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This article reviews the vast literature on Russia’s transformation into a “militocracy”—a state in which individuals with career experience in Russia’s various force structures occupy important positions throughout the polity and economy—during the reign of former KGB lieutenant colonel Vladimir Putin. We show that (1) elite militarization has been extensively utilized both to describe and explain core features of Russian foreign and domestic policy; and (2) notwithstanding its widespread usage, the militocracy framework rests on a rather thin, and in some cases flawed, body of empirical research. We close by discussing the remaining research agenda on this subject and listing several alternative theoretical frameworks to which journalists and policymakers arguably should pay equal or greater attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article serves to introduce a number of recent changes in the practices and rationale of British industrial policy since 2008. I observe a shift towards a stronger role for the government and for agencies of industrial policy in the provision of industrial finance, and towards an increasingly discretionary and strategic approach to industrial policy intervention, both of which stand in tension with the neoliberal ‘coordinative discourse’ that continues to structure macroeconomic policy in the post-2008 context. I suggest that this tension is indicative of the emergence of two competing ‘crisis diagnoses’ in government after 2008; one reflecting the neoliberal coordinative discourse that structured economic policymaking prior to 2008, the other at odds with this neoliberal crisis diagnosis. I argue that constructivist analytical frameworks on crisis and political–economic change are insufficiently developed to accommodate these findings. I therefore reflect upon some conceptual and empirical implications that the findings raise for a constructivist analysis of economic policy in the post-2008 context in Britain, before concluding that a more contingent, contested and, crucially, incomplete process of re-alignment in the ideas that structure economic policymaking is underway in Britain than is generally acknowledged. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]