Majoritarian values and women’s rights: police and judicial behavior in Tajikistan and Azerbaijan

This paper analyzes judicial and police behavior in dealing with cases of family violence and divorce in Tajikistan and Azerbaijan. Police and judges deliberately violate existing legal provisions to prevent women from divorcing or filing charges against their husbands in cases of domestic violence. While the law does not recognize religious marriages in Tajikistan, judges often rule to protect women’s living space after the dissolution of such unions. Drawing on rich interview and archival data, this behavior is explained by showing that judicial and police behavior reflects their biases, which in turn are a reflection of majoritarian norms in these countries. Since current laws are derived from Soviet codes, which were never internalized by the population, police and judges bend them to fit their understanding of social justice.     

Mark Swatek-Evenstein: A History of Humanitarian Intervention

Liverpool Law Review -     

Michael P. Scharf,Milena Sterio & Paul R. Williams: The Syrian Conflict’s Impact on International Law: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, 378 pp, £85 hardback,ISBN: 9781108491532

Liverpool Law Review -     

When corporate citizens ‘second-class’ national citizens: The antinomies of corporate-mediated social provisioning in Nigeria's oil province

This article explores the contradictions of corporate-aided social provisioning and shows how such contradictions impact on social existence in three oil- and gas-producing communities in Nigeria. It is based in part on the findings of the author's ethnographic work in the three communities. The analysis extends the growing scholarly debate that when the state abandons its developmental obligations to the citizenry, and business voluntarily steps into the centre stage of social provisioning by way of corporate citizenship, the resulting interventions could have profound counter-developmental consequences, especially at the grassroots.     

Towards an Explanation of Intercommunal Peace in Kabardino-Balkaria: Post-War Nationalities Policy and Late Soviet Society in the North Caucasus

Abstract

This essay examines socio-economic processes during the Soviet period to help explain the causes of peace and conflict in the post-Soviet North Caucasus. It argues that the absence of an ethnically stratified social structure in Kabardino-Balkaria is one of the reasons why this republic enjoyed relative intercommunal peace and stability in the 1990s and early 2000s. By contrast, the surrounding national republics of the North Caucasus that came out of the Soviet era with socio-economic disparities along ethnic lines witnessed higher levels of intercommunal conflict. This essay looks to the understudied topic of post-World War II and late Soviet nationalities policies to explain Kabardino-Balkaria’s divergent historical trajectory.     

Changing arenas for agricultural climate change adaptation in Vietnam

Great changes are underway in how climate and agricultural risks are managed in Vietnam. Uncertainties are emerging regarding the role of the state in managing these risks and what this implies for assumptions regarding hoped-for climate change transformations. Local government control is waning in relation to the expanding roles of the private sector and the growing autonomy of farmers themselves. This article presents cases that illustrate the ways that farmers, private investors, and local authorities are responding to climate risk within roles relating to the other risks involving markets, food security, and pressures on common property resources.     

The Totalisation of Human Social Practice: Open Marxists and Capitalist Social Relations, Foucauldians and Power Relations

This article critiques Open Marxism for an ontology which totalises human social practice—for Open Marxists, capitalist social relations are the singular constitutive source of human activity. Such a stance is superficially attractive yet ultimately inadequate, and I reinforce my case by demonstrating how other critical approaches—in this article, Foucauldian perspectives on power—suffer from similar deficiencies. Thus there is a need to resist the temptation of claiming to know how human social practice can be understood with recourse to a singular aspect (no matter how important) of such practice. I conclude that an excellent example of how to avoid such pitfalls is provided by Antonio Gramsci's writings, for they acknowledge the multifaceted yet nevertheless anchored existence lived by humans in capitalist societies.     

Emancipatory rural politics: confronting authoritarian populism

A new political moment is underway. Although there are significant differences in how this is constituted in different places, one manifestation of the new moment is the rise of distinct forms of authoritarian populism. In this opening paper of the JPS Forum series on ‘Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World’, we explore the relationship between these new forms of politics and rural areas around the world. We ask how rural transformations have contributed to deepening regressive national politics, and how rural areas shape and are shaped by these politics. We propose a global agenda for research, debate and action, which we call the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI, www.iss.nl/erpi). This centres on understanding the contemporary conjuncture, working to confront authoritarian populism through the analysis of and support for alternatives.