Youth And Social Change In Eastern Europe And The Former Soviet Union

Two decades have now passed since the revolutions of 1989 swept through Eastern Europe and precipitated the collapse of state socialism across the region, engendering a period of massive social, economic and political transformation. This book explores the ways in which young people growing up in post-socialist Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union negotiate a range of identities and transitions in their personal lives against a backdrop of thoroughgoing transformation in their societies. Drawing upon original empirical research in a range of countries, the book's contributors explore the various freedoms and insecurities that have accompanied neo-liberal transformation in post-socialist countries - in spheres as diverse as consumption, migration, political participation, volunteering, employment and family formation - and examine the ways in which they have begun to re-shape different aspects of young people's lives. In addition, while 'social change' is a central theme of the issue, all of the chapters in the collection indicate that the new opportunities and risks faced by young people continue both to underpin and to be shaped by familiar social and spatial divisions, not only within and between the countries addressed, but also between 'East' and 'West'. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journal of Youth Studies.

In times of dramatic social changes, adolescents are the last children of the old system and the first adults of the new. The Hungarian and Polish adolescents documented in this book can be considered the omega-alpha generation of the great social, political, and economic changes that occurred during the late 1980s and early 1990s in central and eastern Europe. Adolescent Development and Rapid Social Change addresses the psychological consequences for these young people who came of age during a time of such uncertainty.

Two decades have now passed since the revolutions of 1989 swept through Eastern Europe and precipitated the collapse of state socialism across the region, engendering a period of massive social, economic and political transformation. This book explores the ways in which young people growing up in post-socialist Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union negotiate a range of identities and transitions in their personal lives against a backdrop of thoroughgoing transformation in their societies. Drawing upon original empirical research in a range of countries, the book's contributors explore the various freedoms and insecurities that have accompanied neo-liberal transformation in post-socialist countries - in spheres as diverse as consumption, migration, political participation, volunteering, employment and family formation - and examine the ways in which they have begun to re-shape different aspects of young people's lives. In addition, while 'social change' is a central theme of the issue, all of the chapters in the collection indicate that the new opportunities and risks faced by young people continue both to underpin and to be shaped by familiar social and spatial divisions, not only within and between the countries addressed, but also between 'East' and 'West'. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journal of Youth Studies.

Young people in Eastern Europe are more advanced in some global trends than in the west. This original approach to youth studies explores life transitions, covering all aspects of young people's lives from education and work to family and leisure. Written by a popular author, this engaging book is key reading for all students of youth studies.

The primary goal of this study is to analyze the position of youth in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This covers their health, intellectual development, socio-economic status, crime patterns, attitudes towards politics, present preoccupations and thoughts about the future.

In Family and Social Change in Socialist and Post-Socialist Societies, the authors address the social transformations of eight transitional societies in recent decades (Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, China and Vietnam). Each chapter discusses a different society and reveals their struggles in the reconstruction of the intimate and public spheres amid the post-Cold War period. Making use of a semi-structured analytical framework, the respective chapters address the ambiguous relationship between familism and individualisation seen through change and continuity in demographic behaviour, family values, family solidarity, gender relations, state policy and marketisation. The volume also outlines the possibility of a modified second demographic transition theory as a correction of Western-based interpretations of current social trends. Contributors include: Zsombor Rajkai, Yulia Gradskova, Lyudmyla Males, Tymur Sandrovych, Maƚgorzata Sikorska, Peter Guráň, Jarmila Filadelfiová, Miloš Debnár, Csaba Dupcsik, Olga Tóth, Borbála Kovács, Zhou Weihong, Liu Wenrong, Xue Yali, Nguyen Huu Minh, Chang Kyung-Sup.

This disturbing volume probes beneath the rhetoric about system change in the transition societies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to examine the impact of political, social, and economic dislocation, ethnic conflict and civil war on the most population: children.