Grasping the Syrian War,a view from Albanians in the Balkans

Reactions to the brutal Syrian War from European governments and Europe’s Muslims have been diverse and subject to many shifts over the past few years. This paper focuses on how Albanian political and Islamic religious figures living in the Balkans have come to interpret the war. I focus on discourse, the ways in which these different agents communicate with their audience, and the wider contexts they evoke. Government sources and religiously themed lectures delivered by prominent imams on the social networking site YouTube are used to assess these trends. The most obvious aspect of these debates is the ways in which these agents use the war to press their own agendas, the government to affirm their commitment to the “West” and an ethnicized view of Islam, while Islamic religious leaders use it to reconnect their audiences to a more cosmopolitan vision of their past. War thus becomes a catalyst for a resurgent contestation between different groups vying for control over what it means to be “Albanian” and “Muslim” in the twenty-first century.     

书法与公务员素质培养

法作为中国人文素质的基础和精髓，历来为政府官员所重视，并已成为官员必备素质之一，该文通过梳理分析和归纳总结后得出，书法对当今公务员的素质培养具有重要意义，分别为：通过“以字正心”，端正思想行为；丰富文化知识，提升综合修养；提高书写水平，便于日常应用；广交各界朋友，抵制不良爱好；凝神静气挥毫，有益健康长寿。     

Nationalism and the Rise of Peru's General Velasco

Velasco's brand of military nationalism marked a real break from the orientation of the majority of Peruvian military regimes, which were pro‐United States and espoused limited government. Many attempts have been made to explain this outcome, but the release of documents from British and United States archives clarify certain issues. Above all, Velasco's use of the nationalist card enabled him to win over decisive support from both the military and political society. This support gave him sufficient leverage to consolidate his personal position, which he did before launching a major programme of domestic property expropriation.     

Built-in Safeguards and the Implementation of Civil War Peace Accords

This article contributes to analyses of peace agreement implementation by focusing on the role of built-in safeguards as procedural mechanisms within peace agreements. Recent empirical studies suggest that negotiated peace agreements are a frequent mode of armed conflict termination and implementation of those agreements to be the primary predictor of enduring peace and the quality of that peace. However, in many instances implementation takes years or even decades and is subject to breakdown before achieving the key implementation objectives. In this article, we identify and theorize three key safeguards in peace accords: transitional power-sharing, dispute resolution, and verification mechanisms. We argue that these safeguards lead to higher implementation of provisions negotiated in peace agreements by addressing mutual suspicion and by facilitating more constructive working relationships among former rivals. To test our arguments, we analyze implementation of comprehensive peace agreements negotiated between 1989 and 2012 from the Peace Accords Matrix Implementation Data (PAM_ID). We find that the built-in safeguards that we have identified significantly explain variations in levels of peace agreement implementation.     

PAKISTAN’S CRISIS OF GOVERNANCE AND THE RESURGENCE OF TERRORIST VIOLENCE SINCE AUGUST 2016

Fifteen years since joining the US-led anti-terrorism coalition, Pakistan’s response to the challenges of terroristic violence and extremist indoctrination and propaganda remain military-centric and kinetic. Since August 2016, after a brief lull, Pakistan has experienced a resurgence of terrorist activity and violence that has struck all of its provinces and placed its capital on high alert. The re-escalation in the level of terrorist violence began with the August 8, 2016, attacks in Quetta, which left over 70 dead and more than 100 injured. The lack of response from the provincial and federal governments to this carnage, led the Supreme Court of Pakistan to exercise its authority under Article 184(3) of the Constitution and establish an Inquiry Commission to examine the state of the investigation and report on the challenges faced in the struggle against terrorism and extremism. This inquiry assumed the form and substance of an audit of the performance of Pakistan’s institutions and exposed the link between the country’s crisis of governance and its incoherent response to terrorism and extremism at all levels of government. The implications of the inquiry report are both broad and deep, and reveal that Pakistan’s trajectory remains that of civilian administrative breakdown and institutional exhaustion. This indicates that Pakistan’s civilian-military balance continues to shift in structural terms in favour of the latter and that beneath a veneer of constitutional democracy, the arbitrary, unwise, and inefficient, exercise of power by the political class continues to hollow out the country’s administrative institutions.     

Civil society and state-centred struggles

This article is about civil society and state-centred struggles in contemporary Zimbabwe. I first identify and outline three current understandings of civil society. Two understandings (one Liberal, one Radical) are state-centric and exist firmly within the logic of state discourses and state politics. A third understanding, also Radical, is society-centric and speaks about politics existing at a distance from the state and possibly beyond the boundaries of civil society. This civil society-state discussion frames the second section of the article, which looks specifically at Zimbabwe. It details civil society as contested terrain (from the late 1990s onwards) within the context of a scholarly debate about agrarian transformation and political change. This debate, which reproduces (in theoretical garb) the key political society (or party) fault-lines within Zimbabwean society, has taken place primarily within the restricted confines of state-centred discourses.     

耕地集约化租赁的纠纷审视与司法应对

耕地集约化租赁虽对实现农业的转型升级具有积极作用,但也出现了一些损害农村土地权益的负面现象,并逐渐演化为诉讼纠纷。其所凸显出的发展与有序的问题不容忽视,需要司法实践积极回应,并进行利益平衡上的思考。     

Is It Time to Reform the Dual-Track Pension System?

正Civil servants’pensions is an issue that has long been debated in China.In spite of the fact that pensions for enterprise employees have been rising continuously for the past seven years,their benefits are much lower than that of their civil servant peers.There exists an increasingly widening gap between civil servants’pensions and those of other workers.Recently,the microblog account of the newspaper People’s Daily published an article,which says that civil servants’pensions sur-     

中国地方治理中的政府与社会协商困境分析——基于民主化宏观策略的思考

一个国家民主化的宏观策略体现了该国民主化的根本方向与核心原则。中国民主化的宏观策略是一种可管理导向的积极民主化策略,这种策略给中国地方治理中的政府与社会协商实践造成了种种主客观困境,使得地方政府不能很好地举办协商活动,社会力量也不能有效地参与。为走出困境,就必须在坚持审慎而务实策略的同时,不断克服怀疑主义,建立和健全保证协商有效性的管理机制。     

香港民事诉讼制度改革之回顾与前瞻

香港的民事司法改革历时十年,彰显了民事司法理念的深度变迁,对民事司法制度的发展具有里程碑意义。新规则自2009年4月2日正式施行以来进展大致顺利,在克服诉讼拖延、促进和解、发展调解等方面取得了一定的成效,但改革终究不是一蹴而就的纸面化改造。在新制度与旧观念相互碰撞又各自发挥作用的时期,如欲推翻法律职业者乃至普通民众的思维定势,变革深埋于制度底层的文化样态,其中的困难同样是显而易见的。