Join us for the another installment of our new joint lecture series with HSE University! This series will meet at least twice a semester, switching off monthly between speakers based at HSE in Moscow, and speakers based at NYU and other US institutions.
When low-capacity protest campaigns are promised concessions by authoritarian governments, they have little ability to ensure that those commitments are in fact fulfilled. In this talk Jordan Center Postdoc Sasha de Vogel will examine why some concessions to low-capacity campaigns are undermined by reneging. She argues that the state agents who make concessions balance the desire to resolve the given conflict and the desire to avoid making commitments that constrain the behavior of other state actors. Concessions that, if implemented, would only affect the parties to the immediate conflict are more likely to be actually realized, whereas concessions that create more enduring reforms are more likely to be affected by reneging. She finds support for this argument using a novel dataset of urban protest campaigns in Moscow, Russia, from 2013-2018. She also shows that low-capacity campaigns can reduce the likelihood of reneging by decreasing the incidence of protest, the size of this effect is minimal.
Sasha de Vogel is a post-doctoral fellow at New York University's Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. Her research focuses on the politics of authoritarian regimes and collective action, particularly in Russia and the post-Soviet region. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 2021, and holds an MA in Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies from Columbia University.
Watch the event recording on YouTube here.
Photo: zaramenki.livejournal.com
