’Global city’ and ’global village’: The emergence of urban-rural conflicts in Central Russia

Abstract

As complex societies expand, the process of urbanization increasingly affects people throughout the world. Due to global networks and mass media, the urban way of living is becoming more attractive and desirable. However, this process very often destroys traditional cultures, as well as personal and face-to-face social relations. People around the world increasingly experience the identity crisis, or the feeling of being marginalised. This problem was studied by Stanley Milgram, Phillip Zimbardo, Clifford O’Donnell and others as one of the main issues of environmental and community psychology. But now conflicts between the ‘global city’ and the ‘global village’, or between core and periphery, increasingly threaten the global development. This article can be considered as an attempt to estimate some impacts of post-modern global trends of urbanization on the dynamics of conflicts around the world on the case of these trends in Central Russia.