Nationalist Politics at the Crossroads: The Basque Nationalist Party and the Challenge of Sovereignty (1998–2014)

In the past two decades the Basque Nationalist Party's political strategy has exemplified its historical oscillation between, on the one hand, a more radical claim to Basque sovereignty supported mostly by nationalist forces and, on the other, a comparatively more moderate Realpolitik aimed at achieving higher degrees of regional autonomy and cross-party consensus as a means of more gradual Basque nation-building. In contrast to the mainstream interpretation forwarded by the media and other political parties, the main difference between the relatively more radical or moderate strategies of the PNV is not a higher or lower ideological profile of the claim for Basque sovereignty but a different strategic decision concerning the problem of how to bring together the struggle for sovereignty and the reality of Basque pluralism.     

The Role and Influence of the Orthodoxy in Russian Politics

The Orthodoxy has been in existence in Russia for more than 1000years and has fully merged itself into the nation,creating a strongsense of religious culture.During the long years of the reigns by differ-ent regimes from the Czarist Russia to the Soviet Union and then to thenew Russia,the religion went through the process of ups and downs inits development.Having once played a very important role in the social     

When Do Countries Recentralize? Ideology and Party Politics in the Age of Austerity

The Spanish executive centralized political power to manage the politics of austerity better in the aftermath of the Great Recession. This article analyzes the reinforcement of the power of the central government and argues that three explanatory variables—economic crisis, ideology, and party politics—account for recentralization, which is defined as fiscal consolidation, concentration of competences, bureaucratic rationalization, and ideological convergence. The debate about the motives and nature of recentralization (de jure vs. de facto) further polarized the center-periphery cleavage. Regional prosovereignty parties interpreted the reversal of decentralization as another sign that accommodation within Spain was not possible and that contestation was the way forward.     

Who Needs Identity? Dalit Studies and the Politics of Recognition

The essay reviews three recent contributions to the study of dalits (former untouchables) in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, and situates the monographs in the context of two important events. Firstly, the books are seen as crucial interventions to the emerging field of Dalit Studies. The books help us understand how marginalized groups construct identities, inhabit subjectivities, and articulate their worldviews. Secondly, the field itself is situated against the backdrop of significant social and political transformations in India namely the political ascendance of subordinate castes and the changing notions of what it means to be a dalit in the twenty first century. The essay suggests that Dalit Studies could complicate, nuance, and challenge entrenched shibboleths of historical change in South Asia.     

Does Democratization Reduce the Risk of Military Interventions in Politics in Africa?

This article investigates whether there is an association between a trajectory of political liberalization, democratization, and military interventions. In what is arguably the ‘least likely case’ region in the world, this study analyzes the experience of 55 regimes in Africa between 1990 and 2004 and finds a striking regularity. Liberalizing, and in particular democratic, regimes have a significantly different track record of being subjected either to successful or failed military interventions. The analysis suggests that democratic regimes are about 7.5 times less likely to be subjected to attempted military interventions than electoral authoritarian regimes and almost 18 times less likely to be victims of actual regime breakdown as a result. Through an additional case study analysis of the ‘anomalous’ cases of interventions in democratic polities, the results are largely strengthened as most of the stories behind the numbers suggests that it is only when democratic regimes perform dismally and/or do not pay soldiers their salaries that they are at great risk of being overthrown. Legitimacy accrued by political liberalization seems to ‘inoculate’ states against military intervention in the political realm.     

The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty in Jeopardy? Internal Divisions and the Impact of World Politics

The frustration of non-nuclear weapon states about the lack of progress in nuclear disarmament has reached boiling point: a vast majority of them have supported a resolution in the UN General Assembly that establishes a negotiation forum for concluding a prohibition of nuclear weapons in 2017. Rising tension among the nuclear powers and populist movements feeding nationalist emotions make it unlikely that the situation will change for the better in the near future. It is thus possible that the NPT might be eroded or, in the worst case scenario, simply collapse because of diminishing support.     

The Change and Posture of the Security Situation in Northeastern Asia

The U. S. war against Iraq has greatly shaken the security situation in different quarters of Northeast Asia, especially North Korea. And the Taiwan issue is another flashpoint in the region. After the U.     

Which European Public Order? Sources of Imbalance in the European Area of Freedom,Security and Justice1

Abstract

The creation of the Single European Market has been accompanied by an intense discussion on whether market-creating measures have been privileged over market-correcting ones by the institutional system of the EU. The creation of an ‘Area of Freedom, Security and Justice’ (AFSJ) launched by the Treaty of Amsterdam poses a similar question which, however, has remained heavily under-researched: will the balance between policing competencies and individual rights shift towards the former at the expense of the latter? Recent work on the ‘new raison d’état’ and the strengthening of national executives in processes of Europeanisation points in this direction. This essay explores the parallels between the Common Market and the AFSJ with regard to the relationship between the structures and substance of governance. The balance between security and individual rights is scrutinised in the main pillars of the AFSJ: asylum cooperation, judicial cooperation in criminal matters and police cooperation.     

Moral Economese of Scale? Crisis,Discursive Change and the Varying Authority of Economists

This article examines the varying authority in contemporary governance of 10 prominent economists trained and based in America during the most recent period of economic instability. Despite stemming from diverse backgrounds and adopting a variety of roles, these private actors have each increasingly sought to combine moral authority with the technical authority that has been widely challenged since the outbreak of financial crisis in 2007. The shift from esoteric scientific jargons of economese towards more explicit engagements with overtly ethical issues in a moral economese is identified as an important discursive change through which these actors sought to reconfigure their contested authority. Yet this article maintains that persistent prioritisation of market values impedes rather than supports such attempts to reassert authority. Blends of technical and moral forms of authority are considered highly unstable and not conducive to enhancing the authority of these and other prominent private actors in global governance.     

Institutional Reforms and the Politics of Inequality Reproduction: The Case of the League of Nations’ Council Crisis in 1926

ABSTRACT

This contribution to the special issue explores how institutional reforms are shaped by and feed back into the politics of inequality reproduction. IR has recently begun to more closely study how hierarchies intersect. This article uses the analytical concept of “interlinkages” to grasp how international organisations couple intra-organisational patterns of unequal representation to extra-organisational social hierarchies. It empirically investigates the forms and effects of such interlinkages through a case study of the League of Nations’ Council crisis and reform in 1926. The reform reaffirmed the most prominent interlinkage: the restriction of permanent membership to states recognised as “great powers”. In addition, the reform created two new types of non-permanent seats which changed the pattern of representation of small states. Overall, the case study shows that the interlinkages and their effects were generated by an interplay of formal design and informal understandings both at the level of permanent and non-permanent seats.     

Is There a Local Dimension to Modern Election Campaigns? Party Activists’ Perceptions of the Media and Electoral Coverage of Canadian Constituency Politics

Modern election campaign studies focus on national dimensions at the expense of attending to local campaigns in legislative elections. This is also true of analyses of media coverage and impact of election campaigns. This paper examines the local dimension of media and election campaigns across a wide range of diverse constituency contexts in Canada in order to identify the political, socioeconomic, and geographic determinants of constituency party associations ability to attract local media attention during an election campaign. We also examine the role of these features of the constituency settings and explain variations in satisfaction with the medias coverage of the local campaign.     

Which Afghanistan? Military,Humanitarian, and State-Building Identities in the Afghan Theater

Proponents and critics of the democratic peace have debated the extent to which covert attempts by democracies to overthrow other elected governments are consistent with or contradict democratic peace theory. The existing debate, however, fails to acknowledge that there are multiple democratic peace theories and that inter-democratic covert intervention might have different implications for different arguments. In this article, we first distill hypotheses regarding covert foreign regime change from three theories of democratic peace. Relying primarily on declassified government documents, we then investigate these hypotheses in the context of U.S. covert intervention in Chile (1970–73). The evidence suggests that covert intervention is highly inconsistent with norms and checks-and-balances theories of democratic peace. The evidence is more consistent with selectorate theory, but questions remain because democratic leaders undertook interventions with a low likelihood of success and a high likelihood that failure would be publicized, which would constitute exactly the type of policy failure that democratic executives supposedly avoid.     

The Road from Dayton to Brussels? The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the Politics of War Crimes in Bosnia

Abstract

The tenth anniversary of the massacre of 7–8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995 set in stark relief the continuing salience of war crimes in the political life of Bosnia and Herzegovina. With the country now firmly on a path ‘from Dayton to Brussels’, dealing with the war crimes legacy is critical to its future development. Cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) is a non-negotiable condition for further progress toward membership of the European Union and NATO's Partnership for Peace, while in the long-term, dealing with the legacy of war crimes is crucial to establishing lasting peace in Bosnia and in the region. This article examines the potential contribution of the ICTY to the restoration of peace in Bosnia in the context of debates about the role of post-conflict justice in societies in transition from war to peace and in the context of the international community's use of the war crimes issues as a political bargaining tool. It will be argued that the two are inextricably linked as short-term pragmatic advantages brought by cooperation work in tandem with longer-term goals of peace and reconciliation.     

Is There a Niche for Lawyers in the Field of Mediation?

Negotiation Journal -     

“Their History Is a Bit Like Our History” 1 : Comparative Assessment of the Official and the Provisional IRAs

The Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), one of the best known and most researched terrorist organizations in history, has been comparatively assessed alongside various terrorist outfits from around the world. However, it has never been systematically compared with its most immediate rival, neighbour, and competitor, the lesser known Official Irish Republican Army (OIRA). This article addresses this scholarly gap and presents a thematic assessment of the similarities and differences between the two organisations in their respective post-ceasefire periods of 1972 and 1994. It proposes a new comparative approach to studying terrorist organisations in which knowledge about a better known entity (here, the PIRA) and its future trajectory is generated through a detailed assessment of the activities and developments of a not only more obscure case (here, the OIRA) but also, in many aspects, the most comparable case or cases. Such an approach could yield interesting results for the field of terrorism studies, which could still profit from in-depth, internal, case study analyses of specific terrorist organizations.     

Is Bigger Better? Activity and Success in Negotiations in the United Nations General Assembly

Theorists often claim that being bigger than one's counterparts offers advantages in multilateral negotiations. In this article, I examine that argument using data from negotiations in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). The article analyzes and compares the activity levels of smaller and larger states in international negotiations, and sheds light on the conditions under which the latter “punch below their weight.” My analysis indicates that size directly affects participation, but not success rates. Bigger states can better formulate national positions on a broad range of issues, enabling their diplomats to more actively participate in negotiations, while smaller states are absent more often. Activity is conducive to success, which helps bigger states. But not every negotiation strategy is equally effective. In the UNGA's one‐state, one‐vote context, bigger states are not able to systematically exert disproportionate influence despite their often superior financial resources and bargaining strategies.     

Should the Media Be More or Less Powerful in Politics? Individual and Contextual Explanations for Politicians and Journalists

The normative question regarding whether the media should have more or less impact on politics, as viewed by politicians and journalists, is important assuming that norms about media influences can influence behaviors. The present study is the first that combines individual and structural factors that explain political actors’ and journalists’ normative views on the media’s influence on politics. Based on a conceptualization of political communication cultures, representative micro-level survey data from more than 600 political actors and journalists within 52 German cities were combined with macro-level indicators for the political and media competition in each city. Multilevel analyses show that interactions between the actors’ characteristics and their competitive working conditions help explain their normative evaluations of the media’s influence on politics. However, individual characteristics such as actors’ role conceptions influence normative views more so than media and political competition do.     

Is social networking fostering the fungibility of the Other?

The argument will be made here that the various social networking platforms and mobile communicational technologies that have proliferated within the 21st century have promoted a powerful sentiment of technological determinism, particularly with regard to what it means to be a social individual within (post)modern society. The article will show how these new communicational technologies have accelerated and amplified a highly commodified and instrumentalised form of rationality within a relational context. By relying on an interdisciplinary methodological framework – focusing primarily on the critical insights of Bauman, Turkle, Adorno and Horkheimer – this investigation essentially highlights how (contrary to popular perception) these new communicational devices have had an inimical and undermining effect on individuals’ apperception of the Other, and what it means to be a sociable being. As a result, the focus is on how these new mediums of communication foster the sentiments of objectification, fungibility and the disposability of the Other in the realm of interpersonal relationships – a paradoxical outcome, in light of the fact that such technological developments are often purported to encourage and foster a sense of interpersonal cohesion and contiguity.