Deported before experiencing the good sides of migration: Ethiopians returning from Saudi Arabia

ABSTRACT

In the period November 2013–April 2014 more than 160,000 Ethiopians were deported from Saudi Arabia after a seven months amnesty period for undocumented migrants came to an end. This large-scale regularization campaign of the Saudi government must be seen in light of the ‘Arab Spring’, when popular uprisings in the Middle East were threatening dictatorial regimes. The effect of the Arab Spring was felt globally; the uprisings impacted upon migrants living in countries in the Middle East and on their countries of origin. This paper looks into the experiences of Ethiopian deportees prior, during and after their forced return. We argue that the fact that the migrants were not prepared for their sudden return affected their economic, social network and psychosocial embeddedness back in Ethiopia. In addition, the Ethiopian government has not been able to improve the returnees’ economic embeddedness, which has affected their social and psychological status negatively.     

When civil engagement is part of the problem: Flawed anti-corruptionism in Russia and Ukraine

In developing countries, the fight against corruption entails purges of political and business elites and the restructuring of electoral, financial, and social provision systems, all of which are costly for the incumbents and, therefore, unlikely without sustained pressure from civil society. In the absence of empirical analyses, scholars and practitioners have, therefore, assumes that civil society plays an unequivocally positive role in anti-corruptionism. In this article, we challenge this dominant assumption. Instead, we show that, under certain conditions, an engaged non-governmental community may, in fact, undermine the fight against corruption. Using the data from forty interviews with anti-corruption practitioners in Ukraine and Russia, as well as primary documentary sources, we present two models of anti-corruptionism whereby active civil engagement produces suboptimal outcomes. One is faux collaboration, defined as a façade of cooperation between the state and civil society, which hides the reality of one-sided reforms. The other model is that of non-collaborative co-presence, whereby the governance role is shared by the government and non-governmental activists without compromise-based solutions. In both cases, civil engagement helps perpetuate abuses of power and subvert such long-term goals of anti-corruption reforms as democratization and effective governance.     

State terrorism: orientalism and the drone programme

This article builds on the recent and growing scholarship on the negative effects of the drone programme. Current literature has shown that the drone programme terrorises the civilian population that it keeps under surveillance. Furthermore, it has articulated the drone programme’s violence as biopolitical and its surveillance as a necropolitical technology of distinction. It is argued in this article that the Orientalist attitudes and logic necessary for drone targeting form the basis for the biopolitical and necropolitical component of the drone programme. This article explores the Orientalism that suffuses the US drone programme in order to juxtapose it with governmental discourses that characterise the drone programme and its surveillance as neutral and humane – demonstrating the gap between government discourses of modernity and the actual drone programme. The necropolitical logic of distinction used for targeting leads to the assimilation of those under the drone’s gaze to a population that can be put to death, leading the drone programme to operate indiscriminately. The biopolitical logic is visible in the US practices, which I argue constitutes terrorism with the corroboration of civilian testimonies.     

A Participatory Personality? Examining the Influence of Personality Traits on Political Participation

The aim of this article is to examine whether core personality traits are associated with opinions on and engagement in political participation of either participatory or deliberative nature. The Finish National Election Survey 2015 is used to explore the link between the Big Five personality dimensions and a wide array of political opinions and behaviour. The results suggest that variations in personality to some extent affect what kind of activities one prefers and engages in. Personality traits seem to better predict actual engagement in participatory and deliberative activities rather than having favorable opinions about them. This suggests that there is a difference between being positive about an activity in principle and actually engaging in it. Extraversion and Openness are positively linked to engagement in both participatory and deliberative activities, while Agreeableness and Emotional stability are negatively related. There are stronger effects of personality traits in predicting opinions on and engagement in deliberative activities than for participatory activities. The traits associated with deliberation differ from traits associated with preferring more traditional forms of politics. Thus, the results clearly suggest that the impact of personality on participation should not be neglected.     

Let's have more Russian babies. How anti-immigrant sentiment shapes family leave policy in Russia

This paper builds on scholarship of welfare chauvinism in Europe to present evidence of the relationship between xenophobia and family leave policies in contemporary Russia. I argue that popular anti-immigrant moods pressure government into providing more generous family benefits to Russian families while proposing restrictions to migrants. Findings are based on elite interviews, as well as content analysis of mass media, policy documents, public speeches, and party manifestos. I show that xenophobia is widespread in Russia among the public and policymakers alike, and find that xenophobia is embraced by policymakers to guide decisions regarding the allocation of social benefits.     

Citizens' Attitudes Towards Municipal Mergers – Individual-level Explanations

Municipal mergers are one of the most common reforms of jurisdiction size. While there are many studies of municipal mergers at the contextual level and some about how mergers affect opinions, studies of how individual citizens regard prospective mergers are still scarce. Thus, we study why citizens have different opinions on prospective mergers that are yet to be decided on. Specifically, the factors of main interest in this study are political efficacy and political trust since these relate to how citizens make sense of the complex and uncertain reforms that municipal mergers are. To study this, we disseminated a population survey (N = 6,686) in the Finnish municipality of Korsholm in 2018. At that time, a merger was planned with the neighboring city of Vaasa. This merger was surrounded by a very heated debate, mainly due to the fact that the merger would have affected the position of language minorities (a very salient issue in bilingual Finland) whereby the Swedish-speaking majority in Korsholm would become a minority in a merged new municipality. Using regression analyses where internal- and external political efficacy and political trust are tested as predictors of opinions on this proposed merger, with control for demographic, socio-economic and social factors, the study demonstrates that external efficacy and political trust have independent significant impact on citizens' opinions on mergers. The findings also show that salient issues connected to mergers are important factors as are social factors.