Limits of tolerance under pressure: a case study of Dutch terrorist detention policy

Policy-makers who are confronted with the potential spread of violent extremist ideologies among prison inmates are challenged to design sustainable prison regimes which are suitable to counter prison radicalisation whilst rehabilitating and reintegrating inmates into society. This article outlines a theoretical framework that explains how uncertainty and pressure in the policy-making context heightens the need for structure that induces a shift towards intolerance and stereotypic black-and-white thinking, which leads to the introduction of unbalanced, one-sided prison regimes. We argue that in the long run, these prison regimes are likely to be self-undermining and unsustainable because they undermine long-term security objectives and cause undesired side effects. These propositions are illustrated by an in-depth case study of the Dutch terrorist detention policy.     

Bangladesh: where there's a pill there's a way

In exchange for the substantial foreign aid provided to it by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government of Bangladesh has agreed to accept the Agency's population package. The government has agreed to accept AID-provided contraceptives and has set revolutionary fertility rate targets for the year 1985. To meet the scarcity of contraceptive clinics in rural areas, AID and Population Services International (PSI) have instituted social marketing in Bangladesh. This involves use of commercial distributors, e.g., cigarette dealers and local shopkeepers, for the distribution of condoms and oral contraceptives. The distributors are willing to participate because they make small but significant profits from the arrangement. It is feared that shopkeepers do not have the expertise to screen women who should not be given pills or to give counseling for prospective pill customers. This type of pill distribution could lead to dangers.     

Conflict in a changing world: Looking two decades forward

This article begins by outlining the likely changes in the strategic environment over the next 20 years, first globally than by regions. It goes on to offer some propositions on the nature of future conflict, given the perceived preference in the West for limited, low‐cost interventions. Most recent wars did not begin as inter‐state conflicts, and future ones will follow this trend. The characteristics of intra‐state conflicts are then examined in detail, particularly the effects of asymmetries on policies and perceptions: between states with widely differing capabilities, between states and non‐state actors, and in particular those involving guerrilla and terrorist movements.     

Building a Bridge of Friendship between Peoples of China and Hungary

正Ever since its founding,the World Bridge Foundation of Hungary has been aiming to set up a platform of dialogue between China and Hungary,enhancing mutual understanding and cooperation between peoples in central and eastern European countries and the Chinese people with several thousand years of history.As the founder and Honorary Chairman of the Foundation,I have made continuous efforts in this     

Collective learning and regime dynamics under uncertainty: labour reform and the way to autocracy in Russia

The article questions the structural approach to autocratic transition that sees government as knowingly and purposely building autocracy, and contributes to the tradition emphasizing the plurality of possible regime developments and the role of contingency therein, by providing a more systematic treatment of such contingency. We offer a path-dependent theory of political change and use insights from cognitive institutionalism to show how ad hoc policy reform practices become accepted as a trusted way of interaction by political actors and how they “learn” their way into autocracy. This intuition is substantiated with a case-study of the labour reform in Putin’s Russia. The early 2000s marked a surge in uncertainty in Russian politics caused by the succession crisis and the profound political turnover it triggered. This uncertainty could have resolved in a number of ways, each leading to a different political development. We trace the actual way out of this uncertainty and show that the major factor to condition further regime trajectory was the way social reforms were conducted. The course of these reforms determined the ruling coalition and the institutions that ensure credible commitment within its ranks (the dominant party), and contributed to crowding out the political market and opposition decay.     

Looking beyond States: Openings for international bureaucrats to enter the institutional design process

Surprisingly little research investigates a stark reality: the vast majority of today’s international intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) were crafted not by states alone, but with participation by international bureaucrats working in pre-existing IGOs. What explains this phenomenon? Drawing on international relations scholarship, this article develops predictions involving the capabilities of states, or a matter’s salience to states. The predictions are tested with a new and original dataset that captures, for the first time, variation in the roles that international bureaucrats play in the institutional design arena. Statistical analyses find that states’ need for expertise, as well as the design negotiations’ distance from high-politics, leave openings for international bureaucrats to enter institutional design processes. The findings enhance our understanding of institutional design, principal-agent relationships, non-state actors, and divisions of labor in contemporary global governance.     

Through the Looking Glass: The Helsinki Final Act and the 1976 Election for President

The controversy surrounding the 1975 Helsinki Final Act made it an enduring issue in the 1976 campaign, and the political backlash against President Gerald R. Ford damaged his electoral chances. Ford's signature of the agreement, his continuation of détente, and his foreign policy more broadly may not have been decisive issues in his contests with Ronald Reagan and then Jimmy Carter, but they certainly were prominent throughout the election. Examining the influence of the Final Act on Ford's election campaign illuminates the extent to which a number of candidates sought to use popular opposition to the agreement to their advantage. Furthermore, it reveals how the 1976 presidential candidates, and Ford in particular, struggled to address growing questions about détente, human rights, and morality in foreign policy. Ford's failure to defend his signature of the Final Act adequately raised concerns about his foreign policy and personal leadership with the electorate.     

We NGOs: A controversial way of being and acting

While the forces of globalisation have intensified economic polarisation, diverse social movements worldwide are struggling to defend the public interest and to promote a more rights-based and sustainable form of organising human society. In allying themselves with the causes of the dispossessed at the local level, and raising international awareness of such issues, NGOs have a part to play in building a more equitable global order. However, NGOs urgently need to find better ways to link these struggles with their analysis, their action, and their ethical values.     

Reform of the stability and growth pact: Looking beyond the commission's proposal

Policymakers, military strategists and academics all increasingly hail climate change as a security issue. This article revisits the (comparatively) long-standing “environmental security debate” and asks what lessons that earlier debate holds for the push towards making climate change a security issue. Two important claims are made. First, the emerging climate security debate is in many ways a re-run of the earlier dispute. It features many of the same proponents and many of the same disagreements. These disagreements concern, amongst other things, the nature of the threat, the referent object of security and the appropriate policy responses. Second, given its many different interpretations, from an environmentalist perspective, securitisation of the climate is not necessarily a positive development.     

The Political Enforcement of Liberalism: Bargaining, Institutions, and Auto Multinationals in Hungary

The demise of communism triggered large flows of foreign direct investment into Eastern Europe. This article examines the impact of recent changes in the international environment—the transformation of world production systems and the rise of neoliberalism—on bargaining between multinational corporations and post-communist governments. It focuses on the Hungarian automobile industry, one of the region's largest recipients of FDI. The Hungarian case illustrates the ability of small, open, and geopolitically weak states to parlay shifts in the global environment into a bargaining asset. The ascent of lean production heightened pressure on auto MNCs to develop local supplier systems capable of fast delivery of components to East European subsidiaries. The pull of backward integration was particularly strong for Japanese producers, whose non-European status enabled Hungarian state authorities to secure commitments to raising domestic content. Transplanting Japanese-style production in Eastern Europe proved less vexing for European MNCs, whose status as EU-based companies freed them of local-content requirements and whose preexisting supplier networks obviated heavy investments in the Hungarian components industry. But while Western auto producers enjoyed highly favorable terms of entry into Eastern Europe, even they could not elude the paradoxical effects of global changes on MNC/host state relations. The very eastward extension of the European Union's nondiscriminatory rules that facilitated EU-based firms' entry into Hungary also permitted host state authorities to parry efforts by MNCs to obtain particularistic concessions after entry. The Hungarian case thus demonstrates that MNC/host state bargaining in the post–Cold War period hinges more on the global positions of multinationals than on the structural vulnerabilities of capital-importing states ( per dependency theory) or the internal capacity of host states ( per statist theories).     

Putting on Their Sunday Best: Romania, Hungary, and the Puzzle of Peace

The absence of conflict between Romania and Hungary after the end of the Cold War presents a fascinating puzzle on which various strains of international relations theory can be brought to bear. Contrary to the expectations of realism, cooperative behavior has been pursued by these two historic antagonists. Expectations from realism, liberalism, liberal institutionalism, and social constructivism are tested on this dyad and results are compared to other cases. The investigation concludes that both international institutional norms and changes in the domestic governments of these states were necessary as factors in this anomalous behavior.     

Good News! You may be out of a job reflections on the past and future 50: Years for Northern NGOs

After 50 years of spectacularly successful work (particularly in raising the equity stakes, improving the quality of overseas development aid, fostering Southern NGO work at the international level and organising quick and effective humanitarian assistance), Northern development NGOs have come to a crossroads. The author argues that the history of the NGO 'occupational category', coupled with a changing political and economic environment (the end of the Cold War, rising international investment, declining overseas development aid, and vastly heightened Southern NGO capacity), means that most Northern NGOs should close up shop. Instead, a kaleidoscopic rebirth is envisaged, where four key functions remain for Northerners--as humanitarian agents, economic policy watchers, North-South brokers, and corporate responsibility advocates. This change of job is heralded as good news: evidence that the project of global social justice has moved dramatically forwards.     

Ethnos,demos and democratization: A comparison of the Czech Republic,Hungary and Poland

With the collapse of European communism, Western observers and leaders fostered new expectations about the relative likelihood for post‐communist nations to ‘join the West’. The Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary were seen as least problematic candidates, sponsored especially by the German leadership. A troubling issue however is the emerging pattern of ethnos‐politics, identity politics based on blood ties, as opposed to demos‐politics, civic politics based on universal territorial citizenship. In the Czech Republic this ethnos‐politics appears most clearly as anti‐Romany racism and governmental discrimination. In Poland and Hungary, centre‐right parties have developed a politics of ethnic patriotism which labels opponents as traitors and foreign elements. In these nations, political liberalism has been too weak and often too opportunist to offer a viable demos‐politics as a counterweight. Instead, the ex‐communist successor parties in Poland and Hungary have re‐emerged as the mass base for a non‐nationalist demos‐politics. The West has yet to take seriously the new ethnos‐politics, prefering to give priority to economic and foreign‐policy compatibility. The admission of these nations into the European Union or North Atlantic Treaty Organization would give new legitimacy to ethnos within the West, and reinforce the ethnos‐politics of Austria's Haider and France's LePen.     

从和谐地区建设看上海合作组织发展

建设和谐地区是胡锦涛主席近年来提出的处理国际关系的崭新理论。从这一理念出发,重新审视上海合作组织近十年来的发展历程和未来的发展方向,并且做出相应的制度建构与安排,对上海合作组织未来发展会产生深远的影响。     

全球化背景下的安全:国家的地位和作用

安全的本质是“谁的安全”的问题,全球化的不断发展,非传统安全威胁的出现,使学术界在安全研究的主体上出现了“国家的安全”和“人的安全”之争。如何看待全球化背景下安全研究中的国家及其地位和作用,不仅关系安全理论解释的合理性和有效性,而且关系到国家安全战略的选择。通过对全球化背景下新安全观与传统安全观的比较,特别是对西方学者有关“人的安全”的分析,本文批判了将两者对立起来,矮化国家作为安全主体作用的倾向。认为:全球化背景下,国家安全视野的范围、安全维护的手段和方式应有相应的扩大和调整。但是国家依旧是安全研究的重要主体和“参照物”,同时也是维护“人的安全”的重要载体和有效手段。