Alec Rasizade

Alec Rasizade (Azerbaijani: Əli Rasizadə) is a prominent Soviet and American professor of history and political science, who specialized in Sovietology, primarily known for the typological model (or "algorithm" in his own words), which describes the impact of a drop in oil revenues on the process of decline in rentier states by stages and cycles of their general socio-economic degradation upon the end of an oil boom. He has also authored more than 200 studies on the history of 20th century, Perestroika reforms and breakup of the USSR, oil diplomacy and contemporary politics in the post-Soviet states and autonomies of Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Education and scholarship

Alec Rasizade was born in the city of Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan SSR, Soviet Union, in 1947 and graduated from the history department of Azerbaijan State University in 1969, then graduated and received a PhD degree in history from Moscow State University in 1974 (with a thesis on the Truman Doctrine), and the Doctor of History degree from the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1990 (for dissertation on Turkey in the system of NATO). He subsequently worked as a professor of European and American history at Azerbaijan State University from 1974 to 1980, and a senior research fellow at Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences from 1981 to 1990.

Upon the demise of the USSR in 1991, Rasizade emigrated to the United States as a visiting professor of history at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Furthermore, as a Fulbright professor, he taught Soviet history in the 1990s at Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, SAIS, Monmouth and other universities. After obtaining in 1995 a doctorate in history from Columbia University (based on the scope of his lectures and publications), he worked at its Harriman Institute. In 2000, Rasizade was invited to Washington to work at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, whereupon in 2004 he moved to the newly established Historical Research Center of the National Academy of Sciences, where wrote his most significant works until retiring upon its closure in 2013.

Professor Rasizade occasionally participates in academic, educational, social, analytical and legislative events, discussions, panels, peer reviews, interviews, broadcasts and hearings as an expert in post-Soviet affairs. He is also an advisory or editorial board member in a number of the world's leading academic journals in his field of regional studies and an emeritus professor of Baku State University.

Significant studies

Rasizade's academic contribution to Sovietology may be divided into four general categories: Caspian oil boom, Russia, Azerbaijan and Central Asia. His ideas and conclusions for each of these major studies are summarized in the following theses:

1) Having an insider knowledge of Caspian oil reserves, Rasizade precisely calculated and predicted in his writings the exact end of the second Baku oil boom of 2005–2014, notwithstanding the geopolitical euphoria of the 1990s in Western capitals based on exaggerated estimates by American academia, Azerbaijan's government and the Caspian oil consortium.

2) On Russia, he wrote that Putin's Bonapartism was a natural result of the 1990s turmoil, when the society as a whole and the nouveau riches in particular, longed for a strongman who could establish order, stability and legitimacy for the illegally acquired wealth even at the expense of civil rights restriction. Furthermore, Rasizade argues that demise of the USSR was only the first stage in the process of Russian Federation's own breakup or, as he put it bluntly, Russia is doomed to disintegrate as did all multinational empires in history.

3) Azerbaijan, in his view, is a classic Middle Eastern petrostate, which will eventually sink into its legitimate place among the impoverished Muslim nations with the end of oil boom, as is predetermined by its culture, endemic corruption and lack of industrial endowment. He insists that the oil boom was just an aberration on Azerbaijan's natural path from communism to the Third world.

4) As for Central Asia, the main argument in his publications has been the futility of Western efforts to impose there the democratic values of European civilization, since democracy in Muslim nations inevitably leads to election and entrenchment of Islamofascism, as was proven by American intervention in other Islamic countries. Instead of direct involvement, he recommended to US government a support for local tyrants who were able to maintain peace in the region and order in their countries by the brutally effective methods of the same Islam.

Rasizade's algorithm

The most outstanding work of Alec Rasizade, which gained an international acclaim, was the eponymous algorithm of decline theory, described in his 2008 article at the peak of oil prices, when nothing foreshadowed their steep fall and the subsequent onset of global economic recession with irreversible consequences for oil-exporting nations. Prior to that, the effect of rising oil prices, rendered to strengthen the national currencies and affect the economies of rentier states as a result of oil boom, was described only by the "Dutch disease" theory, first introduced in 1977.

However, that theory could not foretell the further course of developments after a drop in oil prices on the world market: what would have turned out for oil-dependent countries upon the end of their oil booms? And precisely that happened in 2008, when the price of oil collapsed from $147 per barrel in the middle of the year to $32 by its end, i.e. by 75 percent. Exactly at that moment came out of press the aforementioned article, in which Rasizade explained the chain reaction of an unavoidable sequence of events in the process of impoverishment, degradation and decline in living standards of nations whose welfare depends on the export of natural resources, when one change inevitably entails another. Appearance of the article was so timely that the described algorithm, which was unfolding in real time, had been picked up in scholarly literature as a typological model by the name of its author.

Rasizade's algorithm may be described succinctly as the following chain reaction (domino effect): a decline in oil production or a drop in the price of oil translates into a synchronous fall in the inflow of petrodollars, which results in the collapse of treasury's revenues and expenditures, which leads to devaluation of the local currency, which ensues (in a free market) a tumble in prices of goods, services and real estate in dollar terms, which squeezes the tax base, which entails the redundancy of government bureaucracy, nationwide layoffs and bankruptcies in the private sector, which further squeezes the tax base, which results in cutting wages and social benefits, which causes mass unemployment and impoverishment of the populace, which triggers a growing dissatisfaction of power elite, which brings about a regime change with redistribution of wealth and property.

After this, the whole cycle repeats itself on a lower level of revenues and living standards until the final slump of such country into its historically legitimate and economically stable place among the Third World nations. This is the final stage of algorithm, after which an industrial development may (or may not, as the experience of backward countries shows) begin in a given state — such a prediction does not lend itself to political or economic calculations and depends on the mentality and traditions of each particular nation. Therefore, after adjusting to the new standards of living, these nations can exist in the condition of entropy indefinitely.

References

Notable publications

(The full list of published academic works, studies, lectures, articles and essays of A.Rasizade is presented in the Azerbaijani Wikipedia).