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Yaroslavsky on West Hollywood’s Ex-Soviet Immigrants

A CBS2 News report on West Hollywood residents’ reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine featured Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin. In the 1970s, West Hollywood offered a fresh start for Jews fleeing religious oppression in the former Soviet Union after World War II. Now, the city claims more Russian speakers than any U.S. city outside of New York, the report noted. “West Hollywood became a magnet for those fleeing the Soviet Union,” said Yaroslavsky, whose parents emigrated from Ukraine earlier in the 20th century. “You had the very liberal, progressive gay and lesbian community in West Hollywood and then you had the Russian community. But over time, they became partners, and it’s really a beautiful history they have in West Hollywood.”


 

Anheier on Germany’s Role in Ukraine Crisis

A Project Syndicate commentary authored by Adjunct Professor of Social Welfare Helmut Anheier took stock of the diplomatic and economic pressures on Germany as it considers its role in defusing the Ukraine crisis. As Russian troops amass on Ukraine’s border and as NATO nations issue warnings, Germany’s response has been tempered by a commitment to pacifism driven by historical guilt as well as the nation’s reliance on imported — mostly Russian — natural gas. Germany must confront the risks inherent in its dependence on Russian energy and examine the sustainability of its business relations with Moscow, Anheier wrote. “It must let both Russia and its NATO allies know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that while it is no champion of hard power, it is willing to bear the high cost of countering aggression against Ukraine,” he concluded.


 

New Book by Segura Measures the True Cost of War

A new book co-authored by UCLA Luskin Dean Gary Segura measures the full cost of war by examining the consequences of foreign combat on domestic politics. In “Costly Calculations: A Theory of War, Casualties, and Politics,” published by Cambridge University Press, the authors employ a variety of empirical methods to examine multiple wars from the last 100 years. The human toll – the military dead and injured – is generally the most salient measure of war costs and the primary instrument through which war affects the social, economic and political fabric of a nation, according to Segura and co-author Scott Sigmund Gartner, provost of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. Their work provides a framework for understanding war initiation, war policy and war termination in democratic polities, as well as the forces that shape public opinion. “War-making is not just strategic but also represents a political action of some consequence filtered through a societal lens,” the authors write. “Leaders embark upon a course of conflict with an eye on the level of public support, work hard to win that support if it’s missing, actively attempt to manage public beliefs about the conflict and its costs and benefits, and may suffer the political consequences when the people viewing a conflict through the eyes of their communities believe that they miscalculated.” 


 

Steinert-Threlkeld on Social Media Tracking as a Tool of War

Research by Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, assistant professor of public policy, measuring the political opinions of Russian-speakers in Ukraine at the time of Moscow’s 2014 incursion into Crimea has been published online by the journal Post Soviet Affairs. The study, co-authored by Steinert-Threlkeld and Jesse Driscoll of UC San Diego, uses a vast collection of social media data to demonstrate that many self-identified Russians living in Ukraine would not have favored a continued campaign to expand Russia’s borders. “Our supposition is that if Russian strategists were considering expansion beyond Crimea, they would have been able to use social media information to assess, with a great deal of precision and in real time, the reception that they would likely receive,” the authors wrote. While there is no evidence that Russian leaders took advantage of this type of analysis, the authors conclude that tapping into social media traffic could provide a useful source of intelligence for those planning military campaigns. “Social media data are straightforward to analyze systematically and can be collected at a relatively low cost,” wrote the authors, whose team, including research assistants in Kiev, used a data set of 6.8 million tweets to gauge social attitudes shared by Russian-speakers. “The prevalence of overtly political behaviors on social media provides important clues about the political dispositions within communities,” they said.

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