Political influence and economic impact of Ukraine’s oligarchic system

The argument of my thesis so far:
1.     Oligarchs and oligarchy are differentiated from other kinds of elite and elite rule by extreme wealth.
2.     Wealth conditions the methods and logic of oligarch political strategies and actions. Large wealth differentials can stoke social and political tensions, creating specific kinds of protection problems for oligarchs, but permits the purchase of protection, whether coercive or political/ media influence.
3.     The original and subsequent wealth-enhancing economic schemes of the Ukrainian oligarchs are characterised by indirect extraction via the state. Some schemes are more transient than others, as modes of extraction of this kind evolve.
4.     Once in motion, the economic-political relationship goes both ways: wealth leads to political influence, but political position and influence can allow the accumulation of wealth.
5.     Despite the existence of wealthy oligarchs at the head of big business networks, with similar material situations, there is no significant or permanent collective organisation of the oligarchs as a group: no separate political existence outside of the fusion with political leaders and their state positional networks.
6.     The system is not reducible to Yanukovych and his crew, who were arguably just its most brazen component. Therefore, lustration won’t work as a means of countering the system if it is just one part of the system cutting off another part to save the system.
7.     In contrast to the situation in Russia, the Ukrainian oligarchate is more decentralised, reflecting both regionalism and a weaker central state—but also helping to keep the state weak.
8.     Oligarchs taken together are the strongest part of this system, but they are not in full directing control: they hedge their bets on political outcomes.    
9.     The oligarchic system as a whole has shown remarkable resilience, because of this array of evolving schemes and mechanisms. The system is made up of multiple interactions of smaller systems, which can come apart, adapt and reassemble themselves in different combinations, as required by changing political circumstances, like transformers robots. This continued through Yanukovych and Poroshenko: Different parts of the system continued to detach, adapt, re-combine post-Maidan.
10.  The rise of the oligarchic system is a big part of the explanation for Ukraine’s sub-par economic performance post-independence, both through the suppression of competition and the blocking of the kinds of reforms that might impinge on oligarchic business interests.
11.  The operation of oligarchic economic schemes and political mechanisms affect economic outcomes, especially by hampering the kinds of institutional development associated with economic prosperity.   
12.  Survival of the oligarchic system has implications for economic catch up and so ability to defend sovereignty.  
13.  Orthodox economic stabilisation policies can have unintended and self-defeating consequences. Economic policy as more of a political than a technocratic issue. Ukraine’s fiscal tightening during recession and war assuages markets and cuts oligarchic rents, but is painful in terms of living standards and may have hampered economic recovery. Banking reforms as a second key reform success.
14.  Survival of the oligarchic system undermines (painfully achieved) economic policy successes. The vaunted “successes” on fiscal, energy, banking—often very painful for the population—have been greatly undermined because by the survival of the oligarchic system.    

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