Post-violence regime survival and expansion in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan

ABSTRACT

Kazakhstan’s and Tajikistan’s governments were able to successfully strengthen their reach and their capacity to control the population in the wake of deadly violence against regime opponents. Yet the process of deepening authoritarianism was not a straightforward affair. Both countries expanded their coercive capabilities – they upgraded policing in rural areas to improve intelligence gathering on the local population and predict the rise of any anti-government activities. While doing so, however, leaders of both countries sought to frame their actions as an inclusive process that was sensitive to the grievances of the affected populations and the general public. This article adds to the growing body of literature on authoritarian state responses to insurgency by showing how authoritarian regimes create narratives, engage civil society and look for political advantage to expand the coercive apparatus.     

Boko Haram terrorism in Nigeria: The international dimension

The terrorist group Boko Haram, or the self-described People of the Tradition of the Prophet (SAW) for Preaching and Striving, continues to terrorise Nigeria, with horrible consequences. Clearly, study of the problem cannot be disconnected from the complex nature of Boko Haram itself, considering the group's unclear agenda and its shadowy sponsors — internal or external. A key question regarding the nature of Boko Haram is whether it has a transnational dimension or not. This paper examines the nature of Boko Haram terrorism in Nigeria. It argues that Boko Haram's terrorism does indeed have a transnational dimension, demonstrating that its agenda and targets transcend Nigeria, and that there are international links to the operations of Boko Haram. Given this international dimension, what concerns does Boko Haram generate for countries outside Nigeria, and what are their responses to the group's continued acts of terrorism? This analysis is contextualised within the charged debate on the definition of terrorism and the modern trend of religious terrorism in the international arena.     

The structural sources of postcommunist regime trajectories

Regime trajectories in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (FSU) have diverged considerably since the collapse of communism. We argue that this variation is the product of two largely structural factors: the salience of anti-Soviet nationalism and the opportunity for membership in the European Union (EU) that was mostly the product of geography. In Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, anti-Soviet nationalism and the stimulus of EU democratic conditionality contributed to the rise of a non-communist elite that confronted serious internal and external pressure to democratize. By contrast, weaker anti-Soviet nationalism and dearth of pressure from the EU allowed for the persistence of communist elites who faced relatively weak external constraints on autocratic behavior. We argue that these structural factors played a more important role in accounting for variation in democratization across the postcommunist world than factors such as institutional design. At the same time, the different character of structural forces in Eastern Europe and the FSU has likely created greater room for voluntarist factors in determining regime variation within the former Soviet Union than within Eastern Europe.     

The future of the international nonproliferation regime

The nuclear nonproliferation regime should be strengthened in order to meet the needs of an unstable international security environment, says Hiroyoshi Kurihara, Senior Executive Director of the Nuclear Material Control Center in Tokyo. He proposes that Japan can contribute more actively to strengthening nonproliferation efforts by considering the establishment of a regional confidence building mechanism to monitor peaceful nuclear activities in the Northeast Asian region. The establishment of such a mechanism is vital, he says, if the nations of the region are to develop confidence in each other such that war, and particularly nuclear war, between them will become impossible.     

The devil in the details: constitutional regime types in post-Soviet Eurasia

The constitutions of Eurasia’s more authoritarian countries categorically differ from those of the region’s more democratic countries, in that they codify a doctrine of presidential supremacy as well as several constitutional tools allowing for its implementation. Therefore, the classic typology of forms of government is inadequate for understanding the architecture of power in these countries. Rather, their routine categorization as presidential or semi-presidential formats of executive–legislative relations causes flawed case selection in extant comparative research about the impact of forms of government, particularly president-parliamentarism, on regime performance and stability. This article shows that almost a third of all constitutions in the region reflect a regional variety of genuinely authoritarian presidentialism. It systematizes the properties of this constitutional pattern of “Eurasian-type presidentialism” or, for that matter, “superpresidentialism.” Methodologically, the article encourages contextual analyses to understand non-Western, non-liberal constitutions “from within.”     

The Development of the Scout Movement in Nigeria

The writer of this article is Chief Scout Commissioner for Nigeria,where a West African Jamboree is being held at Lagos in February.Although Scouting has not yet been developed in the region toany great extent, the possibilities are great, and it is interestingto recall that M. Eboué made specific reference to itssocial value in Africa in one of the last of his memoranda.     

Political decentralisation and conflict: The Sharia crisis in Kaduna,Nigeria

When states in northern Nigeria started processes for implementing Sharia laws in 1999, it triggered sentiments all over the country. In Kaduna State, the proposal led to demonstrations and violent clashes. The article examines the ways in which different scales of politics are mutually constituted in the Sharia case and how the Sharia proposal subsequently resulted in clashes in Kaduna. It is argued that the Sharia initiative, even though it started as a sub-national question, was connected to a national power contestation. However, the federal government remained passive and diverted the issue to local political space. In Kaduna, the issue took dimensions that incurred with apprehensive local political contention that made it escalate into violence and polarising people according to religion. An analysis of the crisis in Kaduna is offered that does not regard the conflict as locally confined, but as inherently related to wider political and historical processes.