Georgian Portraits chronicles everyday life in the Republic of Georgia in the decade that followed the Rose Revolution of 2003. Recent anthropological developments argue for the use of “afterlives” as an analytical notion through which to understand processes of socio-political change. Based on a series of portraits, Martin Demant Frederiksen and Katrine Bendtsen Gotfredsen employ the theory of social afterlives to examine the role of revolution in the formation of a modern Georgia. The book contributes to a deeper understanding of life in the aftermath of political reform, depicting the hopefulness of the Georgian population, but also the subsequent return to political disillusionment which lead them to a revolution in the first place.

An overview is given of the 2016 Russian State Duma election, and its significance for the current Russian regime. As the first in a series of five articles in this edition of Russian Politics, it sets the 2016 State Duma election into context. It begins by discussing the role of the Duma in Russian politics, and reviews political developments between the protests that followed the 2011 parliamentary election, and the successful conclusion of the 2016 one. It then examines how institutional and political changes came together in the 2016 campaign. The resultant supermajority for the pro-Kremlin United Russia party is analyzed, before the remaining articles in this issue – which examine the issues of turnout, voting behavior, electoral manipulation and the future of the regime – are introduced.

Because of the predicable outcomes of recent Russian elections, voters are often characterized as passive actors in the electoral process. However, as we show in this article, political and social factors still underpin the motivations for people’s voting behavior. The article analyzes voting behavior in the 2016 State Duma election, using a post-election, nationally representative survey to assess the differences between the four parliamentary parties’ support bases. It finds that voting decisions in the 2016 election were strongly related to voters’ attitudes to the national president, Vladimir Putin, as well as to their attitudes to corruption and the economic situation. Voters who were more positive to the president and viewed the economic crisis more benignly were more likely to vote for the ‘party of power’, United Russia. Moreover, the four parties’ electorates had distinctive social profiles that were consistent with long-term patterns established in previous State Duma elections.

This is a review of a highly topical volume on alternative history writing in contemporary Russia.

Efter en kortfattad bakgrundsdiskussion om östutvidgningens dilemman behandlas frågan om en gemensam identitet för EU och vari denna kan tänkas bestå. Argumentet är att förekomsten av en gemensam identitet byggd på gemensamma värden är nödvändig för tilliten inom unionen, liksom för dess inflytande och anseende i världen. Därefter diskuteras de utmaningar som nu riktas mot EU:s gemensamma värdegrund: från de illiberala demokratierna Ungern och Polen, från auktoritära stater utanför EU som Ryssland och Turkiet samt från populistiska strömningar över hela EU-området. Kapitlet avslutas med en summering och några handlingsrekommendationer för hur en gemensam värdegrund, identitet och tillit kan värnas inom unionen.

For decades now, President Vladimir Putin has consistently enjoyed markedly high approval rates and seemingly benefitted from charismatic legitimacy, whereas systemic legal-rational legitimacy has remained on a low level. This article discusses how, through the successful communication of political myth, legitimacy has become ever more personalized in Putin’s Russia, and considers some of the dilemmas inherent in non-democratic settings where legitimacy builds on grounds that are not legal-rational in the Weberian sense.

Migration-related events have received overwhelming attention in mainstream media coverage within Europe in recent years. This study investigates the metaphorical framing of migration issues by comparing dominant discursive patterns from two national and two regional daily newspapers in Sweden and Germany. Applying a corpus-based critical metaphor analysis, the spotlight falls on metaphors prevalent in media articles published during the EU Valletta Summit on migration held in November 2015. The article is inspired by Lakoff and Johnson’s classic work, Metaphors We Live By, according to which metaphors are components of everyday language with a pervasive influence on thoughts and actions. Adhering to this logic, metaphors become most powerful when taken for granted (»naturalized«) and therefore evade readers’ attention. Apart from tracing naturalized metaphorical framings in mainstream Swedish and German media coverage, this study discusses how the discursive connotations conveyed by dominant metaphors are likely to influence readers’ interpretation of migration-related issues and policies.