip this newsletter entry and await next week’s.

Below, I’ve organized things thematically. So first we have a few smaller, policy-related pieces on Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia/etc, then we move to academic work and so on. Hyperlinks are in the titles. And again (and as always, I suppose), please feel free to ignore this particular newsletter if none of this is interesting. We will get to new stuff soon enough.

Goings-On in Eurasia

A few articles to look at here, all thematically tied to the runup to and beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War. These are all fairly modest analytic commentaries. This is closest to my day-job, as it were, as an analyst of Russian/post-Soviet regional politics. We will go in order, from January 2022 onward:

First, colleagues at the Center for Naval Analyses asked me to write - to the best of my ability - a not-totally-pessimistic take on the negotiations that were happening in early January. Such events did not go well, as it turned out, but maybe reading through these serve as a fun time-capsule nevertheless:

CNA InDepth: Beyond Pessimism: Three Paths To Progress In U.S.-Russia Relations

Then, I put out a ‘Q&A’-style piece a few weeks later as things deteriorated further, which also including some side-comments on events in Kazakhstan:

CNA InDepth: Q&A With CNA: Russia's Troop Build-Up On Ukraine's Border

As the pre-war period was crawling towards its terminus, I was getting more curious about the lack of clarity on what exactly Russia wanted out of a war that now seemed inevitable, so I wrote up something for The National Interest (apologies for their ad model, which is extremely annoying - reading it in ‘print view’ is probably best):

The National Interest: Russian Duma Offers a Possible Post-Invasion Vision of Ukraine

As the war continued, I followed up on this piece that provided a little retrospective on this failure to properly plan any realistic political settlement. I’d originally titled this “Violating The Five Ps: Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance,” which was the excellently corny catchphrase of Steve Rowell, the dean of students at Rockport High School, which he deployed with great frequency. They did not go with that title, shockingly:

The National Interest: Problems With Russia’s Political Prepwork in the Russo-Ukrainian War

I punted doing any more short-form pieces on the war, as I was completely crushed with work finishing and then defending my Ph.D dissertation at the end of March. More in the future, however, surely.

On Eurasia, Illiberalism, and Authoritarianism, Oh My!

I should reach back a little farther to provide you with some relevant academic and analytical articles. Into last year at least. The academic and academic-adjacent publication timeline is much, much longer than almost anything else around, which means what’s published recently was often written months or even years before. In any case, there were several papers that came out in 2021 that I think are worthwhile, at least for some of you readers out there.

First was a coauthored article with two UK-based academics on social media and its (non-) effects during the 2014 Euromaidan and 1st Donbas War. Olga Onuch and Emma Mateo really deserve the vast majority of credit here, I was just happy to tag along and help out on the margins:

Social Media + Society: “Mobilization, Mass Perceptions, & (Dis)information: ‘New’ and ‘Old’ Media Consumption Patterns and Protest”

Then there was my first solo-authored article ever, written in a burst of sudden, post-procrastination energy. I didn’t even know where to place the piece, but Marlene Laruelle’s new Illiberalism Studies Program (with which I am now affiliated as a ‘non-resident fellow’) had just stood up a new peer-reviewed journal on the subject, which fit really well into their inaugural issue:

Journal of Illiberalism Studies: “Elites and Institutions in the Russian Thermidor: Regime Instrumentalism, Entrepreneurial Signaling, and Inherent Illiberalism”

After that, an article I’d been working on (very much so on-and-off) for many years was accepted at a regional-studies journal. This ended up going into the dissertation as well, in a somewhat modified form. The piece looks at one ‘illiberal’ policy that was particularly covered in the West and looking at both its legislative process in Russia as well as attempts at diffusing ‘copy-cat’ versions of it across the post-Soviet space. The article isn’t formally assigned an issue number yet (they have a huge backlog), but it’s been available online since the summer:

Problems of Post-Communism: “Mimicking the Mad Printer: Legislating Illiberalism in Post-Soviet Eurasia”

That’s it for formal peer-reviewed academic articles. There are a few shorter analytical pieces that distill some of the above and are probably easier reads. One combined the JIS and PoP-C papers and took a look at the form that illiberalism has taken in Eurasia over the last decade:

RIDDLE Russia: Dynamics of Illiberalism in Russia and Eurasia

I also explored whether the term ‘illiberalism’ is really worthwhile, how it can be understood as distinct from, say ‘fascism’ and other such terms. I relate it (very briefly) to the Interwar era’s experience, a topic that I’m more directly working on in a few of ways right now:

The LOOP: Harnessing Illiberalism's Analytical Leverage

Finally, there’s a short piece of which I’m particularly proud. It’s just a book review (of the very worthwhile monograph The Decline and Rise of Democracy by the excellent academic David Stasavage), but it gets to some key issues in the study of authoritarian regimes that I think are poorly recognized so far, and have certainly motivated my own research:

The University Bookman: Scholarly Blinders and the Diversity of Authoritarianism

Finally, Tempting the American Waters

I haven’t been able to keep myself constrained to my post-Soviet wheelhouse, of course. Commenting on anything related to American politics is a potentially dangerous business, but in many ways a comparative politics background is exactly what’s missing in a lot of academic and policy-oriented research these days. At least I think so. But then, of course I would.

Anyway, I started with one piece in the early autumn of last year that looked at an institutional phenomenon I’m particularly interested in - legislative obstruction - and its application in the American context. The title that the people at American Purpose gave it is extremely unhelpful, but the gist of the article is looking at how these sorts of obstruction incidents, in Oregon and Texas most recently, are part and parcel of legislative politics and have to be seen as such, rather than simply dismissed as unacceptable out of hand:

American Purpose: It’s the Sausage Making

Then, earlier this year, I jumped much more forcefully into a debate that has absolutely driven me crazy. There’s been so much harrumphing about some kind of imminent authoritarian takeover of the United States, and it’s just really been getting to me. So I broke down and wrote something up on the matter. I very cheekily suggested that 1) people are embarrassing themselves about banging the authoritarian drum in the way they have been; and 2) any actual authoritarian regime established in America would look exceedingly different from some sort of radical fascist revanche. So I also suggest what it might really look like:

American Affairs: “Authoritarianism Here?”

Finally, just a few weeks ago I released a ‘working paper’ on a spicy topic - current-day thinkers explicitly promoting the establishment of an authoritarian regime here in the United States. This is the flipside of the AA article. While lots of the rabble-rousing about ‘democratic backsliding’ is frankly overrated and underspecified, there are now a small set of genuine, internet-based ‘authoritarian theorists’ asserting the superiority of dictatorship in America. And they have more followers than you might think. This is not a formal academic publication (yet). It is in fact currently just sitting at the editorial desk of a journal without any movement. But some of these figures have been in the news, and I thought it prudent to get this out into daylight, seeing as 1) it’s the first of its kind describing these guys’ actual views on the matter; and 2) I want the credit:

SSRN Working Paper: “Intellectual Entrepreneurs Against Democracy: Theorizing Authoritarian Futures in America”

So What’s Next, You Ask?

There are several articles I’m looking forward to seeing out in the world in the near future. One on Russia and fascism. Another doing a short review of that working paper on authoritarian theorists. Probably something on Russia, Ukraine, and the war. Etc, etc.

You Probably Meant What’s Next For the Newsletter…

Right, so what’s next down the road? I’m hoping to write something up every week or so. I have a few smaller pieces in the pipeline at online publication venues, so I’ll probably use the newsletter to go over those first. Then I would really like to write up a little rant…er, essay… on what we mean (and especially what we should mean) when we talk about ‘authoritarianism.’ A perpetual bugbear of mine, so I think that’s coming as the first, full newsletter essay next.

- Julian