Turkey's Reform Effort Reconsidered, 1987–2004

The Helsinki Summit of the European Council in 1999 was a turning point in terms of clarifying a concrete membership perspective regarding candidate status for Turkey and accession to the European Union. Political reforms in Turkey to complete the 1993 Copenhagen criteria also gained significant momentum in the aftermath of the Summit. However, arguments stressing the influence of European Union conditionality seriously undervalue the gradual political transformation that Turkey was already undergoing in the years before 1999 and the societal pressure in Turkey that lay behind it. Basing Turkey's eligibility for membership wholly on the effects of European Union conditionality makes the democratic process extremely vulnerable to the still-delicate process of European Union–Turkey relations. The article aims to develop a more coherent explanation of the European Union's impact on Turkey's politics between 1987 and 2004, by offering an alternative framework of analysis based on Moravcsik's analysis of the European human-rights regime and Risse's theory of communicative action. The main argument is that the principal dynamics driving recent democratization in Turkey were its newfound location within the European human-rights regime and the increasing power of ‘European argument’ as an alternative way of resolving domestic conflicts.     

Legal education in Nigeria: an evaluation of the recruitment practice for the teaching of law as a career

This article makes a critical assessment of legal education in Nigeria, focusing on the standard of hiring for the teaching of law as a career in the country. Legal academics are hired based upon an accreditation standard that requires a vocational qualification determined through a call to the Nigerian Bar. The article argues that making a vocational qualification a criterion for academic appointment – apart from other achievements demonstrated through higher law degrees – inhibits innovation in teaching and learning and needs to change. This change is premised on three reasons: the growth of interdisciplinary legal scholarship; the trend in the legal marketplace; and the correlation between a law faculty and a department of religion. And it concludes with some proposals to think about for a more scholarly approach towards the teaching of law within Nigerian academia. The aim of this article is to inform the essential dichotomy between legal scholarship and practice, and the transnational aspirations of legal academics, for those involved in the development of law teaching and study, as well as those concerned with educational policy and administration around the world.     

Extending the Theory of Goal Ambiguity to Programs: Examining the Relationship between Goal Ambiguity and Performance

One of the main assumptions of empirical studies conducted on the influence of goal ambiguity in public management is that goal ambiguity relates negatively to performance. However, this relationship has rarely been tested at the program level because common goal ambiguity and performance measures for disparate government programs have been scant. The availability of Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) results for a number of federal programs provides the opportunity for an analysis testing the foregoing assumption. Measures of program goal ambiguity—target, timeline, and program evaluation—are shown to have negative relationships with different program performance scores, taking into account alternative influences or biases on performance. This analysis extends the theory of goal ambiguity by providing the first analysis of large‐sample federal programs. The theoretical and practical implications are presented in the discussion and conclusion.     

Somalia versus Captain ‘Hook’: assessing the EU's security actorness in countering piracy off the Horn of Africa

An internal security problem of Somalia—state failure from internal conflict resulting in increased piracy—has increasingly become an external security problem for the European Union (EU). This article contributes to analysing the role of the EU as a security actor in countering piracy off the Horn of Africa, by examining three different dimensions of the EU response to this problem: (a) the immediate EU response (the EU military mission EUNAVFOR Atalanta); (b) the medium-term EU response (the Critical Maritime Routes (CMR) programme launched by the European Commission); and (c) the long-term EU response (development and security assistance). This article concludes that the EU has been very active in addressing piracy through its naval task-force to protect maritime transport in the western Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden, as well as its efforts to enhance regional counter-piracy capacities and thematic and geographical financial instruments. The EU thus has taken up the fight against ‘Captain Hook’.