Trajectories of Institutional Disintegration in Late-Soviet Russia and Contemporary Iraq

Abstract

How might revolutions and other processes of institutional disintegration inform political processes preceding them? By mapping paths of agency through processes of institutional disintegration, the trajectory improvisation model of institutional breakdown overcomes "action-structure" binaries by framing political revolutions as possible outcomes of such disintegrative processes. The trajectory improvisation approach expands the trajectory adjustment model of social change developed by Gil Eyal, Iván Szelényi, and Eleanor Townsley. An overview of political revolution in Soviet Russia between 1989 and 1991 illustrates trajectory improvisation. The recent American invasion and occupation of Iraq shows alternative routes to institutional disintegration, indicating the independence of models of institutional breakdown from those of social movements. These cases illustrate both the diversity of situations the trajectory improvisation model speaks to, and the limitation of models of trajectory adjustment, improvisation, social movements, and invasions, illustrating why such models at best enable what are called "explanatory narratives" of actual historical processes.

The Missing Key: Institutions, Networks, and the Project of Neoclassical Sociology

“…In the modern period, we can describe state breakdown as rapid slippage of hitherto stable institutional patterns of trajectory adjustment into patterns of trajectory improvisation, in which a relative handful of political entrepreneurs (Garcelon 2006:262–65) may mobilize everything from social movements to alliance with occupying military forces in attempting to generate alternatives to disintegrating institutions. In more authoritarian societies, state decline involving even partial loss of control over the mass media aggravates the process by opening the political field to alternative figurations.…”

“… Mapping processes of trajectory improvisation at the level of states. Source: Garcelon (2005:23, 2006:263). …”

“…16 16 For elaborations of this argument, see Mouzelis (1995:15–27, 123–24) and Garcelon (2006:265–67). …”

“…31 31 Forms of capitals here follow Bourdieu (1986), who used the term “cultural capital” for what Robert Putnam (2000:18–19, 289) calls “human capital.” For arguments that cultural capital is more terminologically precise than human capital, and that capitals represent monetization of nonmonetary assets in premonetary societies, see Garcelon (2006:256–59). For a discussion of forms of capital and their relation to institutional history, see Eyal et al (1998:20–24).…”