Starry Aspirant

The routine can make you tetchy in this little ship of ours, cooped up in here for two months now with the destination Mars. And even if we survive, you still think were gonna make it out alive? Easy days are hard to take. In space, no one can hear you bark. The birdsongs play in the hydroponics bay, but isn't it just whistling in the dark? And even if we survive, you still think were gonna make it out alive? What is it that we lost? What have we undone? All we were looking for was another sun. Where are we headed now? It's into the unknown, but it doesn't look like we'll be going home. So the nebulae are blooming around the heart of a neutron star. Am I awake or am I dreaming? Maybe we have come too far, and even if we abide will we ever dare to take a step outside? Last week, it was a belt of asteroids that was keeping us on our toes. Some days it's hard to know what this is for. Maybe just see where this wormhole goes. But even if we survive, I wonder if we'r...

“Almost 70 deputies work for Kolomoisky, and another 100 for Akhmetov” reads a recent headline in Ukrayinska Pravda . The article then catalogues some of the actions in the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian legislature, that these parliamentarians are said to conduct on their patrons’ behalf. But Ihor Kolomoisky and Rinat Akhmetov are only the most high-profile of the handful of leading oligarchs who have dominated Ukraine’s political and economic life for more than two decades, usually to its detriment. Two sides of the same coin A striking feature modern Ukraine is not just the ongoing influence in public life of such figures, but also the resilience of the oligarchy as an institution across episodes of serious political disjuncture, including the Maidan revolt of 2013/14, which seemed for a short time to threaten its survival. An oligarchy is a political system dominated by a social minority of wealth holders. If wealth is the characteristic source of oligarchs’ social power, it is b...

I thought I saw Luke Skywalker check into our beach hotel for a winter break. Older now, but still with poise and assurance, he strides through the automatic doors, wheeling a squeaky travel case in his wake. At the reception, he dashes off his signature with a flourish as if to please the concierge, then turns gracefully towards the lift, swishing behind him his coco-powder cape. And I thought I saw him out on the bluffs next morning early, muttering incantations under his breath. Who set fire to the natural log? What is East Grinstead? Why is the sun? The cold rain drizzles, but his cape is good for all weathers. In the bay, a shark is doing backstroke, pretending to be a surfboard. The sparrow-hawk stuck on the air current above one shoulder is Luke’s mind: it's just one more Jedi party trick. His girl, who is too young for him, is dressed in a silky lilac two piece and she wears pristine lilac boots. At nights they sing like crickets on the dancefloor. The disco ball accentuate...

A review of Marko Bojcun’s Towards a Political Economy of Ukraine: Selected Essays, 1990-2015; Ukrainian Voices, vol 3; Ibidem-Press, Stuttgart. A. The history of post-Soviet Ukraine could be written as that of a succession of self-serving political leaderships, and of inspiring but failed popular protests, resulting in chronic economic underperformance that has left the country’s dwindling population among the poorest in Europe. A glance at IMF data, for example, shows the country vying for bottom place in the European income rankings with Moldova. In these essays, written close on the events they analyse, Marko Bojcun reminds us that this need not have been the case, and that other trajectories at times seemed possible. One example is to be found in an article from 2001, in which the prospect of Russia’s European integration is still in the air, just about, whereas from the vantage point of today, this is almost unthinkable. B. The collection covers key waypoints in the politic...

In her book, Margarita Balmaceda offers a detailed comparative account of how post-Soviet political elites dealt with the political consequences of their dependence on energy imports from Russia in the first decades after the Soviet collapse, focusing on the cases of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. Although described as “energy poor”, Ukraine’s reliance on Russia for a large share of its energy deliveries (excluding nuclear fuel) was considerably lower than for Belarus or Lithuania (Balmaceda, 2013, pp. 93, 317). Nevertheless, the relationship led periodically to serious bilateral strains, especially over issues around natural gas. Rather than straightforward energy dependence, however, Ukraine’s basic energy relation with Russia is better understood as one of “asymmetric interdependence”, Balmaceda contends. By this she means that post-Soviet Ukraine had significant energy assets with which it could have mitigated the effects of its reliance on energy supplies from Russia. Chief among...

Institutionalism as an approach to economic analysis has made a rather vigorous comeback in recent decades. Originally associated with the economic sociology of Thorstein Veblen, whose work focuses on the consumption patterns of the US nouveaux riche and the distortion by the profit motive of the potential of industrial society, a strong institutionalist tradition developed in North America in the early decades of the twentieth century (Stilwell, 2013, pp xxx). With the mathematisation of the subject after the second world war, however, driven by the practical emphasis of Keynesianism on the development of national income accounting for practical policy purposes on the macroeconomic side and by the emphasis on marginalist techniques of neo-classical microeconomics (Blackmore, History of Economic Thought), this institutional economic tradition of institutionalism lost ground. For the earlier version of institutionalism, we may take as representative Walton Hamilton’s definition of insti...

Remarkable features of Belarus revolt incl: i) decentralisation in Minsk & country; ii) immediate resort of the authorities to extreme, large-scale violence, unprecedented even for Belarus; spontaneous self-organisation & unity of disparate social groups. 2/14 Most striking is concertinaed sequence of “post-ignition” events: from rigged result to the onset of regime defections (mostly low level so far) in less than a week. Last Saturday, the regime appeared impregnable; today, it looks dazed & shaken. To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht badly, from memory: & after 12 years, the 1,000-year regime was swept away. Could still go pear-shaped: Luka regime could lash out again, or play some trick to divide opposition & deal with them one by one. “Dialogue” could give regime time to regroup & rethink strategy. But so far it most looks like a "democratising" revolution rather than Colour or Maidan—perhaps most similar to Solidarity in Poland or Czech Velvet? Belarus’...