Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Law in post-Soviet Nation-building

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Project Abstract This research project looks at law as a tool of social change in the context of nation building. Specifically, through an investigation of land privatization in post-Soviet Ukraine, this dissertation research will closely examine the relationships between democracy and markets. Fieldwork will test the hypothesis that creation of private property in Ukraine is endowing an oligarchy rather than fostering democracy, paying attention to conditions that favor one or the other in empirically observable practices. In the process of debating, drafting and implementing the major legislative projects of post-socialism, both ideas and networks are mobilized and formed as law is used to remake society. Accordingly, one part of this ethnographic research will examine how rules and laws for land privatization in Ukraine get set, both at local and national levels. The second part of the project will investigate practices surrounding the implementation of privatization on collective farms around the central Ukrainian village of Zhashkiv. The research builds on a body of prior work on property and privatization, but will go beyond archival data on legislation and regulation with ethnography of rulemaking in real time. The research plan takes advantage of a unique research opportunity, a period of implementation and legislative fine-tuning running until December 2007. According to the 2001 law that mandates privatizing ownership of land, from 2002 through 2007 land is to be surveyed, titled, allocated, and distributed according to Implementing laws and rules that are still being written, disputed, and rewritten. From prior work in Ukraine, the researcher is acquainted with members of parliament, has conducted preliminary research at the collective farms in Zhashkiv, and is proficient in both Russian (spoken by many Ukrainians) and Ukrainian (the language used in government publications). Overall, this research promises to enhance our understanding of the role of legal change in nation-building and the relationship between private property ownership and representative government. The research will inform knowledge and theory on two broad areas: (1) Law, Democracy, and Markets: Land privatization lies at the intersection of many processes of contesting the formation of state and market in Ukraine. To what extent Ukraine in the course of nation building becomes an oligarchy or democracy implicates a range of questions of governmentality and neoliberal citizenship. (2) Decentralization amid growing transnational ties: Legal change in Ukraine is taking place in the midst of two simultaneous processes: decentralization (described variously as decolonization and nation-building) and globalization, the creation of new transnational actors, orders, and capital flows. The research will have broad impact. The outcome of this research will be disseminated broadly to the socio-legal science community as well as to scholars in cultural anthropology. As the U.S. state department continues to emphasize the need for upholding the rule of law and democratization around the world, this study will contribute to that effort in a part of the world about which Americans know little. The project will also be useful to Ukrainian policy makers and citizens as they examine current privatization plans.