Steve Crowley

Biography

Stephen Crowley, professor and chair of the Department of Politics, is a scholar of the politics of Russia and Eastern Europe, with a focus on labor and the political economy of postcommunist transformations. His teaching centers on Russia and Eastern Europe, peace and conflict studies, revolutions, and globalization.

His forthcoming book, Putin’s Labor Dilemma: Russian Politics between Stability and Stagnation (Cornell University Press) examines the specter of looming labor and social unrest as Russia’s leaders contemplate how to rejuvenate Russia’s struggling economy. It explores the legacy of Russia’s many “monotowns”—one-factory cities and towns left from the Soviet era, many of which are straining to stay afloat with the potential for labor protest that can become quickly politicized.

Putin’s legitimacy has rested for some time on economic growth and projecting “stability’’ after Russia’s tumultuous 1990s, and more recently on heightening populist class divisions between the cosmopolitan “middle class” in Moscow and St. Petersburg and the more nationalist working class in Russia’s industrial heartland.

Yet given slower economic growth such a legitimation strategy is becoming increasingly unsustainable: The Russian leadership is faced with the dilemma of tolerating declining living standards, which promises to increase protest from a core part of its political base, or engaging in painful structural reforms, which promises the same. Initial findings from this project have been published in Post-Soviet Affairs , East European Politics & Societies , Problems of Post-Communism .

Working Through the Past: Labor and Authoritarian Legacies in Comparative Perspective (coedited with Teri Caraway and Maria Lorena Cook; Cornell University Press, 2015) argues that labor in many settings confronts not only the challenges of economic globalization, but also legacies from the authoritarian past. The volume is the first comparative study of the impact of such legacies on new democracies in Asia, Latin America, and post-Communist Europe.

Previous publications include Hot Coal, Cold Steel: Russian and Ukrainian Workers From the End of the Soviet Union to the Post-Communist Transformations (University of Michigan Press, 1997), runner-up for the AAASS Marshall Shulman Prize; the coedited volume Workers after Workers’ States: Labor and Politics in Postcommunist Eastern Europe , (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). Other articles have appeared in journals such as World Politics, Demokratizatsiya, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Politics & Society, as well as a number of collected volumes.

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Crowley was recently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, a Visiting Scholar at George Washington University’s Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, and at the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki.

His research has been funded in recent years by grants from American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Kennan Institute, and the Collegium Budapest/Institute for Advanced Study.

Popular writings have appeared in the Guardian , the Washington Post , Newsweek, and Foreign Affairs .