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Post-Soviet Eurasia is one of the world’s most geopolitically consequential and rapidly transforming regions. Developments across it increasingly reshape political, economic and social relations far beyond its borders. Understanding these dynamics is therefore both intellectually urgent and analytically demanding, requiring an interdisciplinary approach capable of moving beyond established categories and fragmented national perspectives.
This handbook provides a wide-ranging comparative account of post-socialist transformations across Eurasian societies. It brings together diverse theoretical approaches and research methods, offering on-the-ground perspectives from anthropology, political and cultural sociology, comparative criminology, human geography, urban studies, gender studies and cultural history.
Written by leading scholars, the chapters examine how societies and social groups respond to, negotiate and actively shape wider transformations in political economy. The chapters address a variety of important topics: marginalisation, rights and freedoms; gender and politics; protest and activism; welfare and social protection; crime; labor, migration and mobility; identity, class and inequality; and the remaking of Eurasian cities under capitalism. Taken together, the contributions recast the region’s development from the ground up, challenging established interpretations and unsettling dominant narratives.
By situating developments within individual countries in broader historical, regional and comparative contexts, this timely handbook also opens new ways of thinking about political-economic change and social restructuring elsewhere in the world.
Charlie Walker is Associate Professor of Comparative Sociology at the University of Southampton. His research has examined social stratification, employment change, social protection, youth transitions, and society-military relations in Russia and the former Soviet Union, with a focus on the changing shape of identities and inequalities surrounding class, gender and youth.
Jeremy Morris is Professor of Russian and Global Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. His latest book is Everyday Politics in Russia: from resentment to resistance, published by Bloomsbury in 2025.
Eleanor Bindman is Reader in Politics at Manchester Metropolitan University (UK). Prior to this she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London and as a lecturer in Politics at the universities of Liverpool and Manchester. Her research focuses on civil society development and protest mobilisation in authoritarian regimes with a focus on Russia and Belarus. Her work has been published in Democratization, Governance, East European Politics and Government and Opposition, amongst others.
Oleg Golubchikov is Professor of Human Geography at the School of Social and Spatial Sciences, Cardiff University, UK. He has long-standing research interests in urban and spatial change under post-socialist and market transitions, with empirical studies conducted in Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Turkmenistan, Albania, Montenegro, China and Vietnam. He holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford and, before joining Cardiff, worked at the universities of Oxford and Birmingham.
Agnieszka Kubal is Associate Professor of Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford and Research Fellow at Green Templeton College. Her research focuses on human rights, migration, and legal consciousness in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, with particular attention to authoritarianism and legal mobilisation.
Meri Kulmala is a sociologist and holds docentships in Social and Public Policy (University of Eastern Finland) and in Russian and Eurasian Studies (University of Helsinki). She serves as Research Director at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki. Kulmala has extensive experience in leading research on welfare and inequality and has published widely on the Russian welfare system as well as the accessibility of Finnish health and social services for marginalised and minoritised groups.
Gavin Slade is Associate Professor of Sociology at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan. His research focuses on punishment, prisons, organised crime, corruption and state violence in the former Soviet region, particularly Georgia and Central Asia. He has published widely on prison reform, penal governance and post-Soviet criminal justice, and has worked with organisations including the Council of Europe, the European Union and the United Nations on criminal justice and governance issues.