El director Zhang Yimou: biografía y trayectoria

The literature on social exclusion and inequality typically mentions bounded categories, such as black/white, male/female, Muslim/Christian, peasant/landlord, etc.

Authors that include developing countries in their analysis mostly discuss social exclusion in terms of the categorically bounded groups with different ethnicity and culture (Stewart, Brown and Langer 2008), caste and religion (Thorat, Attewell and Rizvi 2009), age and gender (Gomes da Conceição 2002), rural-urban residence, disabilities, etc. Although one may not deny the fact that in Armenia there exist certain inequalities in terms of categorically bounded groups, such as females versus males, people with urban residence versus those with rural residence, or groups with disabilities versus those without, the focus of social exclusion in this study is not based on any of these categories. The exclusion examined in this study concerns a group of people that may represent, for example, a female or in the same way a male category, a person with urban or rural residence; exclusion is studied through what Sen (1998) calls “relational roots of deprivation” and not through bounded or categorical groups of excluded people. The political processes and power relations described

56 Gerard J. Libaridian is an outstanding Armenian American historian and politician. From 2007- 2011, Dr.

Libaridian was the director of the Armenian Studies Program and the Alex Manoogian Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Libaridian taught previously at a number of universities, and has lectured and written extensively. From 1991 to 1997, Libaridian served as adviser, an d then senior adviser to the former President of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrossian, as First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs (1993-1994). His role was invaluable in the state-making of the independent Armenia, as well as the Karabakh peace negotiations during the presidency of Levon Ter-Petrossian. Gerard Libaridian is the founder of the Zoryan Institute (1982) http://zoryaninstitute.org/.

The interview with Dr. Libaridian was conducted in Ann Arbor, Michigan on April 14, 2010.

57 These individuals' professional backgrounds and their relation to Armenian state militarizat ion will be addressed in detail in Chapter Seven, State Militarization and Social Exclusion .

99 in the study, although affecting social exclusion in both urban and rural areas, are particularly relevant to the urban category.

Durable social exclusion in this study is measured by the Gini coefficient, wage distribution, unemployment rates over a period of around 20 years.⁵⁸ Other indicators, such as government expenditures on health, education, housing and welfare, which have

deteriorated, are evaluated, as well.⁵⁹While standardized inequality indicators, such as the Gini coefficient, distribution of income, access to social goods and employability, are measurable outcomes of social status, they are unable to uncover the popular perceptions of how inequality and exclusion are created and inherited from cohort to cohort. Hence, it is important to present not only those indicators, but also public reaction that plainly captures the transitional exclusion of Armenian people. This is done through surveying a group of students, as a representative cluster of the society. Three hundred students participated in the survey.⁶⁰

With respect to privatization, the opaque process by which public assets were sold to certain individuals is analyzed. State administrators allowed friends and relatives to buy lucrative companies. A discussion concerning the huge amount of industries held by individuals close to the state elites is developed. The generation of oligarchic strata, as a social class prone to social closure and opportunity hoarding, is a core investigation of the chapter examining the impact of privatization on social exclusion. I also discuss the social impact of privatization of the energy and telecommunications sectors. Furthermore, administrative barriers to foreign investment are emphasized.

Because there are no sound and complete studies on militarization in the post-Soviet region (except, perhaps Way and Levitsky 2006 and 2010; and Ó Beacháin, Donnacha and

58 Because there is a shortage or unavailability of data on these indicators in post-Soviet Armenia as in most of the post-Soviet countries, it was impossible to compile a consistent and up -to-date presentation of economic inequality based on only these indicators. Specifically, it was very difficult to find data on the Gini coefficient in post-Soviet Armenia for different years. Therefore, I have tried to include the best available data related t o these indicators, most of which were found and retrieved from the World Bank, IMF and UN publications and reports.

59 The complete list of social exclusion indicators used in this study was presented at the end of Chapter Two, when I discussed measuring social exclusion.

60 The survey and a more detailed discussion around it can be found in the Appendix and in Chapter Four,

"Public Perceptions of Social Exclusion”.

100 Abel Polese 2010), the operationalization of the phenomenon in this dissertation is anchored in some of the popular theories of militarism and militarization (Andreski 1954 and 1968, Janowitz 1964 and 1977, Eide and Thee 1980, Mann 1987, Dunne and Smith 1990 ), as well as studies of militarization in Latin America and Middle East (Hurewitz 1969, Hewdey 1989, Bowman 2002).

State militarization in this study is defined as: a) state’s readiness for war, increase in military budgets and military participation ratios due to war, and b) a continued extension of unfavorable state influence in civilian spheres, including economic and socio-political life, by use of coercion via the security sector. While the first part of this definition may not always result in social exclusion, and thus is not as central in explaining it, the second part of the definition treats state militarization as fundamental for authoritarian stability, and therefore, also for alterations in the distribution of power.

State militarization is measured on two levels, based on the above-provided definition. First, the conventional definition of militarization would include indicators such as military expenditures as a percentage of overall GDP; military expenditures as a percentage of overall public expenditures; and armed manpower ratios, otherwise called military participation ratios.⁶¹ Most of these data are available in Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) Military Expenditure Database. Second, the security sector and state coercion will be measured by the number of regular military and paramilitary Karabakh war leaders in government (the National Assembly of Armenia and Ministries);

and the level of state repression used against oppositional movements, specifically their leaders, in terms of the number of political arrests and physical or political intimidation.⁶²

Finally I draw freely from a rich literature on contentious politics (Tilly 1978, 2001, 2004, 2007; Tarrow, 1998; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; McAdam, McCarthy and Zald 1996), discussed at length in Chapter 2, because the latter fits well with the collective action process that has gripped Armenia since the transition from socialism. Social mobilization, its

61 Data on military expenditures can be found in the comparative chapter on soc ial movements and revolutions, Chapter 5.

62 As defined by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the security sector in this study includes armed forces; police; paramilitary forces; intelligence and security services (both military and c ivilian);

customs authorities.

101 organization, and the intensity of discontent is measured by the number of demonstrations and the number of demonstrators during the 1996, 2004 and 2008 movements. I also discuss the repertoire of contention expressed during those movements. Most often, the demonstrators did not violate limits and respected norms, but there have been cases when they sought to enact disruption and transgression. In addition, I investigate the linkage between demands of social movement organizations and economic and political exclusion. It supports the hypothesis that sociopolitical exclusion contributed to mobilization. The strength of social mobilization will also be assessed according to the formation of horizontal linkages among diverse social movement organizations and between these and opposition political parties.

4.5 Conclusion

This chapter was divided into three main parts. The first part dealt with the research method and design of this dissertation. It is an exploratory case study, based on a historical analysis, state elite interviews, a quantitative analysis of a student survey, and newspaper content analysis.

The second part was concerned with the main hypotheses and their concise

analysis.The main contention of the first hypothesis in the second part of this chapter is that privatization negatively affected the economic, political and social sphere in Armenia, generating continued waves of social mobilization. The consequences of the privatization process, as an element of the neoliberal restructuring in post-Soviet Armenia, were

particularly harmful in the economic sphere, chiefly in the labor market. It created massive unemployment, low-wage employment, and income and wealth inequality. As a consequence of the privatization process, the emergence of a new class of oligarchs and the accumulation of capital in their hands occurred. The new wealthy, practically the new class of oligarchs, aggravate social polarization by assuring the maintenance of their newly acquired resources and power.

In regard to the state militarization hypothesis, this part concluded that the peculiar distinction of the Armenian state militarization is not merely the state’s readiness or strength to protect the country in case of external war, but also the state's readiness to rely on the

102 coercive apparatus to repress social protests. The militarization process started as a

consequence of Armenia’s active involvement in the Karabakh war, but it continued after the war in a different way. Exercising supremacy in military policy and decision making, as well as a tight control of army and in general the security sector by the state elites at the end of 1990s, turned into a ‘militarization for internal matters’, when the leaders of the Karabakh movement weakened and the state power passed into the hands of the leaders of the Karabkh Party. In this case, the armed forces became concentrated on internal order and often were used to prey on the society rather than to protect it.

The third partof the chapter operationalized the important concepts of the study, describing how these concepts were measured.

The specific steps described in this chapter are the roadmap for the following four chapters, which center on the examination of the public perceptions of social exclusion in Armenia; the comparative strength of the Armenian state to repress social discontent (expressed through the comparison of success and failure of social revolutions in five post-Soviet states); the processes that made the Armenian state militarized and exclusive; and finally the thorough evaluation of the privatization process.

103 CHAPTER 5

Public Perceptions of Exclusion

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

Albert Einstein 5.1 Introduction

It is a difficult task to measure the magnitude of social exclusion due to the inherently complicated nature of the phenomenon and its dynamic character. Social exclusion can be measured and evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively. In both cases, it is very complicated to document evidence of links between levels and depth of exclusion and factors assumed to be affecting it. Most of the literature on inequality and exclusion has focused on Gini

coefficient, income and wage differences across social classes, and finally the difference of the richest and poorest quintiles of the society. However, national or cross-sectional surveys that capture people's feelings about inequality and exclusion are not widely available.

One of the first instances to measure social polarization in the South Caucasus region and to suggest recommendations is Nazim Habibov's (2011) "Self-perceived social

stratification in low-income transitional countries: Examining the multi-country survey in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia". Based on the latest comparative survey conducted in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, Habibov (2011) examines the factors explaining self-perceived stratification in South Caucasus. Whereas Habibov examines social polarization and exclusion based on merely the self-perceived standpoint, in the analysis of the problem this dissertation incorporates both public perceptions of exclusion and a reasonably factual presentation of social exclusion based on both quantitative and qualitative measures (beyond public perceptions). The author'smost significant finding is that the majority of the people in the examined region consider themselves as middle class, although a substantial share of the population are in fact at the lowest level of society. Another essential conclusion of

Habibov's study is that self-perceived social stratification in those three countries can largely be explained by a set of factors within the direct social policy domain and that the problem can be mitigated by promotion of job-intensive economic growth, supporting small

104 businesses, improving effectiveness of social protection policies, affordability of healthcare and education, and active integration of migrants and investment in public infrastructure.

Most of theabove-prescribed policy improvements are orthodox recommendations for the problem of poverty, social exclusion and stratification promoted by the western analysts.

Contrary to those prescriptions, several programs aimed at the above-advocated

recommendations, such as programs of the Millennium Challenge Corporation in Armenia, have not been successful in alleviating the problem.⁶³ They are designed well, but do not always perform effectively in developing countries. This inefficiency may have resulted from the nature of non-egalitarian and non-democratic states, as well as ineffectiveness of the institutions designed to regulate the functions of the state. The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the self-perceived social exclusion inpost-SovietArmenia and to find out factors, beyond the mentioned policy-related fields, that Armenian students, a representative cluster of the Armenian society, believe are essential in explaining their exclusion from certain resources and activities.

In a brief section, I first specify the method and objectives of the survey, mentioning the number of respondents and the city of their residence. Here, I also explain why

descriptive and regression analyses were chosen. Further, I discuss the dependent and independent variables. This section is followed by the analysis of the descriptive and regression statistics, main findings and implications. First, a significant number of student respondents in all the three cities, more than 80%, believe that there is a high degree of social exclusion in Armenia. Around 70% of them perceive social exclusion to be a combination of economic, social and political exclusion. The majority of the 80%, who agree that there is social exclusion in Armenia, think that the main cause of social exclusion is the deficiency of the labor market.The respondents' estimation that their family's socio-economic status and well-being have not improved much over the last 10 years shows the durability of the

63 The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) is a bilateral United States foreign aid agency, which was established by Congress in 2004. It is separate from the State Department, as well as the US Agency for International Development (USAID). In spring of 2004, Armenia was chosen to be among a select group of 16 countries eligible for Millennium Challenge Corporation funding. Other low-income countries with a strong commitment toward good governance and economic growth and reform were Benin, Bolivia, Cape Verde, Georgia, Ghana, Honduras, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mali, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Senegal, Sri Lanka, and Vanuatu.

105 surveyed students' self-perceived exclusion. Their high level of demonstration participation also indicates strong public aggravation due to economic, social and political exclusion.

Finally, the survey results lead to the conclusion that the type and nature of state elites are fundamental for the explanation of self-perceived social exclusion in Armenia,because among several factors, ‘the President’ and ‘the National Assembly (NA) of Armenia’ hold the first positions, with an equal, about 22%, participant reply rate. Another 13%indicates

‘the domestic security system’ as important in causing social exclusion.

In the concluding section, I focus on the limitations and shortcomings of the student survey process and results. The conclusion stresses that, although this survey managed to confirm that Armenians feel socially, economically and politically excluded, it failed to find valid evidence of the hypothesized affect of the privatization process and state militarization on social exclusion.⁶⁴