Embodying a state vision of how civil society ought to function and be designed by the authorities, Public Chambers in Russia have been criticized as means of state control. This state dominance is the starting point in this article, which asks what room to manoeuvre a regional Public Chamber has. Drawing upon fieldwork this article examines how members and local observers of the Public Chamber give meaning to this activity. The analysis assesses the role of state dominance, discussion of routines and responses to local demands, and concludes that these incremental developments form civil society in Russia.

This paper attempts to create an overview of the Ukraine twenty years after independence by presenting prevailing conceptual narrative models of Ukraine employed by Ukrainian and foreign experts. Based on the analysis of 58 interviews of Ukrainian political and intellectual elites and foreign experts, the study revealed several categories of conceptual narrative models employed by respondents: (1) a state without a national idea and a common identity; (2) a country in an unfinished transition and degradation; (3) a divided society; and (4) Ukraine as a colony or “wild capitalism”. The analysis of these categories helps to assess conflict potential in Ukraine and discuss some ideas for conflict prevention and resolution.

The author describes the development of geopolitical studies in Russia after the Soviet breakup. He identifies two main schools of geopolitical analysis, Traditionalist and Revisionist. Traditionalism is inspired by old European and Russian geopolitical theories and views the world through the lenses of confrontation over power and resources. The revisionist school, on the other hand, adopts a considerably broader definition of what constitutes geopolitics by proposing to study various forms of organizing space on a global scale. According to the paper’s central argument, the Russian geopolitics, while having emerged as a vocation, it is yet to turn into a full-fledged academic discipline. It continues to lack coherent and scientifically testable theoretical propositions and needs a broad discussion of its issues with the participation of both traditionalists and revisionists.

Based on an in-depth semantic analysis of interviews with poor Polish couples living in a foreclosed state farm and the examination of the so-called “linguistic sexism” of the Polish language, the author shows that despite a manifest change in the social context of poor households, power relations within impoverished rural married couples still remain the same. The traditional power imbalance can be observed at the level of the respondents' utterances, especially with regard to gender roles, work and household duties, dowries and inheritance. In households with downwardly mobile men, husbands tend to assert even more symbolic power than in households in which the husbands have jobs, even if low-paying ones. Wives of downwardly mobile men in the community studied are inclined to verbally support their husbands and patriarchal family relations, despite the fact that often the traditional basis of patriarchy—economic providership—is now women's responsibility also.