The Military Coups in Fiji: Reactive and Transformative Tendencies

Abstract

Since 1987 there have been six coups altogether in Fiji. The article examines the reactive and transformative nature of the Republic of Fiji Military Forces, hereafter referred to as Fiji military, and coups and their impact on the small multi-cultural country of 850,000 people. The coups in Fiji have to be seen in the light of the two separate but related developments, namely the historical dynamic interplay between politics and ethnicity and secondly, how the military itself has evolved as a state institution and how it perceived its role in the modern state system. Although the military is modelled along the lines of a praetorian institution, its perceived role has often shifted from being guardian of indigenous Fijian interests to protector of the multi-ethnic state. The interventionist tendency of the military was largely in response to the way in which the interplay between politics and ethnicity had played a part in creating discord and tension. All the six coups in Fiji were linked and need to be understood in relation to each other. The 2006 coup was the most politically transformative as some of the most powerful institutions were weakened and reconfigured and a new order created under the guise of a ‘clean-up campaign’.     

Parliaments in Disguise? How German Councillors perceive Local Councils

Dominant narratives of neighbourhood working in the United Kingdom accentuate the diversity and ‘messiness’ of practices across local authorities. This paper questions such narratives. Drawing upon a study of 15 local authorities, we first argue that neighbourhood working is increasingly oriented towards neighbourhood management, privileging the ‘joining up’ of mainstream service delivery over the enhanced community engagement and political accountability more associated with the practices of neighbourhood governance. Deploying Lowndes and Sullivan's four rationales of neighbourhood working (2008), in combination with Mintzberg's metaphor of organisation as ‘structure in fives’ (1983), we suggest that the practices of neighbourhood working are currently best understood in terms of Mintzberg's decentralised divisional authority as a form of constrained decentralisation in which semi-autonomous divisions are brought together under a central administration and given limited control over service delivery in order to address the social and economic rationales for neighbourhood working. We then draw upon recent neo-liberal critiques of local governance to offer a critical evaluation of both the appeal for local officers and politicians of neighbourhood management and the potential tensions and contradictions of such a move for future policy and practice. We conclude that neighbourhood management as a neo-liberal ‘roll-out’ strategy may be self-defeating, surfacing the incapacity of local authorities to respond to local community expectations and grievances, whilst exposing the organisational constraints of partnership working, managerialism and outsourcing.     

Professionalization within a traditional political culture: A case study of south carolina

This article examines the progress of professionalization within a highly traditional political and social setting. The impact of such characteristics as a decentralized personnel system, fragmented political authority, and an absence of top-level support is assessed in the context of current initiatives to upgrade the professional orientations and capabilities of the state's workers. The primary theme is that, despite the lack of an integrated professionalism movement in state government, remarkable advances have occurred, and are continuing at an impressive pace. The impetus for these changes is found to be in the various employee groups that are striving to enhance their professional skills and status.     

Regional collective security in Europe: Past patterns and future prospects

NATO's entry into the Balkan war raised salient questions about the alliance's broader mission and, more generally, about Europe's security architecture. This article confronts these questions by revisiting the debate about collective defense versus collective security as organizing principles for alliances. NATO is viewed as serving a hybrid role of promoting collective defense and regional collective security. This latter, under‐valued function relates to NATO's role in promoting internal cohesion among its members and is crucial to understanding the alliance's evolution and its persistance long after the Cold War.     

From Top-Down to Trickle-Up Influence: Revisiting Assumptions About the Family in Political Socialization

A growing number of theorists are calling for a revival of research on political socialization based on the premise that children are active in their own civic development. We advance this argument a step further by proposing a model of family communication that reverses the roles of parents and children as conventionally understood in political socialization. Adolescent children are not merely receptive to political stimulation; they possess the power to transform patterns of family communication in ways that benefit themselves and their parents. We first challenge a series of interrelated assumptions about the nature and direction of influence in the family. We then document evidence of "trickle-up influence," in which child-initiated discussion--stimulated by a civics curriculum--prompts the parent to increase her civic competence via increased news media use, knowledge gain, and opinion formation. The parent's response reflects her desire to maintain a leadership role in the family, and more important from a theoretical perspective, it reveals the intrinsic forces of family adaptation that can make the home a powerful incubator of citizenship. Political growth occurs when the family system adjusts to reestablish equilibrium in response to exogenous factors or developmental needs that propel change. The ultimate purpose of this essay is to propose a functional model of family political communication. We apply theoretical perspectives from developmental literature to illustrate how political communication serves the family goals of autonomy and cohesion during various stages of the family life cycle.     

Trust and Distrust as Distinct Concepts: Why Studying Distrust in Institutions is Important

Abstract

Scholarship of trust in institutions has tended to see trust and distrust as opposites on one continuum. Theoretical advances have challenged this view and now consider trust and distrust as different constructs, and thus as constructs with different characteristics and partly different determinants. Current empirical research on trust in government has so far done little to incorporate these findings, and has largely continued to rely on traditional survey items assuming a trust–distrust continuum. We rely on the literature in organization studies and political science to argue in favour of measuring citizen trust and distrust as distinct concepts and discuss future research challenges.