Crisis,Routine, Consolidation: The Politics of the Mediterranean Migration Crisis

The current ‘migration crisis’ is framed as a moment of reckoning in the EU’s dealings with its Mediterranean neighbourhood. Yet to what extent is crisis the most useful tool to account for migration and European border control practices in the current context? An exclusive focus on crisis, we argue, is misleading. To a large extent, the current crisis management builds on pre-existing practices and enables their consolidation. For us this is an invitation to discuss the relation between crisis, routine and consolidation in Euro-Mediterranean migration policies and practices. This intervention shows how ‘crises’ are spatio-temporally limited and used to further pre-existing migration control practices and techniques of governing. As such we interrogate what it means to talk of crisis versus routine in the field of Mediterranean security practices.     

正式与非正式国际机制的概念辨析

本文指出了克拉斯纳以行为学标准界定国际机制概念所存在的循环推理的方法论问题,论证了以形式学标准的概念界定方式的合理性,并以这一标准重新界定了国际机制概念。在此基础上,对正式国际机制与非正式国际机制的概念及其判定标准进行了辨析。本文提出,成员国是否具有创造相互之间有法律约束力的权利与义务关系的意图是正式国际机制和非正式国际机制的判定标准。     

Informal Institutions and Horizontal Accountability: Protocols in the Chilean Budgetary Process

Studies of executive‐legislative relations are usually based only on the analysis of formal institutions, although informal institutions also shape interbranch behavior. This omission leads to questionable results when scholars examine the capacity of state institutions to audit other public agencies and branches of government. This article explores how the protocols, an informal institution that shapes the Chilean budgetary negotiations, have increasingly allowed the congress to have a more relevant budgetary role than what the constitution permits. It argues that protocols accommodate some of the undesired consequences of a charter that is strongly biased toward the central government, and describes how this institution has departed from its stringent budgetary focus to encompass broader executive‐legislative agreements that enhance the legislature's capacity to oversee the executive.     

俄罗斯社会经济发展的挑战、风险及前景构想

新世纪以来的前8年,俄罗斯取得了令人瞩目的成就,同时也面临着前所未有的来自国际、国内的挑战与危机,特别是丰富的自然资源和平民主义政策所带来的风险.俄罗斯制订的前景构想的纲领性文件,意在从惯性与资源依赖型的发展模式转向创新型的发展道路,但国家干预的色彩依然很浓.作者认为俄罗斯特别需要保证长期稳定.     

Thinking Outside the (Ballot) Box: Informal Electoral Institutions and Mexico's Political Opening

This article studies the development of informal bargaining tables to mitigate postelectoral conflicts in some 15 percent of Mexico's local elections between 1989 and 2000, even as formally autonomous electoral commissions and courts were being constituted. By documenting the dual institutions that resulted, the study qualifies theories of institutional design that take actor consent for granted. It argues that in the Mexican case and perhaps others, elections, particularly subnational elections, are focal points for informal bargaining over rules that are the true motors of protracted transitions. It finds electoral institutions to be critical to democratization, but for reasons beyond those given by most institutionalists.     

美国次贷危机:背景、原因与发展

本文首先从美国金融市场的结构、次贷与证券化的关系两个方面介绍了次贷危机发生的背景,并解释了RMBS、CDO与CDS等在危机中扮演着重要角色的衍生金融产品;在此基础上,本文详细剖析了次贷危机的爆发与传递过程,认为次贷危机迄今为止经历了流动性短缺、信贷紧缩与实体经济萎缩三个阶段;最后,本文总结了次贷危机给全球金融市场、投资者以及中国政府提供的经验教训。本文截稿时,两房危机刚刚浮出水面。发稿时,随着美国保险集团(AIG)频临破产和美国政府7000亿美元救市计划的提出,美国金融危机进入了一个新阶段。美国经济已陷入1929年以来最严重的危机。     

The Duty to Assist and Its Disincentives: The Shipping Industry and the Mediterranean Migration Crisis

The role of commercial ships in the Mediterranean migration crisis is little-noticed in the media and by the general public, and largely disregarded in the EU’s political responses to the crisis. Whereas large-scale national and regional actions such as the Italian-administered Mare Nostrum and the EU’s Frontex-administered Triton operations have become part of the vocabulary surrounding the crisis, the rescue of 42,000 migrants by commercial vessels in 2014 – and the implications thereof – is rarely commented upon. More importantly, the commercial shipping industry is rendered invisible in the EU policy responses to the Mediterranean migration crisis, which disregards both the efforts and challenges experienced by the industry. For this reason, this profile zooms in on the migration crisis from the point of view of commercial shipping, and argues that it is of fundamental importance that European policy responses to the crisis tackle the multiple disincentives experienced by the commercial shipping industry towards upholding the duty to render assistance to vessels in distress at sea. The concrete policy actions suggested here answer to the challenges experienced by the commercial shipping industry; aid the industry in its efforts to undertake its legal and moral duty to render assistance; and, in effect, save more lives at sea.     

The Mediterranean and the Global Sustainable Development Goals

Are global development initiatives such as the Sustainable Development Goals (agreed in September 2015) in any way relevant to a crisis-ridden region such as the Mediterranean? The SDGs are much more expansive than the MDGs; they cover a range of socio-economic and political issues, which certainly are of acute relevance to the Mediterranean. It is noteworthy that states from the region were not strongly involved in the formulation of the SDGs. Pan-regional institutions such as the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) could derive a new lease of life from leading efforts to implement them (in particular goals related to the environment, energy, water and infrastructure). However, the UfM remains a weak institution. There are commonalities between the EU’s development policy and the SDG norms, but there are also many elements of EU economic policy that diverge sharply from the global ideals. The SDGs are an effort at global norm promotion which are unlikely to affect much of the Mediterranean, at least while the conflicts continue.     

European Banking Union to the Rescue? How Supranational Institutions Influenced Crisis Management in Italy

ABSTRACT

This article examines the management of the recent banking crisis in Italy. In particular, we investigate the changing coalitional dynamics among Italian banks with a view to identifying the conditions under which banks are more likely to share the costs of crisis management. We argue that banks’ preferences are significantly shaped by the institutional context within which they operate. In particular, the establishment of Banking Union in the European Union (EU) significantly weakened the traditional coalitional dynamics among Italian banks by injecting uncertainty about the distributional effects of crisis management policy solutions.     

Religion,Secularization and Democracy in the Mediterranean Region: Problems and Prospects

Political debates in many Mediterranean countries today are increasingly framed in dichotomous terms, highlighting divisions between religious and secular worldviews. In some countries, for example Israel, the issue is so contentious that it is described as a ‘culture war’. While Israel struggles to balance its commitment to a Jewish state and a democracy, it does not seem to matter if the countries in question are democracies or non-democracies, or what their majority religious faith is. Instead, the role of religion in public life or, put another way, the ‘public return of religion’, is a pertinent and controversial political question everywhere in the Mediterranean region. How do we explain this phenomenon? On the one hand, we can point to both economic and demographic changes, while, on the other, we can trace the impact of continuing secularisation. Together these two sets of developments produce new challenges to existing political arrangements.     

Corporate Movements in Democratic Brazil: Informal Business Networks,Civil Activism,and Political Influence

Relations between business, state, and civil society in Latin America are conventionally discussed in antagonistic or hierarchical terms. This article challenges this position, developing a qualitative case study tracing the activities of an informal network of Brazilian businesspersons that, over the last three decades, promoted an agenda of sustainability, transparency, and civil society participation. Drawing from concepts in social movement theory, it is argued that a dynamic movement‐like behaviour combining civil activism, organisational entrepreneurship, and fluid political alignment, allowed the group to establish lasting collaborative alliances with core actors in Brazilian democratic politics, and access relevant elite and policy‐making circles.