Modernizing the Russian North: Politics and Practice

The proposed project examines the current processes of modernization in Russia with an emphasis on how Russian actors seek to modernize and manage their North. Modernization has recently supplanted and, to some extent, subsumed other buzzwords about the g eneral development and trajectory of Russia. Attention to the idea of modernization and the policies that it engenders has much to say about Russia's future course. The idea of modernization in Russia, however, has yet to receive systematic, scholarly a ttention. To address this lacuna, the project is divided into two work packages, involving a number of focused research questions and detailed case studies. The first work package considers the structural conditions driving attention towards economic and social modernization in Russia at the federal level and analyzes how these conditions are transformed by Moscow-based policy elites into political action and legal frameworks. The second work package illustrates how these policies hit the ground in the No rth-western Federal Okrug through case studies addressing efforts at economic, social and political reform. The project then links these two geographical locations of research - Moscow and north-western Russia - in order to elucidate to what extent the 't alk' of Russia's modernization becomes political 'walk' in practice across diverse yet interlinked policy areas in the Russian North. The project uses mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) to draw attention to both the social production of politi cs (ideologies, images of the future) and the structural features that set some of the parameters for political action in Russia. The project involves a number of external researchers, national and international, selected to complement NUPI's political re search expertise with economic and legal analyses