PORTFOLIO

June 13 - 14, 2014. The conference will be hosted at the Hertie School of Governance (Berlin).

The collapse of communism in the Eastern block and Soviet Union brought about simultaneous regime transformations throughout Eurasia. These events were noted by scholars to be part of the famous third wave of democracies that had begun in the 1970s in Southern Europe. In the policy realm, Western governments began adjusting their foreign policy priorities to work toward the expansion of Western-style democracy. The optimism of the 1990s, however, has waned into a new era of scholarly work on regime transformation, with focus on the failed or partial democratic transitions. Accompanying this awareness of partial failure and/or success has been scholarly inquiry to explain it. Much of the scholarship has focused on domestic factors, such as poverty or lack of civil society, that predispose countries to face larger hurdles in obtaining democratic consolidation. Others emphasize elite political strategies to maintain their hold on power and keep opposition forces at bay. Some others focus on the weaknesses of the international community (typically, «the West») in elaborating straightforward pro-democracy policies that work. Few, if any, examine the role of authoritarian states that seek to export authoritarianism even as democratic states seek to export democracy.

We propose a two-day conference of senior and junior scholars with area expertise that will take up the important questions associated with external action in the process of regime transformation.

The regional focus of the conference will be on the South Caucasus. The reason for this focus is that there are few other world regions that are so clearly under the influence of both Western and Russian interests. For instance, Armenia has recently decided to join the Russian-led customs union, jeopardizing its special relationship with the European Union. Scholars from the South Caucasus are therefore encouraged to attend this workshop and their applications will receive preferential attention.

Out of 70 applications, the organizers selected fourteen papers, written by 17 scholars (three papers were co-authored) based on the quality of the abstract, including a good mix of junior and senior scholars and a good number of scholars from the South Caucasus. After an opening event on Ukraine the conference met in the form of four panels and concluded with a workshop successfully outlining the major debates, locating the participants’ findings among them. The group collectively determined that the best outlet for the conference’s best papers would be a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal. The pursuit of an edited volume, however, is still an option.