Historical legacies,clientelism and the capacity to fight: exploring pathways to regime tenure in Tanzania

While regimes in countries like Cameroon, Guinea, Togo and Tanzania have survived the transition from single to multiparty rule, this article suggests two unique characteristics for the case of regime tenure in Tanzania. First, while transitions in other cases were characterized by widespread protests and/or popular opposition movements, opposition in Tanzania's transition environment was minuscule by comparison. Secondly, while repression is still widespread in Tanzania, overt repression appears to be less prevalent in Tanzania when compared to most other strong tenure cases. This study first explores the comparative role of overt repression as a viable explanation for the strong tenure of the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM). Upon closer examination, however, the article argues that accounting for the structures and processes that shape the capacities of political actors to engage in political battles might provide for a more complete appreciation of the CCM's ability to remain the country's dominant political actor, despite the multiparty transition.     

Refracted axis: Kitayama Jun'yū and writing a German Japan

The question of how individuals navigate a given regime is inevitably a delicate one, but one no less important because of its sensitivity. This article examines the case of one Kitayama Jun'yū – author of dozens of works during the 1930s and 1940s that purported to introduce Japan to a German audience – and his changing rhetorical strategies in presenting a Japan that would be acceptable to his readership. It employs an adapted notion of Bhabha's concept of ‘mimicry’ as a means to understand both developments internal to Kitayama's works as well as their changing reception. This framework recognizes that power dynamics played an influential role in cross-cultural exchange between the two countries; at the same time, it enables a depersonalized engagement with cultural politics that does not rest on identifying individual authorial political allegiances. Drawing on both Kitayama's writings and archival materials that reflect official and semi-private responses to his work, this article offers a closer look at how a particular Japanese intellectual negotiated Japan's place within the discursive space of the National Socialist regime.     

The election trap: the cycle of post-electoral repression and opposition fragmentation in Lukashenko's Belarus

Recent work on competitive authoritarianism has not explored the full consequences of electoral participation for opposition movements. While prominent work argues that the government must employ a mix of side-payments and repression to fragment opposition to its rule, Belarus’ history since the ascension of President Alexander Lukashenko in 1994 shows that the opposition has been repressed after most parliamentary and presidential elections without any substantial co-optation. I argue that electoral contestation and subsequent post-electoral repression have led to the Belarusian opposition's fragmented state. This state is grounded in competition for foreign aid, which creates a need among Belarusian opposition leaders to demonstrate their ability to mobilize support through campaigns. Invariably, successful opposition leaders emerge as the principal challengers to the regime, leading to their arrest or exile. Repression then fosters division within anti-government movements and restarts the cycle for new aid-seeking parties and leaders. A quantitative test establishes that repression concentrates in post-electoral periods and a qualitative assessment shows that opposition fragmentation stems from the arrest or exile of opposition leaders. The empirical findings provide contrasting evidence to work on co-optation in autocracies while suggesting an adverse effect of foreign democracy assistance around the world.     

The Rules of the Game—Nationalism,Globalisation and Football in Spain: Barça and Bilbao in a Comparative Perspective

This paper discusses the triangular relation between nationalism, globalisation and football in Spain. The aim of the work is to compare the way two Spanish football clubs—the Catalan FC Barcelona (known as “Barça”) and the Basque Athletic Bilbao—respond to the challenges posed by the game's globalisation, and through this comparison learn about the nexus between nationalism and globalisation. The main claim is that the differences between the two clubs’ behaviour can be attributed to varying characteristics of Basque and Catalan nationalism. Focusing on different path dependency, the development of a civic Catalan nationalism is contrasted with the growth of Basque nationalism as essentially ethnic. These characteristics emerged and crystallised primarily during the regions’ industrialisation, and the nationalist response to this advent of modernism would later shape the response to post-modern globalisation. The diametrically opposed ways in which the two football clubs react to the game's globalisation reflect the significant differences between the two national movements’ core values. This illustrates the importance of path dependency as a factor that produces diverse responses to globalisation—the results of which are not predetermined.     

Testing EU Foreign Policy in the Middle East

Since 2011, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries have been confronted with increasing challenges stemming from the Arab uprisings. Internally, they have had to face popular mobilisation and discontent, triggering a mixed reaction, including economic handouts, patronage, limited political and economic reforms as well as military intervention and repression. Externally, they have actively intervened in support of the protest movements in Syria and Libya and enthusiastically facilitated President Saleh's departure from Yemen. At first sight these responses may seem schizophrenic. Upon closer inspection, however, managing instability by shoring up friendly regimes on the inside and expanding the GCC's influence outside represent two sides of the same coin.     

Invading Europe: The British army and its preparations for the Normandy campaign, 1942-44

Some scholars claim that collective security always fails. This article analyses a case where it succeeded. When Belgians rebelled against Dutch rule in the early 1830s, all five great powers agreed no fewer than four times to threaten or to use force against one or both sides. Why? Drawing extensively on diplomatic correspondence from Austrian, German and Russian archives, I show that the Concert of Europe functioned as a security regime, helping the powers to agree. Great power consensus broke down when Britain and France imposed a peace settlement on the Dutch in 1832. Yet the Belgian case—like Iraq's 1991 expulsion from Kuwait—shows that collective security can sometimes succeed against cross-border aggression.     

The roots of coercion and insurgency: exploiting the counterfactual case of Honduras

Anecdotal evidence points to a significant relationship between repression and rebellion and yet the quantitative civil war literature ignores state strategies, deeming them endogenous or perfectly correlated with polity type. This article seeks to bring the state back in again and examine the causes of states' strategies and the effects of these strategies on non-violent mobilisation. It finds that, under certain circumstances, a state's response to a peaceful opposition movement depends not on its institutions or capacity; rather, it is a function of the state's control of the national security apparatus, autonomy from its constituents, and resources fungible for reform. Additionally, the article concludes that state policy can play a more significant role in explaining the onset of civil conflict than do structural variables such as per capita income, terrain and population size. Historical analysis of coercion and insurgency in the counterfactual case of Honduras illustrates the plausibility of this argument.     

Postwar (West) German–Romanian Relations: Expanding Brubaker's Analytic Triad

This article revisits Rogers Brubaker's well-known triadic nexus, consisting of national minority, nationalizing state, and kin-state, and interrogates its applicability to the study of German minorities in Central and Eastern Europe since the second half of the 20th century. It does that by looking at German–Romanian relations after the Second World War, arguing that the migration of Romanian Germans to (West) Germany led to the transformation of Brubaker's triadic nexus into a quadratic nexus. More precisely, the field of Romanian Germans in (West) Germany has to be added to the three already existing fields. Furthermore, the extension of Brubaker's model allows in effect for a more comprehensive analysis of postwar West German–Eastern European relationships.     

International NGOs and unions in the South: worlds apart or allies in the struggle?

In the early 1980s, support for trade unions was a significant component of Oxfam GB's programmes in various parts of the world, most notably Central America and South Africa. In Central America, this was motivated both because organised labour played an important role in popular movements that were pressing for equitable political settlements to the wars ravaging the region, and because unions as such, as well as their members and leaders, were the targets of repression and political violence. This article explores the background to the rise in funding for unions in Honduras, reflects on this experience, and discusses some of the factors that might change a potentially awkward donor‐recipient relationship to one of dialogue and solidarity.     

Journalism as “Prostitution”: Understanding Russia's Reactions to Anna Politkovskaya's Murder

When the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in her apartment building in Moscow in October 2006, heads of Western governments and nongovernmental organizations hurried to make strong statements condemning the murder, and public rallies in Politkovskaya's honor were held in front of Russian embassies across the world. In contrast to this swift and unequivocal response, the reaction of Russian officials, journalists, and the public at large was delayed, lukewarm, or nonexistent, much to the incomprehension of Western observers. To understand why the majority of Russian citizens were unmoved by Politkovskaya's murder, this article will contend, we need to understand the specific history of media-political transformation in Russia over the past decade and a half. This includes (a) approaching Soviet journalism as a unique nexus of ethics and politics, (b) studying the centrifugal forces unleashed during Russia's media privatization in the 1990s, and (c) understanding how those forces (in tension with the centering pull under Putin) have been shaping the practices and meaning of journalism in post-Soviet Russia over the past decade and a half. Such context-sensitive and historically contingent exploration will, in turn, suggest new theoretical tools for thinking about journalistic action, or agency, in political contexts short of classical liberalism more broadly.     

China's Kashmir Policies

The article examines why some ethnic groups seeking ethno-political autonomy engage in violence while others respond with relative quiescence. It compares and contrasts the ethno-political movements of the Bodos and Misings in northeast India and adopts an integrated approach in which the mobilizing structure and state responses assume equal and important roles that determine the correlation between the mobilizing process and levels of contention. A fundamental claim is that popular support and participation are crucial to shape the trajectories and strategies of ethnic movements. What determines the level of popular following is long-term commitment, legitimacy, and effective communicative strategies adopted by activist organizations. This in turn, generates collective mobilization and produces mechanisms for violence. The absence thereof leads to less disruptive contention. Further, the level of ethnic contention is determined by consistency and extent of ethnic accommodation and the nature of state repression. Consistent accommodation can have a countervailing effect on the activists to launch violent rebellion. Accommodation may range from implementing particular ethno-linguistic policies to selective incentives or cooptation of core political activists by the government. Contrarily, inconsistent accommodation and widespread state repression leads to high levels of violence.     

Questioning the media and democracy relationship: the case of South Africa

This article addresses normative ideas around the role of journalism and the news media's links to the democratic process in South Africa and many other post-colonial societies in the Global South. In particular, the article addresses questions around the news media's role as the Fourth Estate and its claims to public representation, as well as the role that new media and social media in particular play in the media-politics nexus and in the strengthening of democracy (in its many guises). The article assesses the contextual factors that need to be considered in the analysis of media development and the roles and functions ascribed to the news media from within the context of the post-colony and young democracies in the Global South.     

A two-step theory and test of the oil curse: the conditional effect of oil on democratization

Does oil impede democratization? This article posits that in order to understand the effect of oil on democratization one has to decompose the transition process into two steps: (1) the ending of the authoritarian regime, which initiates the process; and (2) the subsequent establishment of a democracy rather than an autocracy. I argue that oil has different effects on the two phases of the transition process: while oil has contradictory effects on the likelihood that an authoritarian regime fails, it diminishes the likelihood of the establishment of democracy following the failure. Oil’s negative effect is conditional on the breakdown of the authoritarian regime, which itself is unaffected by oil. That is, although oil does not initiate the transition process, it does influence its outcome. Using data on 118 autocracies, I find evidence consistent with this hypothesis.     

Was Idi Amin's Government a Terrorist Regime?

What does state terrorism look like? How do we distinguish it from other forms of mass state violence, such as repression or genocide? Based on the developing literature on state terrorism, this study presents three expectations that violence perpetrated by the state should meet if it is to be classified as state terrorism: these are (a) that the violence is perpetrated by agents of the state, (b) that the violence is visible, and (c) that state terrorism focused against a state's own citizens will be carried out by an autocratic, personalistic regime. Drawing substantially on a series of primary sources, this study demonstrates that Idi Amin's regime in Uganda from 1971 to 1979 did engage in state terrorism against its own citizens.     

Leading learning and change from the middle: Reconceptualising strategy's purpose,content, and measures

When implementing a transformational global vision and mission, three problems typically confront international NGOs: aligning different levels of planning and strategy; balancing global analysis and priorities against local realities; and identifying measures that both indicate progress and promote and encourage innovation. This article reports on the efforts of CARE International's Latin America Regional Management Unit to address these problems by introducing 'reversals' to common strategic planning principles and processes. It shows middle managers in NGOs how they can lead 'from the middle', and considers 'the region' to be the nexus enabling an organisation to change and learn across multiple hierarchical levels.     

Fighting for the rule of law: civil resistance and the lawyers' movement in Pakistan

Pakistan, sometimes referred to as ‘the most dangerous place on earth’, is not typically thought of as a place where popular nonviolent resistance could take root, much less succeed. Citizen apathy, poor governance, and fear of regime repression and terrorist violence are barriers to effective civic activism inside Pakistan. Yet, over the past two years, Pakistan's authoritarian ruler was ousted and its independent judiciary restored following a massive grassroots campaign led by lawyers. The ‘men in black’, whose insistence on the rule of law and embrace of nonviolent struggle captured the hearts and minds of millions of Pakistanis, helped transform the country's political landscape in unexpected ways. The successes tallied by this nonviolent movement, this article will argue, can be attributed to the large-scale non-cooperation and civil disobedience that pressured two successive Pakistani regimes – one authoritarian and one democratic – to yield to its demands. Unity and mass participation, nonviolent discipline, and the creative use of nonviolent tactics were three key ingredients of success. While instability and Islamist extremism continue to plague Pakistan, the lawyers' movement highlights the steadily growing strength of Pakistani civil society have a potential to influence democratic change in the country.     

The More Fragmented the Better?—The Impact of Armed Forces Structure on Defection during Nonviolent Popular Uprisings

Authoritarian regimes frequently employ fragmentation to safeguard themselves against coups and reduce the power of the military apparatus. This article investigates the impact of structural coup-proofing in the setting of a nonviolent popular uprising that threatens the regime and its survival. It is argued that in such settings fragmentation can have unintentional consequences with respect to the question whether the army fulfills orders of repression or defects. If the security apparatus is highly divided, some armed organizations will seize the opportunity to defect and side with the protesters because the efficiency of counterbalancing decreases if more effective armed organizations are involved. This can be mainly explained through collective action problems that the security apparatus faces in such a setting. This article compiles data of nonviolent uprisings from 1975 to 2006 and data on armed forces structure for conducting a multivariate probit regression on the probability of defection. The findings indeed show a U-shaped relationship between armed forces fragmentation and the likelihood of defection during nonviolent mass uprisings. While security apparatuses with around two effective armed organizations display only a low probability of defection, minimally and highly fragmented forces indicate higher chances of defection from the ruling regime.     

Back to the future: the Arab uprisings and state (re)formation in the Arab world

This article contributes to debates that aim to go beyond the “democratization” and “post-democratization” paradigms to understand change and continuity in Arab politics. In tune with calls to focus on the actualities of political dynamics, the article shows that the literatures on State Formation and Contentious Politics provide useful theoretical tools to understand change/continuity in Arab politics. It does so by examining the impact of the latest Arab uprisings on state formation trajectories in Iraq and Syria. The uprisings have aggravated a process of regime erosion – which originated in post-colonial state-building attempts – by mobilizing sectarian and ethnic identities and exposing the counties to geo-political rivalries and intervention, giving rise to trans-border movements, such as ISIS. The resulting state fragmentation has obstructed democratic transition in Syria and constrained its consolidation in Iraq.     

Means,Motives and Opportunities in Ethno-Nationalist Mobilization

Building on the most important theoretical tools from the literatures on social movements and nationalism, we propose a model of the intensity of nationalist political behavior in which a community's means, motives, and opportunities assume the central roles in the initiation and escalation of nationalist contentious politics. We then test this model using multinomial logit on original data from the seventeen autonomous communities of Spain over a twenty-year period. The results demonstrate that the means, motives, and opportunities assume vital, yet nonlinear, roles in determining a community's level of electoral, violent, and nonviolent contentious activity. The findings also show that there are crucial differences in what accounts for the moves to electoral contention, to protest, and to rebellion. Several of these factors are uniformly escalatory on the intensity of contention—especially repression, social mobilization, and regime change—while others, most importantly democracy, have a moderating effect on the generation of conflict. The results further imply processes of a diffusion of rebellious activities and of an organizational-level substitution effect between violent and nonviolent forms of political behavior. At the aggregate community level, however, escalation in contention involves a “cumulative effect” rather than a classic “substitution effect.”     

Towards a policy framework for the empowerment of social movements

As they move from responding to needs and demands to a more rights-based approach, some French NGOs are rethinking both their areas of work and their ways of working. ‘Empowerment’ has become a key concept in this changing context, although it is sometimes difficult to know how best to apply it and understand what it really means in an NGO setting. This article shares some thinking on empowerment, analysing its ‘object’ (individuals, organisations, networks, or movements) and the ‘process’ through which it is realised. Drawing on the author's own experience and on a brief literature review, it is illustrated by the examples of the international disability and US gay rights movements.