Vol 18, No 2 (2018)

The article considers the theory of the Swedish sociologist Göran Therborn focusing on the relationship of political changes with transformations of the urban space. The author presents key elements of his theory, identifies and describes its similarities and differences with other models of the urban space development. Göran Therborn’s approach is compared with the main urban theories of the second half of XX - the beginning of the XXI century, which allows to understand the importance of his views for urban studies and main features of his approach. The article focuses on the influence of different political actors (national and global) on contemporary cities, and on typical forms of these actors’ presence in the urban space. Göran Therborn was interested in capital cities as the best examples of political transformations and in the perspectives of urban development under the increasing role of global actors (such as global corporations) and the reducing capacities of nation states. The author seeks to prove the potential of Therborn’s theory for today’s urban sociology for it presents cities as “points of contact” of political, social and physical spaces. According to Therborn, the configuration of today’s urban space is determined primarily by political and not economic actors. Thus, Therborn expands boundaries of urban studies by combining economic and political factors in the explanatory models of modern cities development. Although the city is one of the central themes for Therborn his main works on it, with a few exceptions, have not been translated into Russian, and the article aims to fill this gap by presenting key ideas of Therborn’s theory of urban development.

The article is the second part of the publication presenting the empirical results of the three-year study conducted by the Sociology Chair of the RUDN University in cooperation with foreign colleagues to compare the worldview priorities of the today’s student youth. Due to the article size limitations the authors divided the data into two parts: in the first part, they focused on identifying values of three groups of students, which serve as reference points specifying the social action limits and criteria for assessing events and situations. In the second part, the authors continue to characterize values of the younger generations of the post-socialist countries relying on the empirical data collected with another questionnaire focusing on the students’ fears and hopes. In recent decades, the catastrophic/crisis consciousness has been widely studied and social fears were institutionalized as an important subject of sociological analysis. However, value orientations and mass fears are still rarely recognized as interrelated in empirical studies, although real and ‘normal’ fears (total and routinized in the contemporary risk society in U. Beck’s terms) are a key indicator of value orientations even if they are not real but presented as such by the media. Serious modifications of the Russian questionnaire in the Czech and Kazakhstan surveys do not allow for broad comparisons or generalizations; however, the empirical results reveal key life priorities and fears of the students (considering employment, incomes, personal relationship, health, education, etc.), general level of the youth’s anxiety, main strategies to overcome uncomfortable situations, and factors that determine anxiety. The authors conclude that (a) the social well-being of the student youth is very ambiguous in all three countries; (b) in general, fears and hopes of the Russian youth are more similar to their Kazakhstan peers; (c) the Czech students are more certain on a number of issues, which proves their stereotypical western individualism as compared to the Russian ‘traditionalism’.

The article considers the attitudes of the school youth to different types of deviant behavior (alcohol, drugs, and smoking) based on the results of the longitudinal study conducted under the guidance of the author from 1998 to the present in twelve Russian regions: Astrakhan and the Astrakhan Region, Grozny, Ivanovo, Krasnodar, Maykop, Makhachkala, Moscow, Nazran, Nalchik, Pskov, and Stavropol. This study has no analogues in Russia or abroad being a part of the international project “Dialogue partnership as a factor of stability and integration” (“Bridge between East and West”) and of the program “Youth in poly-ethnic regions: Views, attitudes, and orientations” (the author is the initiator and head of the project and program) that for thirty years have monitored schools with a multi-ethnic composition of students. The monitoring aims to assess the development of values, attitudes and identity of the youth in different regions of the Russian Federation, the level of legal culture and how law-abiding the schoolchildren are, the protest activity and potential of younger generations, and the ways to develop appropriate and timely programs to prevent the youth’s deviant behavior and illegal actions. The results of the surveys conducted within the program “Youth in poly-ethnic regions: Views, attitudes, and orientations” were compared with other Russian and foreign studies and presented at the international scientific forums: World Congress of Political Science in Berlin (1994), World Congress of Sociology in Montreal (1998), Russian Sociological Congresses (2000, 2008), Humanitarian Forum “Younger Generations - Life without Borders” (2011), UNESCO International Forum “Dialogue as a Path to Understanding” (2013), and at the “Week of Science and Education for Peace and Development” (2017).