Christian Fröhlich

Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg

This article explores protest tactics in Russian cities, stressing the liminality of spatial contestation practices. In this authoritarian context, spatial contestation typically has a liminal character, where citizens employ strategic ambiguity of their actions vis‐á‐vis (a) legal regulations, (b) official discourse, and (c) transcripts of legitim...

This paper studies local urban activism in contemporary Russia and relates neighborhood protests and urban citizenship to conflicts over housing-related public space. It situates Moscow as a cumulative space of post-Soviet neoliberal and authoritarian urban development and shows how and why Muscovites have opposed this development by engaging in lo...

Civil societies are usually seen as facilitators of democracy or as oppositional powers withstanding authoritarian rule. However, more and more often civil society organizations (CSOs) appear to contribute to the legitimacy of non-democratic incumbents. Taking the example of contemporary Russia, this paper argues that state funding for CSOs under a...

The growing trend towards closing the political space for civil society in authoritarian regimes has primarily targeted NGOs focused on rights-based advocacy. Drawing on a study of disability NGOs in Russia, this paper seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the advocacy options that nonprofit organizations have even in repressive politica...

This article studies how crisis management and its narrative discourse are able to strengthen anti-systemic and far-right narratives. We compare government and opposition discourses during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020/2022 and the energy/inflation crisis of 2022/2023 in the German federal state of Saxony. The paper argues that the two crises were...

None of the three revolutions in Ukraine's modern history as an independent state has been able to both solve the problem of political representation and undertake the task of building sustainable democratic institutions. Ukraine's scores from the Berggruen Governance Index (BGI) between 2000 and 2019 show the ups and downs of state capacity and de...

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has not only deeply challenged Russia's international standing but has also endangered its fragile domestic order. Data from the 2022 Berggruen Governance Index reveals that overall state capacity has been stagnating at a fairly low level since the beginning of the millennium, while democratic accountability has been de...

The countries of the Sub‐Saharan region have, on average, made significant progress in governance performance, especially in terms of democratic accountability and public goods provision—findings that seem to contradict patterns of state fragility and economic underdevelopment common in the region. This article explores this seeming contradiction a...

This essay investigates how large companies in Russia communicate their engagement with the social welfare of people with disabilities. We analysed non-financial reports and studied how people with disabilities are addressed with regard to internal social policies and corporate social responsibility activities. We asked about the content and meanin...

Protest and social movement activism have become increasingly common in contemporary Russia. Researchers have documented a rise in both informal grassroots activism and the development of civil society organizations since the late 2000s. This is astounding against the backdrop of a previously established view of Russian civil society as weak and un...

This article takes a fresh look at nonprofit/government relations in the context of both the partnership literature on collaboration and the closing space literature on repression. Following the Weberian ideal-type approach, we develop a heuristic tool for nuanced analyses of relations between the sectors in comparative research that is applicable...

This chapter examines the nature of governmental support of civil society in a non-democratic context, taking the example of Russia. Russian civil society organizations exist in dual realities when the state sets up a structure of supporting measures but at the same time limits the scope of their activity. While limiting measures and their effects...

This paper takes a fresh look at nonprofit/government relations, attempting to bridge the narrow foci of the partnership literature on collaboration and the closing space literature on repression. Following the Weberian ideal-type approach, we develop a heuristic tool for nuanced analyses of relations between the sectors in comparative research tha...

In this introductory essay to the special issue on civil society in authoritarian and hybrid regimes, we review core themes in the growing literature on shrinking or closing space for civil society. We discuss the role of civil society organizations (CSOs) as agents of democratization and note the emergence of dual, at times apparently conflicting...

Purpose The growing trend towards closing the political space for civil society in authoritarian regimes has primarily targeted NGOs focused on rights-based advocacy. Drawing on a study of disability NGOs in Russia, this paper seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the advocacy options that nonprofit organizations have even in repressive...

In this introductory essay to the special issue on civil society in authoritarian and hybrid regimes, we review core themes in the growing literature on shrinking or closing space for civil society. We discuss the role of CSOs as agents of democratization; note the emergence of dual, at times apparently conflicting policy postures within regimes (r...

The conference aims to study the interconnections between space, the environment and identity in the Eurasian region from different perspectives: extractive practices, religion and the sacred, and local citizenship movements. The Eurasian space, which the conference aims to explore, comprises Russia and India and the countries and regions between t...

When the Iron Curtain lifted in 1989, it was seen by some as proof of the final demise of the ideas and aspirations of the radical left. Not many years passed, however, before the critique of capitalism and social inequalities were once again the main protest themes of social movements. This book provides an account of radical left movements in tod...

This article offers a comparative study of animal rights and animal welfare activism in Poland and Russia. It investigates how an East European democratic state, on the one hand, and a post-Soviet semi-authoritarian state, on the other hand, steer civic activism and how different state-society relationships affect the forms that activism takes. The...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore urban mobilisation patterns in two post-Soviet cities: Vilnius and Moscow. Both cities were subject to similar housing and urban policy during Soviet times, and they have implemented urban development using neoliberal market principles, provoking grassroots opposition from citizens to privatisation...

This article examines state–civil society relationships in contemporary Russia. Its objective is to assess opportunity structures of Russian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that are intertwined with the state. The article presents qualitative data from fieldwork in the Russian cities of Moscow, St Petersburg, Nizhniy Novgorod, and Perm in 200...

Der vorliegende Beitrag argumentiert, warum ein Vergleich des Umgangs mit behinderten Menschen in verschiedenen Gesellschaften fruchtbar ist. Wenn Behinderung eine sozial konstruierte Kategorie für die negative Bewertung bestimmter körperlicher und psychischer Eigenschaften ist, dann wirft dies die Frage auf, welche Auswirkungen das auf den gesells...

The article argues in favour of a theoretically and empirically based comparison of societies according to their relationship to disability. If disability can be seen as a socially constructed category of negative evaluation of certain physical and mental characteristics, then the question raises, what are the impacts on how societies deal with dis...

In gegenwärtigen Gesellschaften wird die Menschenwürde behinderter Menschen durch naturwissenschaftlich Weltanschauungen und wirtschaftliche Wertgesichtspunkte immer öfter infrage gestellte. Deren Lebenswirklichkeit ist nicht nur davon abhängig, wie rechtliche Rahmenbedingungen geformt sind, sondern auch davon, wie andere Gesellschaftsmitglieder au...

Social and cultural sciences in Germany are finally concerned with disability and develop theoretic approaches. Thereby two main fields of work appear. Current works in tradition of »systems theory« focus on specific operating modes of social institutions in systems of welfare work and social help. They describe processes of exclusion and integrati...