From Reform to Resistance: Universities and Student Mobilisation in Egypt and Morocco before and after the Arab Uprisings

University students played a pivotal role in the Arab uprisings in 2011. This article explores the link between reform policies and social mobilisation through a comparison of university reforms and student protests in Egypt and Morocco. It argues that both—the fabrication of social policies and the formation of protest—are rooted in the specific political configuration of authoritarian regimes. Egypt and Morocco have both embarked on internationalising higher education, but the monarchy was more successful in embracing change through a more pluralistic type of governance. Hence, Morocco was able to escape the disruptive dynamics of the uprising, unlike Egypt, which was more reluctant to establish a new type of governance.     

Niches of agency: managing state-region relations through law in Russia

State-region relations involve negotiations over the power to (re)-constitute local spaces. While in federal states, power-sharing ostensibly gives regions a role over many space-making decisions, power asymmetries affect this role. Where centralization trends may erode regional agency, law can provide an important tool by which regions can assert influence. We examine a case where, in response to a proposed Russian federal law highly unpopular with a regional population, the region's government sought to ameliorate its potential impacts by using opportunities to co-produce the law, amending regional legislation, and strategically implementing other federal and regional laws to protect its territory.     

Literatur

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

A renewed attention to the past

‘A book may be good for nothing; or there may be onlyone thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?’(Samuel Johnson) This section is dedicated to the review of ideas, articles,books, films and other media. It will include replies (and rejoinders)to articles, the evaluation of new ideas or proposals, and reviewsof books and articles both directly and indirectly related tointellectual property law. Conventional wisdom states that the main objective of patentregimes is to support industrial innovation. This suggestion,which forms the core legitimacy behind their being, is controversial.First, the actual connection between those regimes and industrialinnovation raises doubts in practice. Second,     

A note on the timing of investments in litigation contests

Allowing the plaintiff and defendant to choose the order in which they invest effort into trial, we show that the timing of litigation efforts is critically dependent on the level of defendant fault. For a high (low) level of defendant fault, the plaintiff invests after (before) the defendant’s investment choice. The equilibrium order of litigation efforts in turn is decisive for (a) the level of total litigation effort, (b) justice achieved by the litigation contest, and (c) plaintiffs’ incentives to bring suit. As a result, the endogenous timing bears vital implications for policy makers.     

Challenging the boundaries of democratic inclusion? Young people's attitudes about the distribution of voting rights

In theoretical debates about the quality of democratic rule, the core question concerns membership, and the adequate constitution of the demos: who is entitled to participate in choosing political representatives? This article enhances the predominantly normative debates on democratic inclusion and boundary making by taking an empirical perspective and analysing attitudes of 16–18-year-old teenagers regarding preconditions for the distribution of voting rights. Based on data stemming from 13 focus groups conducted in three Austrian cities in spring 2010, our findings show that principles related to both competence (autonomy, knowledge) and community (showing concern, being subjected to the law) matter when it comes to democratic boundary making. Furthermore, the study reveals that, in trying to explain the formation of juvenile attitudes about boundary issues, institutions are relevant when related to the conjunctive experiences manifested in the group-specific habitus: while young immigrants argue more inclusionarily than natives in terms of community-related preconditions, especially as far as the roles of language and citizenship are concerned, students argue more exclusionarily than apprentices when it comes to competence-related preconditions, especially civic education. Boundary making affects social groups independent of national origin or citizenship and can therefore be considered a permanent process beyond international migration.