Post-Soviet politics in Kyrgyzstan: between centralism and localism?

Kyrgyzstan is a country that has recently attracted attention with its different features in post-Soviet Central Asia. The country could not be institutionalized by either an authoritarian means or a democratic regime after her independence in 1992. Political life has been shaped by political confrontation between administrative authorities that have tendencies to strengthen the authoritarian regime and local political leaders who act centrifugally. This article, in the light of this background, aims to investigate the political process in the framework of the ‘Tulip Revolution’ that took place in 2005. Initially, social, economic and cultural dynamics, which have impacts on the political processes, are analysed, and next, the contemporary implications of these dynamics are examined in detail. Finally, probable influences of the political developments witnessed after 2005 and the potential direction of transformation of the political regime are discussed.     

Tax Innovation or Excise Duty in Disguise? Deviations and Distortions in Value-Added Tax in Bangladesh

The article examines and analyzes the nature of deviations and distortions in the VAT system in Bangladesh. The article argues that the Bangladesh VAT introduced in 1991—with a view to maximize tax revenue by broadening tax base and curbing tax evasion while simplifying the process—has deviated significantly from standard and international best practices. It further argues that most of the deviations have their roots in the excise system of taxation that VAT has replaced and, while some of them produce ad hoc benefits in terms of generating revenue and easing compliance, most of them, besides eroding the coherence of the tax system, defeat the core principle of VAT—self assessment. The article concludes that if the process of adulterating VAT with so many ingenious adaptations and deviations is allowed to continue, the objective of VAT to evolve as an efficient tool for maximizing revenue will remain elusive.     

Radicalizing Religion? Religious Identity and Settlers' Behavior

Does religious identity prompt radical action? This article presents a model of individual-level radical action. Drawing mostly on collective action theory the article posits that organizational membership drives the effect of religious identity on individual-level radical action. Using survey data the article assesses the behavior of Jewish settlers in the West Bank in the face of the 2005 Gaza withdrawal. The article finds that contra the prevailing view, which holds that religious identity alone is sufficient to trigger violence, evidence suggests that organizational membership is a mechanism bridging religious identity and radical action. Longstanding arguments tying radical actions solely to religion may require substantial revision.     

Does Size Matter? Reassessing the Relationship between Aquaculture and Poverty in Bangladesh

Aquaculture has long been promoted by development institutions in Bangladesh on the understanding that it can alleviate poverty. Most of this attention has focused on forms of the activity commonly referred to as ‘small-scale’. This article draws on concepts from the literature on agricultural growth and elaborates a typology of aquaculture based on relations of production which suggests that, in Bangladesh, quasi-capitalist forms of aquaculture may possess greater potential to reduce poverty and enhance food security than the quasi-peasant modes of production generally assumed to do so. The implications of this conclusion are explored.     

Can charity and rights-based movements be allies in the fight against HIV/AIDS? Bridging mobilisations in the United States and sub-Saharan Africa

The activist-fuelled responses to HIV/AIDS around the world have resulted in unprecedented changes to the way infectious disease is defined and treated and in the mobilisation of resources for treatment in developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. However, the communities that have been critical sources of response are widely divergent. In the United States, where the epidemic was first identified, the strongest response was within the gay community, with its attendant rights-based orientation. In sub-Saharan Africa, faith-based communities have been critical actors, and have generally taken a charity-based approach to their work. As globalisation and the successes of the global AIDS movement draw these groups into closer contact, the question of whether these divergent approaches can work in alliance becomes ever more important. In this paper I use the concepts of collective identity and framing to examine the development of both approaches and to suggest that the activity of frame extension may be a helpful tool in bridging divergent approaches.     

Sanitation and Religion in South Asia: What Accounts for Differences across Countries?

Exposure to open defecation has serious consequences for child mortality, health, and human capital development. South Asia has the highest rates of open defecation worldwide, and although the incidence declines as household income rises, differences across South Asian countries are not explained by differences in per capita income. The rate of open defecation in sub-national regions of Bangladesh, India and Nepal is highly correlated with the fraction of the population that identifies as Hindu, in part because certain rituals of purity and pollution discourage having latrines in close proximity to one’s home. Almost all open defecation occurs in rural areas, and this paper estimates how much the rate could be reduced if rural households in regions that have a higher fraction of Hindus, where open defecation is still common, altered their behaviour to reflect that of non-Hindu households in regions that are predominantly non-Hindu, where the rate of open defecation is much lower. Using nonparametric reweighting methods, this paper projects that rural open defecation in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal could be reduced to rates of between 6 and 8 per cent, compared to the prevailing level of 65 per cent.     

Institutional design for credence goods: Can the existence of financial incentive be problematic? Evidences from childbirth system of Bangladesh

The introduction of an incentive system in order to increase the provision of credence goods such as health services can be problematic. This article identifies the possible magnitude of overtreatment by physicians in private clinics compared with the situation in government and nongovernment health facilities in Bangladesh. The five to ten times higher volume of cesarean childbirths in private clinics (higher incentive institutions) compared with the volume in government/NGOs health facilities (lower incentive institutions) is indicative of the problem of overtreatment. This problem may become acute where there is only one private clinic in an area; however, the mere increase in the number of private clinics may not solve the problem.     

Ethnofederalism and ethnonationalism in the separatist politics of chechnya and tatarstan: sources or resources?

Common explanations of the recent war in Chechnya add up to an astonishingly overdetermined picture. The conflict between Russia's central government and its separatist ethnic autonomy was blamed on several grand factors: oil interests, resurgent Islam, imperial collapse, international terrorism, organized crime. Superficially, Chechnya shares most of these features with Tatarstan — another defiant republic of the Russian Federation which has oil, notorious gangsters, and a native population of Islamic heritage. A more detailed account shows, however, that the two state entities have little in common except the Soviet-made institutional framework. Tatarstan is a rare example of an ethnically non-Russian republic within the very urban industrial core of the former USSR, while Chechnya was patently peripheral. Differences in historical legacies and present-day social compositions conditioned very different outcomes of multifaceted political struggles that accompanied the demise of Soviet empire. In Tatarstan, local ethnically-colored nomenklatura exploited the chaotic transition to claim property rights over the local economy. The new rhetoric of national revival which the nationally-minded wing of Tatar intelligentsia advanced during Gorbachev's relaxation of censorship, was used by the Tatar nomenklatura to justify its struggle for economic property rights and exclusive political jurisdiction in its territory. By contrast, the Communist patronage network which ruled Chechnya until 1991 was too dependent on the central government for subsidies and coercive resources to follow the Tatarstan example. In the aftermath of August 1991 hardliner coup, when the Chechen apparatchiks misplaced their bets in Moscow's politics and momentarily lost support of the central government, they were swept away by the social movement of rural masses and urban marginal intellectuals. In its turn revolution, the only such outcome among the republics of the Russian Federation (but not the USSR), created an inherently unstable regime in Chechnya which could legitimate itself only with the idea of national independence and, once Moscow attempted to destabilize it, through the patriotic war.     

State-organised Religion and Muslims’ Commitment to Democracy in Albania

This article questions why, and indeed how, Muslims have committed to democratisation in post-communist Albania. The explanatory framework merges the theoretical insights of the moderation paradigm with the specific devices that characterise the post-communist religious field in investigating Muslims’ support for democracy. The empirical analysis draws on a within-case comparison of Muslims’ behaviour in three consequential stages of democratic transition—each marked by different configurations of institutional settings and ideological options, which we trace as potential explanations. The analysis suggests that institutional arrangements played the primary role. Yet, learning from the experience of dictatorship and from a ready pool of inherited Albanian-specific templates facilitated the consensual reclaiming of Islam in a local, pro-democratic, and pro-European manner.     

Religion and Reconciliation in Bosnia & Herzegovina: Are Religious Actors Doing Enough?

The article explores the question of whether and how religion is being used in Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH) to promote and foster reconciliation. Based primarily on 20 semi-structured interviews with representatives of the three main faiths in BiH—Islam, Orthodoxy and Catholicism—the article's central contention is that religion is a potentially valuable, yet fundamentally under-utilised peace-building tool in BiH.     

Exigency or expediency? Contextualising political Islam and the pas challenge in Malaysian politics

Few would disagree that Islam has become a major force in Malaysian politics. Be that as it may, scholarship on political Islam in Malaysia has mostly centred on detailing the umno–pas confrontation. While it is important to understand the depths of this phenomenon of politicised Islam, it is equally vital that attempts be made to relate it to broader socio-political tectonics in the complex Malaysian landscape in order to better appreciate the nature and trajectory of the politicisation of Islam in Malaysia. Focusing on pas as the institutional manifestation of politicised Islam in Malaysia, this paper advances two arguments. First, pas has been successful insofar as it has managed to relate Islam to the pressing issues of the day. Second, the best electoral performances turned in by pas have all coincided with problems with umno and the broader coalition. Islam then, appears to be less vital to the politics of pas than is widely perceived.     

Financial Development and Poverty Reduction: Can There be a Benefit without a Cost?

This article investigates how financial development helps to reduce poverty directly through a distributional effect, beyond its indirect effect through economic growth. The results obtained with data for a sample of developing countries from 1966 through 2000 suggest that the poor benefit from the ability of the banking system to facilitate transactions and provide savings opportunities (through the McKinnon ‘conduit effect’) but to some extent fail to reap the benefit from greater availability of credit. Moreover, financial development is accompanied by financial instability, which is particularly detrimental to the poor. Nevertheless, the benefits of financial development for the poor outweigh the cost.     

War Minus the Shooting? The politics of sport in Lebanon as a unique case in comparative politics

In the literature on sport and politics the potential of sport to unite fragmented societies is emphasised. Lebanon is a counter example. Sport does not unite but further divides people. Confessionalism, the political system of this ‘mosaic state’ with 18 state-registered sects, produces conditions that only allow for competition within sects. The sport sector, especially the professional men's teams in football and basketball, serves as a tool for competition within and between sects. In a middle-income country with only four million inhabitants, club revenues from ticketing and broadcasting are almost non-existent. Therefore professional sport teams are completely dependent on sponsors. Within a patron–client relationship system, political leaders finance the clubs but expect complete loyalty from the teams, implemented through such practices as choosing their party colours as team colours or posting large pictures of themselves in the arenas. While national sports teams often have the potential to unite societies, in Lebanon this can only happen if first steps from a sectarian to a secular state are taken. Then a common national identity (including general support for the national sports teams) might gradually develop and later transform the confessional subsystems such as the media, schools and sports clubs towards non-sectarian entities.     

Can the power of platforms be harnessed for governance?

Although not as eye-catching as their business counterparts, many public and private institutions are currently experimenting with using platforms as a strategy of governance. Governance platforms are now being constructed by a wide array of actors at different geographical scales and across a wide range of issue areas. Although often enabled by digital technology, governance platforms fundamentally embody a new organizing logic to achieve distributed participation and mobilization. While private platforms are transforming the way that companies create and market their products or services and shifting the fundamental logic of how value is produced and appropriated, can this powerful organizing logic be harnessed for public as well as private purposes? We investigate how governance platforms generate powerful effects and survey the extant literature on governance platforms. We conclude that governance platforms do demonstrate promise, although they face a number of challenges.     

Can Changes in Transformational-Oriented and Transactional-Oriented Leadership Impact Turnover over Time?

This article empirically examines the impact that leadership styles have on turnover. The results reveal that transformational-oriented leadership was found to lower voluntary turnover—that is, the aggregate of quits and transfers. Transactional-oriented leadership, on the other hand, was found to increase quits in agencies. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed in the article.     

Problems of Coordination in Field Administration in Bangladesh: Does Informal Communication Matter?

The main thrust of the article is to analyze the state of problems of inter-organizational coordination in the upazila (second tier of local government) in Bangladesh. It also explains to what extent informal communication matters for inter-organizational coordination. Based on empirical data collected in 2009, findings of the study suggest that a number of factors have facilitated non-existence of inter-organizational coordination at the upazila. These factors include lack of division of activities, dualism in control over officers, lack of proper functioning of the committees, and dual authority in disbursement of funds and its impact on timely disbursement. Findings also suggest that in the absence of coordination among different departments, informal communication has been observed to be one of the prominent mechanisms of ensuring coordination. However, existence of factors like lack of willingness to be engaged in informal communication and lack of cooperation has hindered the process of building informal communication among different departments. Despite having some problems this research has concluded that informal communication has helped the process of coordination among different departments while they are carrying out their responsibilities.