President Museveni and the politics of presidential tenure in Uganda

There are various reasons why President Museveni is so determined to hold on to power in Uganda. These are similar to the ones motivating other African presidents seeking to entrench themselves in office. Museveni believes he is indispensable for Uganda's stability and prosperity, especially in a country devastated by bad leadership in earlier post-independence decades. Moreover, Museveni and his close allies are fearful of being prosecuted under a new president for alleged wrongdoings.

Opposition to Museveni's continued stay in power has come from within the ruling party, as well as other parties and the Buganda kingdom. But, as elsewhere in Africa, the opposition is too weakly developed to challenge Museveni effectively. Also, presidential manipulations, election rigging, and coercive measures have helped to secure Museveni's grip on power. In particular, Museveni has used the military to entrench himself in office.

Moreover, as in some African countries, international pressures to force Museveni to relinquish power are limited. In fact, donors have propped up a quasi-authoritarian regime with large amounts of resources. Museveni has overseen a prolonged period of economic and political stability and donors argue he deserves their support, even when his record on democracy and good governance is tainted.

In Africa, presidential incumbents who have stepped down have done so because of the strength of domestic and international pressures. Where political opposition is organised and united or where international donors use their aid to promote greater democratisation, then leaders are more likely to abandon plans to stay in power. It is the absence of such conditions and pressures that are leading to the creation of a life presidency in Uganda.     

Two elections and a political regime in crisis: Turkish politics at the crossroads

Turkey had its fourth National Assembly elections on 7 June 2015 in the twenty-first century and this time they resulted in a hung parliament. The efforts at establishing a coalition government failed and the country moved to a snap, ‘repeat’ election on 1 November 2015. This paper focuses on how the voters registered their party preferences almost 5 months apart in the same legislative general elections and why. Using the same sample and interviewing those who lived at the same addresses as those in the ISSP Citizenship survey conducted February to April 2015 and again in October 2015, a panel data-set was constructed. A theoretical framework for voting behaviour that uses party identification, political ideology, ethnic, religious, social class identities and perceptions of the performance of the economy of the respondents to understand what factors help to influence the party preferences of the same respondents 5 months apart. A multivariate (binary logistic regression) analysis of the pre-June and October 2015 data sets revealed that economic voting had been the predominant factor in the June elections, but security concerns also interacted with popular economic evaluations in the November 2015 elections to reinstall the AKP to power.     

Patronage and empowerment in the central Amazon

The shift from modern to post‐modern politics in the Central Amazon is critically evaluated. While considerable empowerment of previously marginalised. Amerindians, rubber tapers and frontier peasants has occurred, patronage networks remain top down in their decision‐making process, significant horizontal political mobilisation between different social actors has not emerged and grassroots political organisation has been stymied by authoritarian politics at the state level. Consequently, as empowerment is supposed to lie at the heart of building sustainable livelihoods in the Amazon, by this line of logic, the future of the region would seem to be seriously compromised.     

Religion,demography, and politics in Lebanon

A devastating earthquake hit Istanbul and its environs shortly after noon on 10 July 1894. Although seismic disturbances were quite frequent in the long history of the Ottoman capital, the imperial city had not witnessed such violent tremors in more than a century. Hundreds of people died and thousands more were injured as a result of the complete or partial collapse of private dwellings, mosques, churches, synagogues and other public buildings. The earthquake of July 1894 hit the seat of the Ottoman government during a period of rapid socio-cultural change and shortly before the empire faced one of its worst crises in the late nineteenth century. As may be expected, many people in the Ottoman lands sought an explanation to the calamity that befell the inhabitants of the capital and neighbouring regions. Some could draw on long-standing interpretive traditions that were primarily either theological in nature or based on classical naturalist theories. However, the Ottoman intelligentsia rejected such explanations out of hand. The Ottoman response to the earthquake mirrored the similar embrace of science's authority and adoption of scientific methods and tools in many other contemporary societies. The process of the expansion and globalization of scientific knowledge expanded beyond the boundaries of Europe and its colonies. Science and technology were widely perceived to be the measure of civilization and modernity. The Ottoman intelligentsia and political elite were therefore invested in helping the Ottoman Empire meet standards that were set in Europe and North America but also achieved quite successfully in Japan. They seized upon the earthquake of 1894 to disseminate knowledge of modern earth sciences and implement new methods of scientific study of seismic events in the Ottoman lands.     

Succession,consolidation, and transition in China’s future

Succession politics in China is usually seen as one political process. This article argues that in fact, political succession in China after Deng Xiaoping should be seen as three analytically and politically distinct processes: succession, consolidation, and transition. Each process requires different political skills and attributes, and success in one process does not guarantee success in another, and may in fact work against success in another. The article argues that Jiang Zemin is likely to be the successor, but that he will have great difficulty consolidating power after Deng’s death. One way he might consolidate power is to reverse the verdict of June 4. The failure of Jiang or anyone else to consolidate power is likely to slow economic transition.     

Neoliberal economic reforms,the rich and the poor in Bangladesh

Bangladesh has been implementing neoliberal structural adjustment policies since the early 1980s. This article analyzes the economic and social outcomes the reform policies have created in the past two decades. It argues that the reform policies, instead of distributing benefits among different societal groups, have brought an economic windfall mainly for the business and industrial class in Bangladesh. Compared to the 24 families of erstwhile United Pakistan, there is now a small group of 40 to 50 families who effectively control the total industrial and financial assets of this poor nation. The vast majority of other societal groups and classes- the industrial and agricultural labor, small businesses, marginal and small farmers, and urban and rural poor — are left out by the reform agenda. The lack of policies of distributional justice has resulted in widening disparities in income and wealth between the low and high strata of the society and deterioration in the overall poverty situation of the country.     

State,bureaucracy and polity in modern Thai politics

We test the comparative foreign labor policies of Korea and Japan within a vein of international relations literature addressing the effects of international norms on changes in state policies. Building on the efforts to emphasize a state's domestic structure as a source of variations in the impact of international norms, this study enriches this debate further by demonstrating the role of the Korean state in developing international human rights norms domestically. In contrast to the previous studies that tend to dichotomize between states and human rights activists, which result in focusing their empirical studies on the question of whether states are constrained in developing immigration policies under the influence of international human rights norms, we demonstrate that state actors in coalition with human rights activists were actively involved in the process of enacting the Employment of Foreign Workers Act (EFWA) in Korea. More precisely, by offering a detailed account of how Korea finally suc ceeded in adopting the EFWA in 2003 after two failed attempts in 1997 and 2000, we attribute the success to the more extensive, organized pro-foreign workers coalition of state actors and human rights activists over the course of actions. When this observation is applied to Japan, the absence of an active role of the state accounts for Japan's relative silence on the EFWA.     

Crime, conflict and politics in transition-era South Africa

Despite the potentially catastrophic repercussions of SouthAfrica’s violent crime epidemic, little progress has beenmade in understanding why violence has persisted and even escalatedsince the end of apartheid in 1994. Adopting an historical approachthat highlights the persistence of urban violence throughoutthe twentieth century, this article focuses on the criminaldimensions of the ‘political’ conflicts of the 1980sand 1990s. The advent of democracy was not in itself sufficientto erase a deeply entrenched culture of violence produced bydecades of repressive racial policing, violent crime and socialconflict. Moreover, politicized hostilities and the continuingdeterioration of law and order structures in the final yearsof apartheid gave birth to various groups that engaged in criminalviolence and provided favourable conditions for well establishedcriminal networks. Such elements were unlikely to put down theirguns and relinquish power simply because politicians declaredthe fighting to be over. Situating transition-era violence withinits historic context and broadening the narrow conception of‘political’ conflict enable us to better understandboth this fractious period and the violence that continues toafflict South Africa.     

The world bank,health policy reforms and the poor

Over the years, since the mid-1990s, World Bank-prescribed health policy reforms have successfully introduced market-based private-managed healthcare model in the developing world. This article presents a portrait of the private healthcare model, explores the factors that facilitated the introduction of this model in developing countries and examines the impact of the model on the health rights and health conditions of the poor. It argues that health reforms designed to promote private-managed care in developing countries affect the poor severely and violate their basic health rights, the rights to stay disease-free and lead a healthy life. A host of factors produced by the private-managed care model, most notably reduced social spending on public health, dismantling of public health systems and the ever expansionary grip of private sector health services have effectively diminished the health rights of the poor.     

Globalization,education, and the politics of identity in the Asia-Pacific

Abstract

This essay examines a resurgent interest in “regionness” as a response to globalization, and it looks at how governments and citizens have participated in the discourse on forging a new Asia-Pacific community that has developed over the past fifteen years. Part one distinguishes between “regionalization” and “regionalism” as competing visions for the construction of a future Asia-Pacific community. Regionalization, the dominant paradigm during the postcolonial period, centers on interstate forums dominated by officially recognized political and economic elites who seek interstate cooperation in order to protect state interests, state power, and national identity from foreign as well as domestic challenges. Regionalism, as an alternative paradigm, envisions the creation of transnational networks inclusive of nonofficial actors, whose identification with a particular state and set of national interests does not preclude the creation of a regional identity (or identities) and support for regional interests. Part two considers the challenges that regionalism poses for the nation-state and its leadership. It does so by highlighting the pressure for reform that globalization has brought to bear upon one particular institution that theorists of nationalism have long identified as central to the perpetuation of national identity, national unity, and state authority: schooling. Part three assesses the current prospects for such reforms by briefly examining recent educational developments in Japan, Australia, Malaysia, and Singapore.     

Ironic political reforms: elected senators,party-list MPs,and family rule in Thailand

ABSTRACT

An elected Senate and the party-list system are two institutional innovations of the 1997 Thai Constitution designed to support political reforms. This paper sheds light on one unintended effect of these reforms: they have allowed scores of political families to maintain or even tighten their grip on Parliament. Combining aggregate data and case studies, this paper shows that a sizable number of elected senators and party-list parliamentary members are related, by birth or marriage, to other parliament members elected in the post-1932 period. The well-intended reforms have concentrated parliamentary power in the hands of these families, many of which represent the excesses of Thailand’s full-blown electoral democracy. The survival and resilience of these families diminish reform opportunities by further entrenching corruption, clientelism, violence, and electoral fraud, as well as by deepening dynastic rule that militates against political pluralism and inclusiveness.