Lithuanian men’s struggles with precarious life: unemployment,working identities,and strategies of survival

Using semi-structured interviews with young unemployed Lithuanian men, this article examines three distinct male working identities associated with ways of coping with unemployment and a sense of precarity: “desperate conformists,” “liberated dreamers,” and men “lost in work transition.” The interviews demonstrate that unemployment stigmatizes men, particularly those with lesser professional and social competencies crucial to efficient participation in the labor market. Therefore, the respondents’ incessant attempts to search for a job or their dreaming about it can be regarded as a way of resisting stigmatization and precarity.     

Measuring Control of Corruption by a New Index of Public Integrity

While the last 20 years saw the invention of corruption rankings, allowing comparison between countries and the shaming of corrupt governments, such measurements are largely based on the perceptions of experts, lacking both specificity and transparency. New research, based on a comprehensive theory of governance defined as the set of formal and informal institutions determining who gets what in a given context, allow for more specific and objective, albeit indirect, measurements of control of corruption. Such measurements focus on the institutional framework which empowers public integrity and eliminates many current anti-corruption tools, while validating others. Most importantly, it provides a broader specific context which can empower reforms based on evidence and a clear measure to determine status and progress of corruption control.     

Are ivory antiques actually antique?

Crime, Law and Social Change - Twenty-five samples of ivory artefacts were analysed using a radiocarbon dating method. These artefacts were part of a collection of 77 items seized during a wildlife...     

From the Cradle of the Nation to the Most Expensive Serbian Word: Changes in Serbian Public Language in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century

Russian National Unity (Russkoe Natsionalnoe Edinstvo—RNE) is the largest militant fascist group in Russia today. The founder and leader of the RNE, Aleksandr P. Barkashov, speaks of himself as a national‐socialist, and praises Hitler's deeds for Germany. The RNE has pledged to establish a system of ethnic segregation in Russia were it to come to power.     

Illegal Economic and Transit Migration in the Czech Republic: A Study of Individual Migrants' Behaviour

This article examines the essential features of international migration and the illegal working activities of migrants in the Czech Republic, with a closer insight into the processes of trafficking and smuggling. The research is based on semi-structured interviews with 63 illegal migrants, both from countries of the former Soviet Union (mainly Ukraine) and developing countries in 2005 and 2006. The main conclusion of the analysis is that, in many ways, the situation of illegal labour and transit migration in the Czech Republic is similar to that in countries with a longer experience as target countries for immigration.     

Economic crisis and the crisis of national identity in Slovenia: toward a new notion of social order

This paper addresses the influence of the economic crisis on national identity in Slovenia. It first analyzes the creation of the contemporary national identity following independence in 1991 that was established in relation to a negatively perceived Balkan identity, which represented “the Other,” and in relation to a “superior” European identity that Slovenia aspired to. With the economic crisis, the dark corners of Slovenia’s “successful” post-socialist transition to democracy came to light. Massive layoffs of workers and the bankruptcies of once-solid companies engendered disdain for the political elites and sympathy for marginalized groups. The public blamed the elites for the country’s social and economic backsliding, and massive public protests arose in 2012. The aftermath of the protests was a growing need among the people for a new social paradigm toward solidarity. We show that in Slovenia the times of crisis were not times of growing nationalism and exclusion as social theory presupposes but, quite the contrary, they were times of growing solidarity among citizens and with the “Balkan Other.”     

Montenegro,NATO and the divided society

In this paper we are investigating the political and social effects of Montenegro joining NATO. This issue is highly controversial and follows the political divisions in Montenegro, which motivated us to apply social cleavage theory. As method, we applied logistic regression clustered for standard error. We found that besides socio-demographic variables (ethnic division between Montenegrins and Serbs), the main line of the cleavage indicated by support of, or opposition to NATO membership falls along the issues of the independence of Montenegro, its relationship with the EU vs. Russia, as well as the attitude toward political power and party identification.     

Prospect theory and presidential elections: Two cases from Yugoslavia and Serbia

Why do presidents in semi-presidential regimes sometimes call early elections? Is the behavior of incumbent presidents different from the behavior of presidential contenders when the former do not need to run for office but face the loss of parliamentary majority in a semi-presidential system? Prospect theory claims that agents make risky choices when facing a loss. Consequently, if incumbent presidents face a loss of majority in the parliament, they will call for early election to try to shore up or salvage the majority. To provide empirical evidence supporting this claim, prospect theory has been applied to the two presidential elections in Yugoslavia and Serbia in which two incumbent presidents, Slobodan Milo?evi? (2000) and Boris Tadi? (2012), had lost early presidential elections. The expected contribution of the paper is to deepen our understanding of how semi-presidential regimes resolve the problem of temporal rigidity and offer novel empirical data in support of the application of prospect theory in political science.     

Judicial Self-Governance Index: Towards better understanding of the role of judges in governing the judiciary

The aim of this article is to introduce a novel view on how to evaluate the share of power held by judges in judicial governance. Its contribution to court administration and the regulation of judges is three-fold. First, it provides a novel empirically tested conceptualization of judicial governance that includes 60 competences grouped into eight dimensions (ranging from selection and education of judges to case allocation and publication of judicial decisions). Second, it proposes a new Judicial Self-Governance (JSG) Index that measures how much power domestic judges hold in these eight dimensions of judicial governance. Third, by applying the JSG Index to the longitudinal data for Germany, Italy, Czechia, and Slovakia this article demonstrates that the Judicial Council model is not the only institutional model of judicial governance leading to the empowerment of judges. This means that judges can hold many powers without the existence of judicial councils and even in the Ministry of Justice model.