Yuasa Takeshi

It is difficult to discuss "transitional justice" within the context of contemporary Russian politics. In Russia, as in other post-Soviet countries, there is no clear consensus on who defines "justice" and what the term entails. Several political groups have stressed an original Russian path of political development, such as the concept of "sovereign democracy" proposed by Vladislav Surkov, an executive within the incumbent Russian government. In addition, the background and structure of governing elites has not shifted clearly from that of the old regime, and the Russian parliament has not to enact a lustration law yet.<br>Paralleling such facts, many researchers on post-Soviet politics (especially in Japan) do not regard Western standards of human rights, rule of law, and democracy as absolute and universal values. They suggest that political changes in the post-Soviet space should be understood within the unique context of each country's history and domestic political process. Another strand of research stresses that "the wave of liberalization and democratization" will not reach inner Eurasia—Russia and Central Asian countries—and that, the continent is divided by this lack of adherence to "universal values."<br>This article, on the other hand, emphasizes the following two points. First, aspects of "universal values" are found even in Russian politics. In particular, the historical development of civil liberties and their policies of implementation—including the negotiation process between Russia and the Council of Europe (CoE) and domestic institutionalization of the ombudsman system—has proceeded positively (although slowly). While such Western values are not regarded absolutely in Russian politics, they still steadily and irreversibly influence the political process.<br>Second, the process of democratization in Russia and Eurasia is not static:there is no geographical cleavage between democracy and dictatorship, and "universal values" are penetrating, at least incrementally, into Russia. This article proposes a metaphor of archipelago, which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn used in his masterpiece on the inhumane system of the Soviet gulag, to explain the geographical and cognitive distribution of civil liberties in Russia today.<br>The contemporary archipelago of civil liberties in Russia consists not only of governmental and state-based institutions, but the autonomous intentions of individual citizens. There is no alternative for the Russian government but to accept these values. However, the consolidation of civil liberties norms in Russia has been so limited that the Putin government's relations with Western institutions such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and CoE have deteriorated. In the short term, Western leverage and linkage that support civil liberties in Russia are decreasing.

The institution of the presidency in post-Soviet Central Asian countries is static, aside from the turmoil in Kyrgyzstan. The same person has held the post for a long time and is authorized by legislative procedures, such as referendums, to prolong his presidential term. In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, there has been no change in the government since independence. However, presidential leadership in these two countries is a variable for understanding the mechanism of authoritarian regimes in the region. In this essay, the author argues several topics for research on governance in Central Asia, that have been insufficiently covered by previous works. First, trends of political transition in the region are better understood through analysis of leadership in competitive authoritarianism. Quoting Robert C. Tucker, the author identifies two types of presidents in Central Asia: "Event-making" leaders and "eventful" ones. Second, referring to Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way's work, the author takes the position that leadership is less important than international and domestic structural variables such as leverage and linkage from the West (Europe and the United States). The author discusse

Changing framework or institution for people's identification after the collapse of the Soviet Union is one of main issues to understand political order in contemporary Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) . In this context, constructing suitable collective identity is important project for statebuilding process in this region. As long as surveying institutionalization of citizenship in each Central Asian countries, it consisted with relatively wide tolerance for minorities including Russian citizens or natives. On the other hand, through the institutionalization of border control and visa regime, discrimination among citizenships is getting strict. In Central Asia, there is no appropriate conception to construct institutions, in which combinations of several multi-level identities, such as national, state and regional, harmonize interactively. Region-wide level identities in Central Asia have less affected than state-level ones because of their lack of measures to develop their unity. Although several security frameworks (the former Central Asian Cooperation Organization [CACO], Eurasia Economic Community [EurAsES], Shanghai Cooperation O

There are two channels for Western countries to participate in the regimet-ransition movements in the former Soviet Union States (FSUS): Interstate bilateral relationships on the one hand and international organizations for transition support like OSCE/CSCE (Organization/Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe), IMF and EBRD (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) on the other. These Transition-Support Organizations (TSO), which include FSUS as member states, had a common purpose during the 1990's: How to stabilize the transition to the new politico-economic regime (democracy and market economy). These norms, with the background of the Western ideas, are important even for the FSUS to establish the legitimacy of their rule.TSO in this article, especially OSCE, can be defined as organizations that mainly use soft powers in contrast with a hard-power organization like NATO. Although they cannot operate with hard power or resources which can have immediate and forcible effects, TSO try to infuse values and institutions of democracy and the market economy through soft-power methods such as monitoring elections, dispatching long-term missions for peace-keeping, advi