This book presents an overview of current developments in Belarus. It explores the upswelling of popular support for the idea that Belarus must change. It highlights how the old regime presiding over worsening economic conditions has been confronted by increasing social mobilisation which demands a transformation of state-society relations.

This book presents an investigation of economic growth in Russia. The sharp decline in the national production that Russia endured in the 1990s resulted in Russia plunging into the poverty trap. The goal of this book is to determine whether and how Russia manages to overcome the poverty trap and initiate and sustain economic growth.

This book examines how Russia’s entrepreneurs operate in a business environment beset with risk and uncertainty. The challenges they may encounter include an unreliable judicial system, insecure property rights, arbitrary interference from officials, as well as corruption, harassment, suspicion and violence.

This book examines why, when the conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014, fighting broke out in the Donets’k region, whereas it did not in Kharkiv city, despite the city, like the Donets’k region, being geographically proximate to Russia and similar in ethnic and linguistic make up.