Hamas in Politics: Democracy,Religion, Violence

Ahmed Midhat Efendi, a nineteenth century Turkish author, maintained that it was necessary to establish customs duties and other barriers against foreign sellers in order to convince them to produce locally in the Ottoman Empire. This would be a way to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) to a country in need of capital and technology. However, today, liberals around the world as well as in Turkey see a free trade environment as a prerequisite for FDI. This study tries to find out whether a relationship existed between free trade and FDI inflows in Turkey during a period when the Turkish foreign trade and financial markets were almost completely liberalized.     

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.