COVID-19 and the Wuhan Diary –how does the overseas Chinese community react to group criticism?

Journal of Chinese Political Science - We conduct an online survey to explore how Chinese people living in Germany perceive and react to group criticism in the context of the debate on the Wuhan...     

The Reforms in the Institutional Structure of the European Union in Compliance With the Lisbon Treaty

The necessary adjustment to the political architecture in Europe is considered to happen with the Treaty of Lisbon. The treaty is an attempt to make adjustments to the decision-making process, ensuring democratic legitimacy, strengthening of the institutions, and enabling political action worldwide. With the Lisbon Treaty, a change has been made in the institutional structure of the European Union （EU）. The Treaty of Lisbon brings together more than a half-century history of integration, which began with the decision for establishing the European Coal and Steel Community （ECSC） on April 18, 1951. The view on the whole, more than 50 years of integration, shows that the European unification process all the time is not out of the spirit of all issues related to the details of common goals and values, but goes in the direction of one political vision of： peace and prosperity, freedom and mobility, knowledge of democracy, populism and tolerant coexistence. The Treaty of Lisbon is in the way to improve the capabilities for action of the democracy in Europe.     

„Integration“ als Exklusion?

Dieser Beitrag versucht, sich auf der Grundlage einer Medienanalyse, qualitativer Interviews und Gruppendiskussionen dem gesellschaftlichen Umgang mit dem Integrationsbegriff anzunähern. Den Ausgangspunkt der empirischen Untersuchung bildet die Beobachtung, dass sich in der öffentlichen Auseinandersetzung um die legitime inhaltliche Besetzung dieses Begriffs die konfligierenden Ansprüche der Mehrheitsgesellschaft und die Selbstwahrnehmung der von Integrationsgeboten betroffenen Immigrantengruppen spiegeln. Auf dieser Grundlage geht es nicht darum, nach den Motivationen und Strukturen von Integration zu fragen, sondern ?Integrationsrahmungen“ zu untersuchen, d.h. empirisch nachzuvollziehen, wie in deutschen Medien und von den Immigranten selbst der Begriff mit Bedeutung versehen, symbolisch aufgeladen und zur Grundlage politischer Forderungen herangezogen wird. Die Ergebnisse der diskurstheoretisch orientierten Untersuchung zeigen, dass sich ?Integration“ empirisch nicht nur als neutral-deskriptive Kategorie erweist, sondern soziale Lagen von Gruppen ?be-zeichnet“ und auf sie symbolische Macht ausübt, die Gegenstrategien auslöst. Die komparativen qualitativen Fallanalysen verschiedener Migrantengruppen in Deutschland verdeutlichen, dass ?Integrationsrahmungen“ nicht nur Konflikte in Einwanderungsgesellschaften sichtbar machen, sondern sie paradoxerweise auch reproduzieren.     

Peace building and spoilers

As the UN Peacebuilding Commission begins to plan it work, it is important to consider how to deal with ‘spoilers’ as a threat to security: groups that actively seek to hinder or undermine conflict settlement. This paper takes a broad approach to the concept of spoiling and considers a wide range of actors as potential spoilers: not only rebel groups and insurgents, but also diasporas, governments and other entities. The authors demonstrate that imposed or ill-conceived peace processes can sow the seeds of spoiling, but that spoiler violence does not necessarily indicate that a peace process is doomed to failure.     

Patterns of Peace

Different strategies are used to conceptualise peace in the literature on International Relations, peace and conflict studies. These have included strategies based upon the notion that peace is geographically contained, and constructed by race, identity, ideology, or power, and has universal qualities, although it is also utopian and unlikely to be fully achieved. What has developed more recently in the relevant literature is a hybrid version of peace—the liberal peace. This is universal, attainable, and dependent upon a specific methodology. The following essay outlines the main discursive characteristics associated with peace, and with the emergence of the concept of the liberal peace. It outlines the patterns of thought prevalent in the conceptualisation of peace, and their ontological and epistemological implications in the context of the liberal peace framework.     

The UK Core Executive's Use of Public Service Agreements as a Tool of Governance

The contemporary literature on governance notes the difficulties that core executives, central points for steering and co-ordinating public activity, have in undertaking this strategic function. The UK core executive, particularly the Treasury, has developed a regime of Public Service Agreements (PSAs) as a novel and ambitious tool of governance, particularly for public services. The tool incorporates improved priority setting, information about performance, and incentive effects for ministers and officials through a system of performance targets. However, systems for setting priorities are fragmented and include those focused on the Prime Minister's Office and Cabinet Office. Monitoring has been improved, although measures often provide a limited, or sometimes even potentially misleading, impression of progress towards valued goals. The direct incentive effects of PSAs appear to be weak. While the link between the system and the allocation of expenditure has engaged the interest of departments in discussing priorities, ministerial and other officials' responsibility for performance has been limited. Targets have increasingly been seen as by ministers as minimum pledges of performance rather than tools for stretching and improving performance. Various forms of blame avoidance and blame shifting have occurred and the credibility of the PSA system is in danger of being undermined by frequent changes to targets and misrepresentation of performance in some areas.