North Korea – Challenge for the Major Powers

Abstract

Since North Korea is one of the world's most enigmatic societies, it is difficult to understand precisely the factors determining its policies. The prevailing power structure, the primary political considerations, and the stability of the current order are each subject to question. Meanwhile, a history of relations between the United States and North Korea reveals repeated movements forward followed by renewed breakdowns. In general terms, China is a crucial actor as the North's chief economic and strategic supporter, with South Korea also vitally important. Russia currently plays a limited role, and relations between Japan and North Korea are hostile. At the close of 2006, negotiations are once again underway but with no agreements reached. Thus, it is difficult to be optimistic about an early resolution of the key issues despite some favorable signs.     

Der Verein – ein blinder Fleck der Organisationssoziologie

As a local voluntary association the club (Verein) is the most common type of organizations in modern civil societies, but still a neglected subject in organizational sociology. The following article starts with an elaboration of a sociological concept of the club taking into regard its diverging legal definition and its changing semantics over time. This is followed by a rough historical account of its eminent role in the process of the emancipation of the bourgeois class as well as in the first associational attempts of the working class and the women’s movements. As a terminological exercise Richard Scott’s five structural elements of organizations – social structure, members, technology, goals, environment – are applied for the type of club, before three key examples of local associations – sport club, art association, environmental group – are outlined with empirical data. The following section delineates the historical deviations between club and federation (Verband). Ultimately a contemporary agenda for organizational-sociological research on clubs is outlined.     

An den Grenzen der Demokratie – Citizenship und Flucht

Current diagnoses of the crisis of democracy mostly refer to a specific type of mass democracy as it was characteristic of the second half of the 20th century. Its political space is the nation state. The presence of refugees in receiving countries now raises the basic democratic question: How can people participate in political decisions that determine their own living conditions? Refugees, lacking citizenship status, hardly have any formal political influence. The article discusses the relationship between democracy, citizenship, and forced migration in three steps. First, it presents the core arguments of the current debates on the crisis of democracy and outlines the main characteristics of democratic welfare capitalism. Thereupon, it analyzes current transformations of citizenship with regard to forced migration. It will be shown that citizenship is differentiated in the course of transnationalization and economization processes. Finally, the paper shows that potentials for democratization become visible when refugees come into view as “activist citizens” who politicize and scandalize the discrepancies between moral and legal norms as well as the limitations of democracy.     

Halil Kut – ‘the last Ottoman Pasha’

The siege of British Indian forces by the Ottoman Army at Kut-al-Amara ?n Iraq during the First World War, which ended on 29 April 1916 with the surrender of the garrison under the command of Major General Sir Charles Townshend, was an important m?l?tary defeat for Great Britain. The article provides supplementary information on aspects of the 147 day long siege and surrender, based mainly on the memoirs of the Turkish General H. K. Pasha, whose forces took well over 10,000 British Indian officers and men into custody at Kut-al-Amara.     

Voters and Voting in Multilevel Systems – An Introduction

This Special Issue, ‘Voters and Voting in Multilevel Systems', is a contribution to a better understanding of the functioning and logics of the present-day German electoral system, but its findings and consequences stretch beyond the German case. After all, Germany is ideally suited for studying multilevel voting and the interdependences and mutual repercussions of multilayer electoral systems. The Special Issue takes the challenges and changes in voting behaviour as a starting point and searches for links and causal relationships between levels. Overall, it has two major goals: first, to examine how (increasing) volatility in voting behaviour and declining participation rates manifest themselves at all layers of the multilevel system, possibly amplifying each other; second, to turn the usual perspective on its head by examining the impact of second-order elections and vote choices on parties' fortunes and electoral outcomes at the national level.     

Engaging the youth – citizenship and political participation in Pakistan

The article explores the issue of youth political participation in Pakistan. In the light of the attention devoted by the Pakistani press to the youth vote in the 2013 Pakistani elections, this article discusses young Pakistanis’ articulation of their views on mainstream politics and their views of the state, and attempts to answer the question as to why young people in Pakistan are disillusioned with mainstream politics. The article focuses in particular on the perceptions held by those in their late teens to late 20s. Since 59 per cent of Pakistan's population is below the age of 24 and overall over 67 per cent of the population is under 30, their views on the state, rights, responsibilities and their concept of citizenship are a window into how Pakistan is likely to develop. The focus of the article is on voices that are rarely heard and which stand in stark contrast to the solutions offered by the institutional literature. The research is located in the wider discussion of the concept of citizenship and builds on previous work on citizenship in Pakistan.     

Kalte Vertrautheiten – Private Kommunikation auf der Social Network Site Facebook

This paper argues that forms of private communication are not separable from the media they are communicated with. Methodologically this paper aims at comparing the literal culture of sentimentalism with the practices of private communication that is found today on the social network site (SNS) Facebook. This comparison shows that upon digital terms the historical coupling between the distinctions public/private and the metaphor of coolness/warmth intersect. The media therefore transforms a specific style of private communication. Within the literal culture of sentimentalism letters were written as emotional outpourings between fellow feeling friends. Within the empirical results of the DFG-project “Public and Privacy 2.0” rather cold intimacies of strange friends on SNS can be found. The networked digital friend has to perform his online intimacies while excluding unspecific other addresses within the network. Therefore practices of distance and irony, cool distinctions and the communication of indifference, as well as cryptic maneuvers of exclusion become functional. Privacy is not decomposed – as the sociological critique of SNS often states. Private communication is rather transformed by the technical and social affordances of network communication. Against the backdrop of the imperative of connection the users practice a cool conduct and a culture of distance on Facebook.     

Autorität: Herrschaft ohne Zwang – Anerkennung ohne Deliberation

Alongside with democracy and justice, authority is one of the most important concepts of political thought. As authority is often understood as the unconstrained but also unquestionable acceptance of hierarchy, the relationship between authority and democracy has always been marked by tensions. Following four different chains of argument addressing authority, this article shows that this core concept is in danger of losing its precision in the attempt of dissolving those tensions in recent debates in political sciences. Either the term is used in such a broad sense that anyone can have or be assigned authority or it is identified with power in general or the legitimate power of command so that only and all the people in power have authority. Both strategies of dissolving the tensions between authority and democracy render the concept at best ambiguous and at worst diffuse or even dispensable. On the contrary, the aim of the paper is to argue for authority to be a political core category which can only maintain this position when it means something other than democratic power to act on the one hand and legitimate rule or decision-making competence, respectively, on the other.     

Relationale Soziologie – Theoretische und methodologische Positionierungen zwischen Strukturalismus und Pragmatismus

Nowadays, relational sociology is represented by sociological approaches from the US and from France. These approaches share the aim of recombining the two “mega-paradigms” in the social sciences, structuralism and pragmatism. Relational sociology is thereby conceived as a project integrating the analysis of different forms of social practices and structures. The article aims to identify the specific properties of relational sociology beyond this common basis. Starting with the “New York school of relational sociology”, it is shown that this school can on the one side be regarded as a contemporary approach of relational sociology, having introduced innovative contributions, but also shows deficient developments on the other side. Thereupon “actor-network theory” and “economics of convention” in particular are presented as examples of the “new pragmatic sociologies” in France, which can also be regarded as modern versions of relational sociology. After characterizing and comparing these three versions of relational sociology, their metatheoretical and particularly methodological commonalities are presented. Finally, the article tries to define positively what constitutes relational sociology.     

Auf dem Weg zur Postwachstumsgesellschaft – Von der Resonanztheorie zur aleatorischen Demokratie

Current routines in democratic politics seem to foster delayed reactions to long-term ecological issues. The article systematically reconstructs Hartmut Rosa’s reflections on democracy, who combines in his theory of resonance a fundamental critique of late-modernity and its logic of growth with a general plea for a democratic transformation towards a post-growth society, and modifies them at three points. It emphasizes Rosa’s concept of the experience of self-efficacy in politics inspired by resonance-theory. From there on, his reflections are developed towards the idea of aleatoric democracy in two respects. First, the paper shows how practices of aleatoric democracy can fulfill the requirement of positive experiences of self-efficacy in politics. Second, it explains why institutions of aleatoric democracy can be suitable counterweights to the short-termism inherent to the current routine procedures of democratic governance.     

Identity and political preferences in Ukraine – before and after the Euromaidan

Abstract

Taking advantage of a panel survey in Ukraine before and after the Euromaidan, we analyze the relationship between ethnicity, language practice, and civic identities on the one hand and political attitudes on the other. We find that while ethnic identities and language practices change little on the aggregate level over the period, there has been a significant increase in the proportion of people thinking of Ukraine as their homeland. There has also been a large fall in support for a close political and economic relationship with Russia and some increase in support for joining the European Union. Nevertheless, we find that identities in general, and language practice in particular, remain powerful predictors of political attitudes and that people are more likely to shift attitudes to reflect their identities rather than modify their identities to match their politics.