Are the Odds of Justice “Stacked” Against Them? Challenges and Opportunities for Securing Land Claims by Smallholder Farmers in Myanmar

ABSTRACT

In 2012, the Government of Myanmar passed the Farmland Law and the Vacant, Fallow, Virgin Land Law, with an aim to increase investment in land through the formalization of a land market. Land titling is often considered “the natural end point of land rights formalization.”¹1 Hall et al. 2011 Hall, Derek, Philip Hirsch, and Tania Murray Li. 2011. Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia. Singapore: NUS Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 35. A major obstacle to achieving this in Myanmar is its legacy of multiple regimes which has created “stacked laws.”²2 Roquas 2002 Roquas, Ester. 2002. Stacked Law: Land, Property and Conflict in Honduras. Amsterdam: Rozenberg. [Google Scholar], 11. This term refers to a situation in which a country has multiple layers of laws that exist simultaneously, leading to conflicts and contradictions in the legal system. This ambiguity is often manipulated by those who have more access to political and economic resources, particularly those who received large land concessions under the 1988–2010 military regime. In this context, this paper attempts to answer the question: In Myanmar, how do smallholder farmers engage with a stacked legal framework, which is ambiguous and unfairly applied, to defend themselves against land dispossession? The analysis seeks to contribute to the literature on the contest over land control and access through an analysis of how a stacked legal framework can be used to further disenfranchise farmers by elites, or on the contrary, by farmers to gradually reclaim this control through strategic political maneuvering.     

Does the Electoral System Foster a Predominant Party System? Evidence from Turkey

This paper discusses the role of the electoral system in making the Justice and Development Party (AKP) dominant. Drawing on Sartori’s framework, we first clarify the concept of a predominant party system. Second, we examine the impact of the electoral system on the emergence of a predominant party system in Turkey. Analysing election results, we argue that the electoral system fosters dominance in three ways. First, a combination of electoral formula, national threshold and district threshold leads to over‐representation of large parties and under‐representation of small ones. Second, the fear of a wasted vote due to the high threshold prompts voters to support their second‐best option, which concentrates the votes among large parties. Finally, the electoral system increases electoral turnout rates by extending polarization.     

Amending the Youth Criminal Justice Act, 2007–2012: dynamics and contingencies of a ‘transforming Canada’ agenda

This paper addresses the Conservative Party of Canada's three-phase effort (2007–2012) to amend the Youth Criminal Justice Act to prioritise public protection, accountability and victims' rights over prevention and rehabilitation. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and criminology and critical policy scholarship, the paper situates this tough-on-crime initiative in relation to a US-led punitive turn that Canada is belatedly catching-up on, positions this catch-up effort in relation to the Conservative's larger transforming Canada agenda, and explores cultural, institutional and political contingencies salient to its impacts on Canadian law and society.     

A Travesty of British Justice? Appealing against Internment during the Second World War

In late 1940, the Australian government established Aliens Tribunals and Advisory Committees to ensure that local internees could, if they desired, protest against their internment. Most historians argue that this system of appeals was fundamentally flawed. This general explanation has much to commend it. Even so, the widely‐condemned appeals system requires some contextualisation. This article examines the appeal against internment of one man, Henry Brose, but it also seeks to place the appeals system in the broader context of the Australian government's attempt to balance personal liberty and national security over the course of the Second World War. The purpose of such an approach is not to offer a revision so much as a re‐contextualisation of an appeals system that historians have correctly described as flawed. This article demonstrates that the initial appeals system was certainly undermined by a government motivated by concerns for national security rather than personal liberty. But it also argues that the ongoing attempts of the Australian government to improve and overhaul the appeals system, in the midst of prosecuting an extraordinarily complex global war, suggests a more nuanced story than the one — of hapless victims and travesties of British justice — that has traditionally been told.     

Sacred Laïcité and the Politics of Religious Resurgence in France: Whither Religious Pluralism?

This article contributes to the current scholarly discussion by inviting us to look at secularism not as a static model of religious governance, but as a formation that shifts with time and that is deeply related to our contemporary understanding of religion. As such, it investigates the recent transformations of French secularism. In 2004 France passed a law banning visible religious symbols in public schools. Since then French secularism has increasingly become a sacred – non-negotiable – element of collective life. Drawing on Kim Knott's concept of the ‘secular sacred’, the article investigates, through an analysis of policy reports, law proposals and laws, how this discursive usage of secularism has been used to set apart particular spaces from others: secular spaces that carry the ‘supreme’ values of secularism. In this process, the role of public servants and citizens has been changing, as they have been invested with the responsibility of policing the boundaries of these spaces. New tools, such as charters of secularism, laws and regulations, and state bodies are being imagined to consolidate these boundaries. The article also explores how ‘religious resurgence’ (and more specifically ‘Islamic resurgence’) has been essential to this ‘sacred-making’ activity: to give substance to values that are non-negotiable and need to be separated from those that are not. Overall, the piece posits, in line with other recent works, that sacred-making is not reserved to the ‘religious’, but can become a central component of how secularism gets articulated and deployed. In so doing, it underscores the importance of documenting how meanings given to secularism shift to grasp the politics that underpin discourses on religious resurgence.     

Future Shock or Future Stability?: Generational Change and the Australian Party System

The stability of the Australian two‐party system has been a long‐running feature of Australian politics. But a question outstanding in the literature is how different generations of Australians contribute to the stability of the Australian two‐party system and how this has changed over time. In answering this question, this article sheds light on generational effects and party system change that better informs us about the sources of voting patterns over a long period of time. Further, this article draws on and builds on the international literature on generations and party systems.     

Contesting Europe,or Germany's Place in Europe? European Integration and the EU Policies of the Grand Coalition Government in the Mirror of Parliamentary Debates in the Bundestag

This article explores how European integration is contested between political parties in debates of the German Bundestag. Distinguishing between ‘domestic’ debates about the conduct of EU policy-making by the German government and ‘supranational’ debates about the institutions and policies of the European Union, the article asks for thematic objects and patterns of polarisation between parties within these debates. Presenting empirical evidence from the manual coding of 23 plenary debates during the second ‘Grand Coalition’ government, it is shown that the polarisation between parliamentary parties differs greatly at both levels of discussion. Whereas the antagonism between government and opposition appears to determine the polarisation of parties in ‘domestic’ debates, more ambiguous and atypical position patterns emerge on behalf of supranational issues. Therefore, the article suggests that a differentiation of various levels of debate is helpful in capturing the polarisation of political parties over the issue of European integration.     

A Dawn of Two-Party System in Japanese Politics?: The Emergence of the Democratic Party of Japan

The long rule of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has finally ended, and the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has captured government. This article is to examine why and how that has ended and what are the major factors which have contributed to the change of government. The inability of Japanese opposition parties to capture government has been discussed for a long time. The first part of this article is to examine the strength and weakness of major structural explanations which have been discussed in existing literature. Then, the article proposes a process-level analysis which takes a synergistic effect among institution, strategy and chance seriously. The second part of the article is a short history of the emergence of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) as a ruling party. The history will start with a formation of a small political party in September 1996,and describe how a new single-member electoral system shaped the incentives of political actors, how they worked out political strategy under the new system, and how chance affect the success or failure of political strategy.     

Call for papers: Organizations, social inequality, and social justice conference of the workgroup sociology of organizations, the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Nuremberg, and the Junior Research Group ?Interdisciplinary Social Justice Research“ at Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin, April 23–24, 2004.

Mitteilungen und Berichte

Call for papers: Organizations, social inequality, and social justice conference of the workgroup sociology of organizations, the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Nuremberg, and the Junior Research Group „Interdisciplinary Social Justice Research“ at Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin, April 23–24, 2004.