Abstract
This introductory chapter begins by pointing out the curious oversight of life strategy in the discussions of migration and regimes in crisis. It notes the increasing extra-individual and extra-structural pressures placed on individuals when the political regime faces crisis or undergoes transition from one economic and political system to another (e.g. post-Soviet transition from communism to capitalism/from authoritarianism to democracy), highlighting the combined role of structure–agency and urgent need to bring life strategy out of the shadow and to help understand our globally connected and turbulent present. The chapter draws on the field of migration and transition research, tracing all the perspectives from Western (Western Europe and North American) to post-Soviet East European scholarship that emerged between 1950s and late 2000s, to introduce the concept of life strategy and present its various typologies. The chapter concludes by extending on the existing scholarship to highlight what life strategy means from the perspective of contemporary regime transition/crisis in Ukraine and how it is intimately bound up with the social change and migration.
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- 1.
‘Path dependence’ is an important concept for social scientists engaged in studying processes of change. Being based on models of technological development used in economics, the first wave of scholarship in political science and sociology applied the concept of path dependence to political institutions, emphasising lock-in and increasing returns (Pierson 2000), self-reinforcing sequences (Mahoney 2000), and the ‘mechanisms of reproduction’ (Collier and Collier 1991) of particular historical legacies. These works played an important role in developing arguments about historical causation and interdependency of global development, when less developed countries follow the development logic of more advanced states with successful democracies. Referring to the social developmental sequences, it was later labeled “path dependent social dynamics” (Blume and Durlauf 2005; Durlauf and Young 2004). The path dependence theory of democracy underwent a harsh critique for overstating the degree of institutional stability of the exemplar democratic states (Hacker 2011; Crouch and Farrell 2004; Schwartz 1998; Alexander 2003).
- 2.
Huntington (1991) argued that international structural factors during the 1970s were the causal sources for initiating Third-Wave democracy. Under structural factors, he meant the “regional contingency factor” or the Soviet equivalent of the “domino theory”, where the success of democracy in one country causes other countries to democratise. He suggested that post-Soviet states are being influenced by democratisation effects, most notably by the efforts to spread democracy by the European Union and the USA.
- 3.
Political mobilisation is a framework that is utilised to understand political participation in a transition period.
- 4.
The ‘Ukrainian Society: Monitoring of Social Change’ is an annual social project coordinated by the Institute of Sociology since 1992. It consists of a survey of the Ukrainian population with a sampling of about 1800 respondents (aged over 18). It aims to be representative across such variables as gender, age, education, region and type of settlement. Center ‘Socis’ conducts the fieldwork.
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Oleinikova, O. (2020). Life Strategy, Migration and Regime Transition. In: Life Strategies of Migrants from Crisis Regimes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39839-2_1
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