Domestic law and human rights treaty commitments: The Convention against Torture

How human rights treaties will be incorporated and applied domestically must affect how eager states will be to ratify those treaties. This article focuses on two characteristics of domestic legal systems that shape the relationship between international law and domestic law: whether treaties are directly incorporated into domestic law and whether treaties can override ordinary statute. The analysis probes two arguments as to why domestic legal institutions influence ratification decisions, one emphasizing the potential costs associated with ratification and the other emphasizing congruence between domestic values and treaty norms. Survival analysis of ratification of the Convention against Torture reveals that both judicial independence and making treaties equal or superior to statute increase the likelihood of ratification, which is consistent with the norm-congruence thesis. The results suggest new avenues for investigating the relationships between human rights treaties and domestic legal institutions.     

Unemployment and voter turnout revisited: A brief note

This brief study revisits the issue of whether higher unemployment rates elicit an increase in the voter participation rate. Using a state-level panel dataset for all five of the Presidential election cycles of this century, it is hypothesized that, following Cebula (2008) and Burden and Wichowsky (2014), the higher the unemployment rate, the greater the degree to which eligible voters, whether unemployed or employed, show up at the polls, arguably because they are expressing the concerns and fears regarding prevailing economic policies and conditions and because by voting they are expressing the desire for changes to address those concerns and fears. The estimation implies that a one percentage point higher unemployment rate leads to a nearly 1.0% higher voter participation rate. This result is in principle compatible with and supportive of the hypothesis that higher unemployment rates motivate voters and the empirical finding of a positive voter turnout/unemployment rate association obtained in the studies by Cebula (2008) and Burden and Wichowsky (2014). Moreover, this finding is potentially important because it implies that elected officials are, to at least some degree, held accountable by the electorate for a weakly performing economy.     

Muslim feminism: Citizenship in the shelter of corporatist Islam 1

It appears that Muslim feminists the world over are struggling against both Islamic patriarchy and authoritarian governments that are unwilling or unable to grant women social equality. Yet, Malaysia, a developing country in Southeast Asia, seems to be an exception. There, Islam is a patchwork of the most liberal as well as radical strands of Islam, a collage that is represented in cities by Muslim women in full purdah mingling with others in body‐conscious dresses and jeans. This contrast is reflected in the struggle between a small group of feminists called Sisters in Islam and resurgent ulamas over issues of marriage, domesticity, and public life. Feminist groups seek not only to express a female voice in Islam but also to renegotiate a wide range of issues pertaining to Islamic kinship codes, male‐female relations, and citizenship. This paper will argue that local feminism is shaped by the wider structure of state power as the national elite seeks to position itself in relation to global capital.     

Neoliberal feminism as political ideology: revitalizing the study of feminist political ideologies

Abstract

The emerging literature on neoliberal feminism appears to signal the revitalization of the study of feminist ideologies, suspended since the mid-1980s. However, it is argued here that scholars tend to conceptualize neoliberal feminism in a way that inhibits ideological analysis, as exemplified in Nancy Fraser’s Fortunes of Feminism. They take classifications of feminist political ideologies from the 1980s as representative of the only true feminisms, and thus view neoliberal feminism as a perversion, rather than an outgrowth, of earlier feminisms. This account of the emergence of neoliberal feminism is both historically inaccurate and politically problematic: it positions feminists as passive in the face of an overpowering neoliberal agency, and limits feminists’ capacity to imagine themselves as agents of political and ideological change. Building on Michael Freeden’s work on political ideologies, an alternative account of neoliberal feminism is offered, one that locates feminist agency in the production of new feminist ideologies.     

浅析习近平的妇女思想

中国特色社会主义进入新时代,习近平同志坚持马克思主义妇女观,重视妇女和妇女工作,做出一系列重要讲话和指示批示,强调发挥妇女在社会生活和家庭生活中的独特作用,坚持走中国特色社会主义妇女发展道路,要为实现男女平等提供政策支持和制度保证,并对妇联开展工作提出一系列极有价值的指导意见。这是马克思主义妇女理论在当代中国的新发展,为做好妇女工作、促进妇女发展提供了思想武器和行动指南。     

Managing the fight against corruption: A case study

Corruption is one of the foremost problems facing policy-makers and managers in developing countries, but it is a remarkably difficult one to study. This case study—an actual episode that has been disguised to preserve confidentiality—provides a vehicle for illustrating both the application of analytical tools to corruption and the importance of practical issues of implementation and politics. The case suggests that anti-corruption policies should carefully assess (1) the relative severity of various kinds of illicit activities, including who gains and loses; (2) the relative susceptibility of the various activities to feasible changes in policies and procedures; and (3) the strategic importance of politics, in the narrow sense of bureaucratic politics as well as the wider political realities.     

India going nuclear: A bomb against China?

As China and India were gradually repairing their relations since the late 1980s, India’s nuclear tests in May 1998 caused a major setback for the improvement of the bilateral relationship. By discussing the question whether New Delhi is developing the bomb against China or not, this article attempts to shed some light on the strategic fallouts of the Indian nuclear tests for Sino-Indian relations and South Asian security. It is argued that despite measurable improvements in Sino-Indian relations in recent years, the two nations still view each other as geo-strategic rivals. The major motivation for New Delhi’s bomb decision was that it had felt increasingly uncomfortable with the power asymmetry between India and China and it wanted to sit as equal as China at the table of world powers by declaring itself a nuclear weapons state. His teaching and research interests include East Asian international relations, Chinese foreign policy and national security.     

Sheila A. Smith,Intimate Rivals: Japanese Domestic Politics and a Rising China

Journal of Chinese Political Science -     

浅析电视公益节目的传播学理论基础

从传播功能研究与传播效果研究的角度来看,电视公益节目是促进社会规范实行以及潜移默化进行社会教养的强有力武器;而从传播控制研究来看,它是电视人超脱于"政治控制"、"经济控制"以及"受众控制"之上的"自我控制"的体现,是传播控制论中最理想的一种控制状态.从传播学理论中的三个角度入手,研究电视公益节目的理论基础,以期待业界对其的充分认识与重视.     

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin against the Settlers: A Stakeholder Analysis

This case study considers how a minority stakeholder group of Israeli settlers blocked Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's peace initiatives. Drawing on interviews with those who served in Rabin's administration and with the settlers' leaders, this article contends that the prime minister's use of adversarial public rhetoric against the settlers denied the legitimacy of an influential stakeholder group, triggering a backlash of intense militancy from the right-wing minority. This, coupled with Rabin's failure to deal with opposing coalitions, diminished his capacity to implement "land for peace" initiatives. The case illustrates a leader's failure to maintain adequate forms of engagement with key stakeholders. The accompanying analysis demonstrates that stakeholder theories, though incomplete in their existing forms, can still illuminate the high risk and ineffectiveness of denying the legitimacy of stakeholder groups and the strategic importance of maintaining channels of flexible negotiation and cooperation with seemingly marginal groups when high-stakes rivalries are likely to ensue.     

简述青铜形制的时代发展

青铜器为我国古代重要的礼器,每个时期都有不同的特点。青铜是我国古代重要的炊食器。其在各个时代的造型、特征纹饰都有那个时代的特征。通过对各个时期青铜实物的分析与研究,探究其内在的含义,对其纹饰,造型以及其作为礼器的地位的上升与下降,对我们来分析青铜作为礼器在我国古代社会的重要地位及了解青铜的时代特征,具有十分重要的意义。