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Jane I. Dawson, Eco-Nationalism: Anti-Nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia, Lithuania and Ukraine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996, xii + 221 pp., $49.95 h/b, $16.95 p/b.
ECO-NATIONALISM IS AN EXCELLENT MONOGRAPH, a deserved recipient of the prestigious 1997 Marshall Shulman Prize awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. This is an important research study for several reasons, but most importantly for its intriguing and thoughtful comparative theoretical and conceptual framework, its extensive original field work, its focus on the very timely and important issues of the complex contextual linkages between anti-nuclear power environmental activism and national identity formation processes in a number of the former Soviet republics, and the fact that the research time-frame, from 1985 to 1995, spans the period of the formal Soviet break-up. This time-frame and the tumultuous events that it brackets, in effect, generated a real-world laboratory which affords Dawson the unique opportunity to explore and test alternative theories of social mobilisation, namely, resource mobilisation and identity-oriented models. The former model, a structural approach, focuses attention on the roles that access to mobilisation resources and opportunities play in the patterns of social mobilisation, whereas the latter converges on the roles of culture, ideas and group identity to explain social mobilisation processes. Dawson is more than equal to making full use of this opportunity and as a result of her richly detailed, contextualised case-studies amalgamates these two paradigms into a hybrid conceptual framework that yields sonorous explanatory insights into the actual and expected patterns of social mobilisation in late communist and post-communist societies.
Formally the volume consists of six chapters sandwiched between a highly readable informative preface...