Judicial politics in Belgium

The judiciary in Belgium is an independent branch of government and has succeeded in maintaining its independence against many odds. Not being bound by any particular method of inter‐pretion and able to control to a certain extent the machinery of government, the judges have been, whenever needed, cautiously innovative. The public is certainly not hostile, as far as such innovations are concerned. Constitutional law, morals, human rights and particularly economic law have been the areas in which judges have been most willing or compelled to take creative steps. Because these individual decisions are drafted as applications of existing general principles and statutes and largely reflect the prevailing views of society, very little criticism has been voiced about this hidden and cautious legal activism.     

A Cross-National Analysis of the Mediating Effect of Economic Deprivation on Crime

This study develops and tests a model of economic deprivation and crime using data from 52 nations for the years 1995–1999. The model, centering on the role of absolute and relative economic deprivation in mediating crime, predicts that social change causes variation in economic deprivation, which, in turn, leads to variation in crime rates. The results show that the relative deprivation variable, income inequality, mediates a large portion of the effects of two social change variables, population growth and urbanization, on homicide, while one of the absolute deprivation variables, GDP, transmits a great part of the effects of social change variables on theft. Both social change variables were found to have a weak direct connection to homicide and theft rates. Implications for policy and future research are discussed.     

Preferences for Police Response to Domestic Violence: A Comparison of College Students in Three Chinese Societies

While a large amount of research has been conducted in the West on domestic violence related issues, only a small number of studies have focused specifically on Chinese societies. Using survey data collected from Beijing, Hong Kong, and Taipei, this study compares college students’ preferences for traditional and proactive police intervention into domestic violence and assesses the determinants of such preferences in the three Chinese societies. The findings indicate that Hong Kong students showed the highest level of support for traditional police response, followed by students in Beijing and Taipei, while students in Taipei displayed the strongest preference for proactive police response, followed by students in Hong Kong and Beijing. College students’ preferences for traditional police response were shaped mainly by their locality, whereas their preferences for proactive police intervention were influenced chiefly by their attitudes toward violence and gender roles. Directions for future research are discussed.     

Fighting for the Soviet Union 2.0: Digital nostalgia and national belonging in the context of the Ukrainian crisis

This paper focuses on the use of Soviet-era symbols, myths, and narratives within groups on VKontakte social media site over the initial stage of the Ukraine crisis (2014–2015). The study is based on qualitative content analysis of online discussions, visual materials, and entries by group administrators and commentators. It also applies link-analysis in order to see how groups on social media are interrelated and positioned online. It reveals that these online groups are driven primarily by neo-Soviet myths and hopes for a new version of the USSR to emerge. Over time, the main memory work in these groups shifted from Soviet nostalgia and “pragmatic” discourse to the use of re-constructed World War II memories in order to justify Russian aggression and to undermine national belonging in Ukraine. Reliance on the wartime mythology allowed for the labelling of Euromaidan supporters as “fascists” that should be eliminated “once again.” This powerful swirl of re-created Soviet memories allowed effective mobilization on the ground and further escalation of the conflict from street protests to the armed struggle.     

‘The battlefield is in Brussels’: Islamophobia in the Visegrád Four in its global context

ABSTRACT

A common popular and scholarly opinion of Islamophobia in the so-called ‘Visegrád Four’ or ‘V4’ (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary) sees it as caused by circumstances unique to Eastern Europe. Specifically to blame, it is alleged, is a distinctive local history of intolerance, especially antisemitism, and the fact that under socialism these countries were exempt from the post-war soul-searching that took place in Western Europe. Kalmar’s paper, instead, decentres Islamophobia in the V4 by considering it less as a limited regional phenomenon, and more in terms of how it is linked to Islamophobia in other European Union member states and the United States. As elsewhere, foremost among the conditions that encourage Islamophobia in the V4 is the alienation of certain publics on the periphery, which is an effect of global neoliberal policies. These have generated, along with Islamism and Islamophobia, a reinvented, essentializing discourse of difference between Eastern and Western Europe. In spite of that alleged difference, however, Islamophobic populism in the V4 is not just a regional threat to liberal democracy, but targets all of the European Union and the world.     

Collective learning and regime dynamics under uncertainty: labour reform and the way to autocracy in Russia

The article questions the structural approach to autocratic transition that sees government as knowingly and purposely building autocracy, and contributes to the tradition emphasizing the plurality of possible regime developments and the role of contingency therein, by providing a more systematic treatment of such contingency. We offer a path-dependent theory of political change and use insights from cognitive institutionalism to show how ad hoc policy reform practices become accepted as a trusted way of interaction by political actors and how they “learn” their way into autocracy. This intuition is substantiated with a case-study of the labour reform in Putin’s Russia. The early 2000s marked a surge in uncertainty in Russian politics caused by the succession crisis and the profound political turnover it triggered. This uncertainty could have resolved in a number of ways, each leading to a different political development. We trace the actual way out of this uncertainty and show that the major factor to condition further regime trajectory was the way social reforms were conducted. The course of these reforms determined the ruling coalition and the institutions that ensure credible commitment within its ranks (the dominant party), and contributed to crowding out the political market and opposition decay.