A tale of three villages

This article looks at 3 different individual viewpoints on family size and family planning in 3 different villages in Uttar Pradesh, India. In Ashakhera, where most of the people are upper caste and where the level of literacy is high, the residents understand that family planning is in their best interests. Where at one time the sex of the children to be born was of great concern, it is no longer. In Banthara, on the other hand, there are strict caste differentiations and in general people are poorer. More than 1/2 the population owns no land and it is simply a struggle to stay alive. In spite of this and despite the lack of education, these people want as many children as possible, in order that more can work to bring in more income. Land belongs to the upper castes, so for these people, their labor is the only source of their wealth. The 3rd village, Ballukhera, is small and not especially wealthy. Parents realize that in order that their children have a better life, they must be better educated. Thus, with fewer children, more money can be invested to extend their education. In Ballukhera, consequently, family planning makes sense especially insofar as future aspirations are concerned.     

A tale of a decade: European security governance and Russia

In the decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall the governance of European security has undergone a profound transformation. The beginning of this decade witnessed the end of the Cold War and, in parallel, the establishment of relatively inclusive mechanisms for addressing security‐related issues. While these mechanisms have largely endured (and, indeed, have been complemented by other types of interaction) they have not prevented the emergence of forms of exclusion on the continent. This is a condition of particular significance to Russia. Compared with its Soviet predecessor, it now enjoys far less influence in European security. Its exclusion, however, is only relative. Russia has retained a meaningful role and ‐ recent controversies over NATO enlargement and Kosovo notwithstanding ‐ the bases of its accommodation with the West still remain in place.     

Learning from the news: Experiments in media,modality, and reporting about star wars

This study explores what ordinary American adults learn from news reported in different communications modalities and media. In the first experiment, the text of news items about Star Wars is held constant but the communications modality varies. In the second experiment, news reports reflect the journalistic style of television, newspaper, and magazine reporting. In the modality experiment, subjects learned equally well from the audiovisual, audio, or print versions of the stories. In the media experiment, subjects in the magazine and television conditions gained substantially more information than those in the newspaper condition; but when subjects were asked to apply information to policy judgments about Star Wars, magazine readers were more dovish than television viewers. For Star Wars news, it appears that the content and characteristic style of a news medium have important effects on news comprehension, particularly for the least informed and least interested members of the public.     

A tale of culture-bound regime evolution: the centennial democratic trend and its recent reversal

Using a new measure of “comprehensive democracy,” our analysis traces the global democratic trend over the last 116 years, from 1900 until 2016, looking in particular at the centennial trend’s cultural zoning. As it turns out, democracy has been proceeding and continues to differentiate the world’s nations in a strongly culture-bound manner: high levels of democracy remain a distinctive feature of nations in which emancipative values have grown strong over the generations. By the same token, backsliding and autocratization are limited to cultures with under-developed emancipative values. In line with this finding, public support for democracy neither favours democratization, nor does it prevent autocratization in disjunction from emancipative values. On the contrary, public support for democracy shows such pro-democratic effects if – and only if – it co-exists in close association with emancipative values. The reason is that – in disconnect from emancipative values – support for democracy frequently reverts its meaning, indicating the exact opposite of what intuition suggests: namely, support for autocracy. In conclusion, the prospects for democracy are bleak where emancipative values remain weak.     

Civil wars,party politics and the consolidation of regimes in twentieth century Europe

The present article explores how winners' and losers' strategies for competition influence the possibility of democratization after civil war. Civil wars have been pivotal events in many states, but there has been little analysis of how they affect democratization. Since most have been won by the political right in twentieth century Europe one expects a correlation between civil war and the imposition of authoritarian solution to political conflicts. However, an analysis of five civil wars shows a wide variety in the patterns of political dominance achieved by the winners, ranging from total clampdown in Spain to the winners relinquishing power, as in Ireland. In between, Finland, Greece and Hungary combined various degrees of open competition with restrictions on the losers. In effect democratization can be as likely an outcome of civil war as regression to authoritarianism. Explaining the variation in outcomes of the five cases is the objective of this article.     

International representations of Balkan wars: a socio-anthropological approach in international relations perspective

This article introduces the socio-anthropological concept of international representations to examine the relationship between a civilizational rhetoric, the West European and the international politics of otherization and containment of Southeast Europe, and an essentialist and timeless bias in international relations theory, including both radical and constructivist trends. We first explore the different narrative perspectives on the Balkan wars from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century. Their subsequent problematization is aimed at challenging the way they have constructed commonplace and time-worn representations, which international society shares with different consequences in international affairs. This is a limited conception since international representations as a socio-anthropological concept are always socially, culturally and politically constructed, contested and negotiated. They do not neutrally refer to a reality in the world; they create a reality of their own. Moreover, this limited conception ignores the fact that how, by whom and in whose interest international representations are constructed is itself a form of power in international relations. Therefore, the way international representations are constructed can be problematized as an example of political and ideological projects that operate in the West as well as in the Southeast European countries that are the object of Western foreign policy.     

Power, sovereignty, and the great republic: Anglo-American diplomatic relations in the era of the Civil War

Historians have tended to view the American Civil War (1861-65) as a milestone in Anglo-American relations. It marked the transfer of dominance from Great Britain to the United States in the Western Hemisphere. As Great Britain backed the losing side overwhelming American power brought about a British withdrawal. This article argues that this is a very oversimplified interpretation of their relations in this period. Britain did not intervene in the Civil War because it was not good policy; throughout the British relied on deterrence because, save for the war years, American power could not be translated into military power. The British secured most of their policy objectives thanks to a combination of prudent and conciliatory conduct, and a desire to avoid war, but also due to calm resolution that belied belligerent and sometimes outlandish public statements. British leaders have often been criticized for hypocrisy and double standards, but such criticisms seem unfair. Their belief that the Civil War was futile resulted from a humanitarian desire to halt the killing. It should be remembered that although the nineteenth century witnessed many local conflicts, great wars seem to have disappeared. It therefore appeared to be a laudable objective to attempt to arbitrate in what turned out to be the greatest war after 1815. It is also important to recall that Europeans were less interested in this conflict than the Americans themselves, and that preoccupation with affairs closer to home led to hasty and erroneous judgements.     

Good radicals? Trajectories of pro-Kurdish political and militant mobilisation to the wars in Syria,Turkey and Iraq

ABSTRACT

This article explores the interrelation of volunteering, violence and ideology by studying the pro-Kurdish political and militant mobilisation to the wars in Syria, Turkey and Iraq. Focusing especially on the trajectories, motives and reflections of foreign volunteers in different Kurdish militant groups, I argue that ideology is neither a precondition nor a necessary reason for mobilisation to an armed group. In many cases, it is the other way around, as mobilisation to violence is often the source of ideological conviction.     

Narrators’ perspectives: communicating the EU in Ukraine,Israel and Palestine in times of conflict

ABSTRACT

The role of newsmakers as intermediaries in the shaping of external perceptions and reception of narratives advanced by different actors remains sparse in EU studies. This contribution fills this gap and addresses the personal images of the EU of newsmakers. We contribute to the understanding of those personal perceptions and their link to professional values of audience interest, newsworthiness and objectivity in reporting the EU. The article will demonstrate that all journalists perceive EU coverage in their respective locations are led by local priorities. Negative views of the EU as a weakening, biased, ineffective, elitist and arrogant actor are dominant. Arguably, they create conditions for the birth and dissemination of Euro-distant and even Euro-sceptic media narratives. The article will explain why this is the case while drawing on political/ideational and business/financial explanations.     

Micro-finance evangelism, 'destitute women', and the hard selling of a new anti-poverty formula

This article challenges the recent uncritical enthusiasm for the potential of micro-finance institutions to reduce poverty. It is argued that, although understanding about how to design anti-poverty financial intermediation has improved, the current campaign to increase resource allocation in this sector may undermine the very sustainability that is being sought. Further, studies of the impact of micro-enterprise credit suggest that it is not necessarily beneficial to very poor people. Interventions in the provision of financial services should not be made without locally specific analysis of the functions of existing savings and credit facilities. An emphasis on scale acts as a disincentive to such analysis, and increases the risk of the reemergence of a 'blueprint' approach to anti-poverty action.     

Matching humanitarian norms with cold,hard interests: the making of refugee policies in Mexico and Honduras, 1980-89

Humanitarian norms and institutions should be considered when analyzing the development and state of national policy. Mexico and Honduras, for example, have provided physical security, health care, and education to most Guatemalans and Salvadorans seeking asylum. In neither case, however, are Mexico's and Honduras' economic and political interests being best served. National interest initially forced the deportation or massacre of these refugees, in the case of Honduras, in the early 1980s. In the absence of change in neither national interests nor attitude, these refugees owe their current treatment to the Office of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. These cases support this paper's argument that national policy is shaped over time by interaction with international norm-promoting institutions. In the interest of minimizing costs and risk, policymakers and governments tend to adapt institutionally developed and internationally accepted policies to suit their needs. National policy is not developed solely on the basis of calculations of national interest outside of internationally accepted norms. This paper demonstrates the ability to empirically test the nature of forces guiding the development of national policy.     

The great tradition: The spread of diplomacy in the ancient world

Diplomacy as we understand it to the present day — a sophisticated system for handling affairs of state and negotiating treaties, based on accredited envoys working within a framework of international law and protocol - emerged in the third millennium BCE in the ancient Near East at the same time as the development of writing and urban culture. Transmitted by the great cuneiform civilizations of Babylon and Assyria to Achaemenid Persia and classical Greece and Rome, the heritage of diplomacy continued to flourish in Byzantium, Rome, and Venice. The Renaissance provided the conditions for the spread of a tradition that had existed in many essential aspects for millennia.