Lecture
Thursday, May 19, 2016, 7 PM

Alena Ledeneva

Professor of Politics and Society, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London

Informal to the Core? Russian Society in Global Perspective

Chair: Dr. Mischa Gabowitsch, Potsdam

Based on many years of research on informal practices and corruption in Russian society, business and politics, Alena Ledeneva explains the nature and workings of informal relations in Russia with unprecedented sophistication. In her lecture, she weighs the role of the informal in all spheres of Russian life, including the informal governance in Putin’s sistema. Drawing on the Global Informality Project that she is currently directing, she argues that in the age of global corruption and tax related scandals, Russia can hardly be considered a special case.

Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of University College London. She is the author of Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange (1998), How Russia Really Works: Informal Practices in the 1990s (2006), and Can Russia Modernize? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance (2013). She is currently directing several large-scale international research projects on informal practices and anti-corruption policies.

Mischa Gabowitsch is a researcher at the Einstein Forum. His book Protest in Putin’s Russia is forthcoming with Polity Press in London later this year.

The event will be held in English