Conference Will Discuss Contemporary Russian Politics

The Russian Studies Program at Yale will host a conference titled, “Regime Evolution, Institutional Change, and Social Transformation in Russia: Lessons for Political Science,” on April 27-28.

The conference will feature Russian, European, and North American scholars who will discuss Russia’s political institutions and culture, the impact of Soviet legacies, and the future of global order. It will be held in Henry R. Luce Hall Auditorium, 34 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven. The event is free and open to the public.

The first day of the conference will address some of the most widely debated questions in current social scientific study of the Russian Federation. Panel I will assess the current state of Russian Studies in the political science discipline. This will be followed by a closer look at the specific political influence of Soviet legacies in Panel II. The third panel will address the issue of social mobilization in Russia’s less-than-democratic regime. The first day will wrap up with the keynote panel featuring Celeste A. Wallander, who served as former Special Assistant to President Barack Obama and Senior Director for Russia and Eurasia on the National Security Council, on the future of U.S.-Russian relations.

The second day will begin with a discussion of Russia’s political culture. Russia’s incomplete Europeanization, efforts at nation building, misogyny and masculinity are some of the issues that will be addressed in Panel V. The next panel will look at institutional reforms in the post-Soviet context and will be followed by some insight into Russia’s public opinion formation in Panel VII. The final panel of the conference will discuss the future of global order and Russia’s role in it.

The full conference program can be found here.

The conference is sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation; the Edward K. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; the European Studies Council at the MacMillan Center; the Department of Political Science; and the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.