Georgi Derluguian — professor of social research and public policy at New York University Abu Dhabi since 2011. Among his many scholarly works is the monograph Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus (2005) and the debate book Does Capitalism Have a Future? (2013, co-authored with Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, and Craig Calhoun) which is now translated in seventeen languages.
Georgi Derluguian helps explain why Ukraine wound up with this oligarch problem in the first plac... more Georgi Derluguian helps explain why Ukraine wound up with this oligarch problem in the first place, identifying the cause as a Ukraine’s peripheral position in the world economy and the failure of its elites to cooperate for a larger good during the critical moment of the USSR’s collapse. Here a comparison with China proves useful. Derluguian argues that China succeeded because its relatively simple state allowed its leaders to work together to orient the country toward the needs of the global economy, while the complexity of Soviet institutions (including its division into multiple federal units) made such cooperation much more challenging. After the USSR collapsed, various “violent entrepreneurs” were able to take advantage of the resulting chaos to their own advantage, becoming oligarchs or state-based predators that have vested individual interests in subverting reforms.
Georgi Derluguian helps explain why Ukraine wound up with this oligarch problem in the first plac... more Georgi Derluguian helps explain why Ukraine wound up with this oligarch problem in the first place, identifying the cause as a Ukraine’s peripheral position in the world economy and the failure of its elites to cooperate for a larger good during the critical moment of the USSR’s collapse. Here a comparison with China proves useful. Derluguian argues that China succeeded because its relatively simple state allowed its leaders to work together to orient the country toward the needs of the global economy, while the complexity of Soviet institutions (including its division into multiple federal units) made such cooperation much more challenging. After the USSR collapsed, various “violent entrepreneurs” were able to take advantage of the resulting chaos to their own advantage, becoming oligarchs or state-based predators that have vested individual interests in subverting reforms.
Studying the varieties of welfare can offer surprising insights in the workings and tensions of I... more Studying the varieties of welfare can offer surprising insights in the workings and tensions of Islamist social movements in such major countries as Iran, Egypt, and Turkey. Based on extensive fieldwork and (for Iran) the batteries of socioeconomic data, the recent monographs of sociologists Kevan Harris and Cihan Tuğal offer a high-resolution yet panoramic overview. Harris re-positions the Iranian historical 'improvisation called Islamic Republic' as the 'warfare/welfare state' forged in the sacrificial defense against Saddam Hussein's onslaught in the 1980s. The Iranian 'welfare for martyrs' model itself built on the institutional remnants inherited from the earlier developmentalism of the shahs. The surprising resilience of ayatollahs' regime is then better explained by its accidental affinity to the communist guerrilla states in the world-system's semiperiphery like Cuba and Vietnam. By contrast, Tuğal sees the power of Islamist mobilizing in Egypt and Turkey in the historical failure of secular state modernizers, respectively Nasser and Atatürk, to meet the social and spiritual expectations of rural masses moving into the sprawling cities like Cairo and Istanbul. Following Gramsci and Bourdieu, Tuğal identifies a pregnant tension between the two Islamist models of welfare: neoliberal and religious egalitarian. This tension, not unlike the Christian social movements of interwar Europe, now amidst the post-2008 economic dislocations tends to strengthen the non-capitalist and egalitarian vector in the current global transformation.
In the late 1990s the American sociologists Christopher Chase-Dunn and Bruce Podobnik ventured a ... more In the late 1990s the American sociologists Christopher Chase-Dunn and Bruce Podobnik ventured a provocative hypothesis pointing to the likelihood of another world war in two decades from their time of writing — which meant in our own days now
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Papers by Georgi Derluguian