Two political scientists comment on Thomas Ambrosio's The Geopolitics

of Demographic Decay: HIV/AIDS and Russia's Great-Power Status (Post-Soviet

Affairs, 22, 1, January-March 2006).

Ambrosio's three indicators of great-power capacity, Russia's society, military, and economy, are reviewed in terms of his argument about how the projected effects of HIV/AIDS weakens each factor.

In most resource-rich countries, natural wealth does not translate into prosperity for the majority of inhabitants, but instead leads to environmental and economic devastation, and hampers democratic reform.

Only an informed public can hold leaders to account. Yet local reporting often overlooks the legal, economic, and environmental implications of resource extraction. Covering Oil: A Reporter's Guide to Energy and Development, a collaborative work of the Open Society Institute's Revenue Watch program and the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, aims to encourage rigorous reporting on these issues by providing practical information about the petroleum industry and the impact of resource wealth on a producing country.

The guidebook comes out of a series of workshops for journalists in the oil-exporting countries of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Nigeria, during which participants expressed a need for more information to help them understand the issues surrounding resource exploitation. In response to these consultations, Covering Oil outlines the fundamentals of petroleum contracts, provides a glossary of relevant economic theory, and presents case studies of major public policy issues.

Covering Oil is the second in a series of Revenue Watch guidebooks targeting various audiences involved in the promotion of transparency and democratic accountability. The first, Follow the Money: A Guide to Monitoring Budgets and Oil and Gas Revenues, was aimed at nongovernmental organizations.

If Vladimir Putin were to be asked whether he has been performing as an effective state-builder during the almost five years of his presidency, he would surely reply in the affirmative. And if he felt it necessary to buttress his response, he might mention his oft-cited promises to "strengthen the vertical" and establish "the dictatorship of the law" in Russia. But has Putin been engaging in effective state-building? Has he in fact been strengthening the Russian state? If by the term state-building one means authoritarian state-building, then the answer would be: "maybe yes," but also "maybe no."

On the other hand, if one is speaking of democratic state-building then the answer must be a unequivocally no. The aim of this essay is to examine the issue of Russian state-building as it has been elucidated and discussed by Western political theorists and by Russian analysts in the pages of the Russian press during 2004. The results of recent Russian public opinion polls will also be scrutinized.

This Article seeks to examine the constitutional powers of the Russian presidency and parliament over the nomination of the prime minister in closer detail. It does so in order to argue that Russia's executive may not always be as strong - or as "super-presidential" - as the conventional wisdom holds. It is true that, on paper, Russia's constitution provides for a strong presidency. Yet this is not the same as guaranteeing Russia a strong president. To put it another way, there may be a difference between the powers granted to an office and the powers able to be used by its occupant. If this seems like a subtle point, it nonetheless is an important one. It is crucial to understand why, on some occasions, a president might be kept from exercising his written constitutional powers, while on others he might even be able to surpass them.

This paper argues that it is difficult to understand the effects of American democracy promotion abroad without examining the bureaucratic context from which the policy emerges at home. Which actors within the U.S. government are involved in promoting political and economic change abroad? What strategies and conceptual models guide them? What tools and resources do they bring to bear? How does the interaction of American bureaucratic politics affect the impact of American democracy promotion? Articulating this mix of goals, strategies, and resources helps explain incoherent patterns of outcomes on the ground.

This paper explore these questions by reference to the U.S. government's most ambitious democracy promotion efforts of the past decade: the effort to rebuild its former Soviet enemies into a democratic allies in the 1990s. Yet the patterns of American bureaucratic politics are not unique to this democracy promotion effort. While American democracy promotion has changed in tone and substance under the watch of George W. Bush, American domestic politics has powerfully shaped American democracy promotion in similar ways in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond.

In this decade, fostering democratic regime change in Iraq is the great challenge (or folly) before American foreign policymakers. In the previous decade, fostering democratic regime change in Russia was the great challenge (or folly) before American foreign policymakers. For much longer and with much greater capacity than Saddam Hussein's regime, the Soviet regime threatened the United States. The destruction of the Soviet regime and the construction of a pro-Western, democratic regime in its place, therefore, was a major objective of America foreign policy. Some presidents pursued this goal more vigorously than others: Nixon cared less, Reagan more.

Almost twenty years after Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and soon thereafter began the process of political change inside the USSR, it is still not clear what kind of regime will eventually consolidate in Russia. To date, however, the influence of the United States in fostering regime change inside the Soviet and then Russia has been limited. This paper explores the causes and consequences of US efforts at regime change in the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia.

Generally, Western leaders have reacted favorably to the integrationist push for a "common European home" from first the Soviet Union and then Russia over the past two decades. Yet never in two decades has this strategic agenda of integration been so threatened as it is today. McFaul discusses three factors that have combined to make Russian integration into the West a foreign policy project with very little momentum.

In his first term in office, President George W. Bush established and nurtured a close personal relationship with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin. Early on, Bushs overtures toward his counterpart in the Kremlin produced beneficial results for the presidents policies. President Bush succeeded in persuading Putin to acquiesce in the abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a revision of the Cold War arms-control regime that Bush deemed necessary for his security agenda. After the attacks of September 11, Putin sided publicly and unequivocally with the United States in the war on terror, providing material and intelligence assistance to the American military intervention in Afghanistan and not hindering the deployment of American troops in Central Asia. Since then, Russian and American officials claim that the two countries have continued to share intelligence in fighting cooperatively the global war on terror.