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Moldovan electoral legislation since the country's independence in 1991 is analyzed along with candidates' behaviors for interpreting or modifying these laws in pursuit of their own political interests. Despite the formal grounds of election laws, Moldovan political leaders have frequently distorted the significance of democratic elections in order to come to power or maintain their positions in the government.

Two field surveys are used to inquire into socioeconomic inequality in Moldavia under the traditional Communist system. The social capital accumulated by individuals in institutionalized or informal ways (through networks of personal contacts) was related to the forms of rationing characteristic of economies with chronic shortages. It can be an appropriate tool for analyzing inequality in Communist societies.

Moldova faces important challenges today for its political transformation. On the one hand, external factors keep Moldova in between successful EU candidates and consolidated democracies, and hybrid, semi-authoritarian and even fully authoritarian regimes that consolidated in the aftermath of the Soviet Union breakdown. On the other hand, on internal grounds, Moldova keeps balancing between those two models of post-communist transition. The article sheds light on the mechanisms and dynamics of citizens' evaluation of competing political regimes and underlines the important factors for democratisation following the events of 5 April 2009, which seemed finally to overturn Soviet-era nostalgia.

Information drawn from interviews and meetings with focus-groups in Cahul, the third largest city in Moldova, shows that emigration is a major filter on Moldovan perceptions of reality. What this city's inhabitants say about migration is described and articulated with Moldovan conceptions of their country and the current situation. This same filter affects their perception of Europe. Moldovan experiences of emigration serve to construct a collective portrait of the “Moldovan migrant”. At the individual level, they are used to justify what those who have stayed behind have to say about wanting to leave or, too, wanting to stay.

How have relations between Moldova and the European Union developed over the past decade? The launching of the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) and then of the Eastern Partnership, which coincided with the coming to power of a pro-European coalition, have significantly stimulated EU-Moldovan relations, now among the tightest in the EU's “Eastern neighborhood”. The instruments underlying EU policy in Moldova — the European Union Border Assistance Mission to Moldova and Ukraine (EUBAM), the Free Visa Regime, the Association Agreement, and the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement — are reviewed; and questions, raised about their scope and coherence. Political instability, the Transnistrian conflict and regional tensions are major drawbacks to implementing the ENP.

>Négocier la nation : L'historiographie du tourisme dans la République de Moldavie
Narratives of history have become a vital element in tourist promotion and thus should be submitted to closer scrutiny, as they are frequently linked to discourses of identity. Many of the former socialist countries are engaged in nation-building projects and mediate discourses of identity through informational or promotional resources for tourists. The Republic of Moldova is one such country strongly involved with nation building since gaining its independence after the break-up of the Soviet Union. This specific nation formation process has been informed by various programmatic ideas over the last two decades, ranging from the adoption of Romanianist approaches to those that lean towards a more Eurasianist perspective on the nature of the Moldovan nation. Tourist historiography, i. e. narratives of history from Moldovan tourist media reflects those programmatic ideas by providing accounts of history that contain elements to support the discourses of the nation and by omitting those that are linked to notions of “Otherness”.

Nation-building in the post-Soviet Republic of Moldova and its non-recognised break-away region of Transnistria constitutes a favourite of constructivist nationalism studies. Both the first wave of studies by historians, linguists and political scientists in the mid-1990s and a second wave including anthropologists in the past five years, however, have struggled to make sense of the conflicting nationalisms. The clean distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism may be meaningful for Western academics, but it is not for Moldovan “ethnic entrepreneurs” and their constituencies. The same applies to the distinction between nationalism as an elite project and the national identities of citizens and societal groups.