This volume addresses the following question: to what extent do existing institutional arrangements, rules, and principles associated with the concept of sovereignty inhibit the solution to some of the most pressing issues in the contemporary international order? Can these rules be bent? Can they be ignored? Do they present an insurmountable or at least significant barrier to stable solutions, or can alternative arrangements be created?

What went wrong in Russias decade-old post-communist transition? A group of leading young scholars answer this question by offering assessments of five crucial political arenas during the Yeltsin era: elections, executive-legislative relations, interactions between the central state and the regions, economic reforms, and civil-military relations. All of the contributors recognize that adverse historical legacies have complicated Russian democratization. They challenge structural explanations that emphasize constraints of the pre-existing system, however, and concentrate instead on the importance of elite decisions and institution-building. The authors agree that elites failure to develop robust political institutions has been a central problem of Russias post-communist transition. The weakness of the state and its institutions has contributed to a number of serious problems threatening democratic consolidation. These include the tensions between the executive and the legislature, the frail infrastructure for successful market reform, and the absence of proper civilian control over the armed forces.

Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe presents research Professor Norman Naimark conducted while working at the Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE) on cases of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and forced migrations in five cases including Armenians in Turkey, Chechens-Ingush and Crimean Tatars in the USSR, Bosnian Muslims and Albanian Kosovars in the Yugoslav lands, as well as Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, and Germans in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Such historical comparison dislodges common assumptions to reveal patterns of our modern world.

Without losing sight of relative magnitude or original aggressor, Naimark clarified that crimes occurred in all the above cases, and sets details of atrocities ordered by authoritarian regimes alongside evidence of ethnic cleansing enabled by Europe's democratic powers. In the example of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, Naimark demonstrates that the Serbian ethnic-cleansing campaign, with concentration camps and raping of Bosnian Muslim women, had their precedents in ethnic-cleansing campaigns during World War II. Media images of the Serbian camps shocked EU and U.S. audiences, and rightly so; but publics and political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic may read in Naimark's work the importance of a fuller historical record.

Naimark's comparison presents evidence for his argument that these instances of ethnic cleansing are "interconnected and embedded in the European 20th century." The notion of interconnected atrocity, with points of comparison across nationalities, ideologies, and territories, leads to provocative insight. Throughout 20th century Europe, victims and perpetrators could become perpetrators and victims. Naimark clearly distinguishes between original aggressors and victims, and does not blur the scale of Nazi atrocity with other modern war crimes. But his research demonstrates that the division of Europeans into fixed categories of victims and perpetrators, and the politics of peace-keeping based on these identities, must be tested against Naimark's seasoned and influential scholarship.

As a work of illuminating history, Fires of Hatred has a history of its own. Naimark has injected penetrating scholarship into Europe's politicized debates over history and memory of World War II. Since its publication in English, some of Europe's political commentators have sought to defend their versions of postwar history with which they identify, against the complex details of Naimark's work. Naimark himself has granted numerous interviews with European journalists seeking his help to set their record straight. Demand in Europe for Naimark's work is finally being met. Five years since it first appeared in English, Fires of Hatred has been translated into Italian, Czech, Russian, Croatian, and German. Further translations are undoubtedly in the works.

FCE is dedicated to consequential thinking about Europe in the new millennium, and Professor Naimark exemplifies the beneficial impact of our programs for public dissemination of Stanford research.

Drawn from outstanding articles published in the Journal of Democracy, The Global Divergence of Democracies follows the enthusiastically received earlier volume, The Global Resurgence of Democracy.

The tremendous momentum of democratic expansion that characterized the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s has drawn to a halt. Significantly, this halt has not yet been followed by a "reverse wave"of democratic breakdowns, and democracy remains unchallenged as a global model and ideal of governance. The values of freedom, human rights, and popular sovereignty have continued to gain strength in the world. The first section of The Global Divergence of Democracies presents a few outstanding examples of the accumulating body of argument and evidence in favor of the universality of democratic principles and their basic compatibility with diverse religious and cultural traditions.

Nonetheless, in practice, the performance of the world's newer democracies has become increasingly varied, a trend reflected in the title of this volume: The Global Divergence of Democracies. The divergence in the quality or depth of democracy is matched by a parallel divergence in progress toward the consolidation of democracy. The second section of this volume is devoted to the hotly contested debate among leading scholars of comparative democracy of the utility and meaning of the concept of consolidation.

A third section examines some of the key building blocks of successful democracy, including political party systems, elections, federalism, the rule of law, a market economy, an independent judiciary, and civilian control of the military. The volume concludes with a series of appraisals of the divergent paths that democracy is taking both among and within various regions of the world, as well as in such key countries as Russia and China. With contributions by more than thirty of the world's leading scholars of democracy, this volume presents the most comprehensive assessment available of the state of democracy in the world at the beginning of the new millennium.

This encyclopedic book edited by Pavel Podvig provides comprehensive data about Soviet and Russian strategic weapons, payloads, and delivery systems and on the nuclear complex that supports them. The data are drawn from open, primarily Russian sources. Information is presented chronologically, arranged by individual systems and facilities, and is not available elsewhere in a single volume.

Following an overview of the history of Soviet strategic forces, the book discusses the structure of the political and military leadership in the Soviet Union and Russia, the structure of the Russian military and military industry, nuclear planning procedures, and the structure of the command and control system. It describes the nuclear warhead production complex and the Soviet nuclear weapon development program. It then focuses on the individual services that constitute the so-called strategic triad--land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, the strategic submarine fleet, and strategic aviation. It presents an overview of Soviet strategic defense, including air defense systems, the Moscow missile defense system, the radar and space-based early warning networks, and the space surveillance system. The book also includes a description of the Soviet nuclear testing program, including information on test sites and on all Soviet nuclear tests and peaceful nuclear explosions. It concludes with a look at the future of strategic nuclear weapons in Russia.

Some of the most pressing issues in the contemporary international order revolve around a frequently invoked but highly contested concept: sovereignty. To what extent does the concept of sovereignty -as it plays out in institutional arrangements, rules, and principles -inhibit the solution of these issues? Can the rules of sovereignty be bent? Can they be ignored? Do they represent an insurmountable barrier to stable solutions or can alternative arrangements be created? Problematic Sovereignty attempts to answer these and other fundamental questions by taking account of the multiple, sometimes contradictory, components of the concept of sovereignty in cases ranging from the struggle for sovereignty between China and Taiwan to the compromised sovereignty of Bosnia under the Dayton Accord.

Countering the common view of sovereignty that treats it as one coherent set of principles, the chapters of Problematic Sovereignty illustrate cases where the disaggregation of sovereignty has enabled political actors to create entities that are semiautonomous, semi-independent, and/or semilegal in order to solve specific problems stemming from competing claims to authority.

The book chapter is a revised and updated version of "Asymmetrical Federalism and State Breakdown in Russia," which originally was published in 1999 in Post-Soviet Affairs.

The only Reader on post-Soviet Russian politics, this important book brings together the best published work from a wide variety of sources. Unusually for a Reader, it also includes many up-to-date, specially commissioned contributions. Some forty of the world's leading specialists on Russian politics, a third of them Russians, cover institutional design, elections, parties, federalism, regional politics, presidency and legislature, economic reform and economic interests, foreign policy, public opinion, the mass media, and prospects for democracy.

Substantial editorial introductions to every section provide the student with essential background information, detailing the historical development, contemporary relevance, and current debates for each topic area and each individual chapter. The chapters themselves have been carefully selected and edited to be as useful and relevant as possible to all students of contemporary Russian politics,

With analysis of major recent developments, including the Duma election of 1999, the Presidential election of 2000, and the institutional changes launched by President Putin, this is the most comprehensive and authoritative guide to political institutions and processes in Putin's Russia.

A decade after the collapse of communism, Russia still lacks a robust party system. Most institutions of the state are immune from party influence. However parties play a central role in the lower house of parliament, the State Duma. Why? Why have parties been successful in organizing and influencing the work of the State Duma but enjoyed only very limited success elsewhere? This article argues that parties in Russia are weak in general because the most powerful politicians in Russia have made choices to make them weak. Cultural, historical, and socioeconomic factors play a role in impeding party emergence, but individual decisions--especially decisions about institutional design--are the more proximate and more salient causes of poor party development. The privileged position of parties in the State Duma also resulted from individual choices, but those choices had unintended consequences that did not represent the preferences of the most powerful.

Following the end of the Cold War, the United States and its allies recognized that it was in their vital security interests to promote stable transitions in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the New Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union. For the most part, such transitions would depend on the efforts of the states in transition themselves, including many that had been newly formed. However, one way in which the Western nations could help was by economic assistance -- both financial and technical.

The most abundant and efficacious form of financing will eventually be direct investment by Western private industry combined with indigenous investment in the countries; however, many of the transitioning countries, particularly those of the NIS did not have many attractive investment targets, with the possible exception of the natural resources sector. Recognizing this, the Western countries established a variety of unilateral and multilateral mechanisms to provide interim financing. These mechanisms utilized existing multilateral institutions such as the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund as well as existing unilateral institutions such as the United States' Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and the Trade and Development Agency. The charters and agendas of several existing institutions were expanded to address the specific issues in CEE/NIS. In addition, they established new multilateral institutions such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and unilateral institutions such as several enterprise funds set up by the United States and TACIS (Technical Assistance to the Commonwealth of Independent States) set up by the European Union.

In conjunction with these sources of finance the Western countries also initiated an extensive series of programs designed to address specific economic development and security issues in the region. These programs provided their own funding for projects, provided extensive technical assistance, and in some cases were designed to attract and work with Western private industry. One such program is the Nuclear Cities Initiative (NCI), which is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy. NCI's primary objective is to help prevent the flow of critical weapons technology and personnel from Russia to countries aspiring to acquire nuclear weapons. NCI's approach is to assist Russia in downsizing its nuclear weapons complex by creating sustainable, non-military employment for nuclear weapon specialists in Russia's closed nuclear cities. NCI is designed to build infrastructure necessary to attract private investment and to facilitate the efforts of private investors, thereby leveraging NCI's own budget.

Many of the sources of finance cited herein require a Western company as a strategic partner and co-investor. Thus the missions of NCI and these financial sources are highly complementary. Recognizing this, Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, under contract to NCI and under subcontract to the University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, undertook a project to assemble information on many sources of finance that were applicable to NCI's mission, particularly those that are at least partially capitalized by the United States Government (USG). The intent was to make this information available to NCI partners to facilitate the establishment of ventures co-financed by NCI, the Russian Federation, private Western industry, and the sources described herein. While this research was performed for the purposes of NCI, much of the data are generally applicable to other projects seeking financing in Russia.