Infiltration and the making of Israel's emotional regime in the state's early years

After the 1948 war, the cease-fire lines between Israel and its neighbours remained porous. Palestinian refugees crossed the borders. Some returned to cultivate their fields; others crossed the border as thieves. Some intended to murder Israelis and wreak terror. Most of the refugees who made their way into Israel were not violent, but their presence frightened Jewish civilians living in frontier regions. Policy-makers and cultural agents of the social elite mobilized to mould the threatened population into Israelis who could display fortitude. The article analyzes the emotional regime the Israeli state sought to inculcate and the desirable and undesirable outcomes of this policy.     

Threats to Leaders’ Political Survival and Pro-Government Militia Formation

It is puzzling why leaders delegate authority to pro-government militias (PGMs) at the expense of professional armed forces. Several state-level explanations, ranging from low state capacity to blame evasion for human rights violations have been proposed for the establishment of PGM linkages. These explanations lack focus on the individuals making decisions to form PGMs: national leaders. It is argued that leaders create linkages with PGMs to facilitate leaders’ political survival in the event of their deposition. Threats to leaders’ survival come from the military, foreign powers, or domestic actors outside the ruling coalition. As costs of leader deposition are low for the state, leaders facing threats from one or all of these sources must invest in protection from outside of the security apparatus. The argument is tested through data on PGM linkage formation and threats to political survival. Results show that leaders under coup threat are more likely to form PGM linkages, while threats from foreign actors make leaders particularly more likely to form linkages with ethnic or religious PGMs. The findings strongly suggest that PGM linkage formation is driven by leader-level desire for political survival, rather than a host of state-level explanations.     

志愿服务与社会工作专业发展

2008年,是中国人“难忘”和“不寻常”的一年,也是中国社会工作“难得”和“大发展”的一年。作为舶来品的社会工作,经历过由志愿性到专业性社会工作的发展历程。2008年的四川汶川大地震和北京奥运会,使志愿服务在中国参与率俱增,志愿精神深入人心。志愿服务帮助中国人民战胜特大灾害,伴随北京人民向世界贡献了“无与伦比”、“最伟大的”奥运会,同时推进了中国现代文明程度的提升,促进了中国社会工作专业的发展。     

Post-Cold War Vietnam: stay low,learn, adapt and try to have fun – but what about the party?†

The paper compares political ideas and acts in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev and in Communist Vietnam. It argues that the Gorbachev group, committed to progressive change, concluded that power granted to them by their position in the Soviet system needed to be eliminated, creating a ‘boot strap’ problem. To secure progressive change they had first to destroy their own power base. By contrast, the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) attempted, in the two decades after the emergence of a market economy in 1989–1991, to rule an increasingly open society through Soviet political institutions. By the late ‘noughties’ Vietnam faced a crisis of domestic sovereignty, with politics largely a matter of spoils, with policy largely irrelevant and unimplementable, and usually blocked by powerful interests. The paper argues that Hinsley's notion of the sovereignty issue makes this situation far easier to analyse. It argues that the Gorbachev group's analysis would have led to them predicting that the VCP's attempt to use Soviet institutions to rule over a globalising and increasingly open society with a market economy would lead to a crisis of political authority, and that they would have been correct. This leads to the counter-intuitive position that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a success ? in that it managed to solve a serious political problem, i.e. how to create the preconditions for a political system suited to a market economy in a relatively open society – and the VCP a failure.     

Political context,policy networks and policy change: the complexity of transition in Hong Kong

Abstract

Central to the debates on the transition of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty is how this process has affected change in the policy process and policy outputs. Many see policy change as a result of the evolving political environment in Hong Kong following the political transition. This article, however, adopts the notion of policy networks and argues that the analysis of policy change cannot be reduced to a simple contextual stimulus – the policy alteration model. A case study – ‘the development of civic education’ – demonstrates the importance of policy networks, as a particular structure of government and group relations in decision making, in explaining the course of policy change. It is apparent that the relationship between regime change and political liberalization, on the one hand, and established networks, on the other, tends to be complex and dialectical in Hong Kong. Despite the importance of sovereignty transition and political restructuring, the effect of contextual factors on public policy greatly depends on the nature of the network involved.     

Unveiling Nepal's Civil Society

The main purpose of this paper is to provide information about Nepal's civil society as far as possible, as the same has become much contested in recent years. The article looks into the different traditions (from traditional to post-modern) of civil society in Nepal as an endeavour to take stock of where it stands vis-à-vis with various factors in the context of economy, polity, and society. The paper argues that, although Nepal has a very long tradition of civil society, the extant one is highly politicized. Part of the problem with politicization lies with perpetual political instability and part with the way civil society has come to be understood. In the context of Nepal, there are yet no clear tools developed to map the civil society. It concludes that one cannot have water-tight compartmentalization of civil society and other societies as they are interdependent, but when civil society groups lose the civility factor, they are bound to face legitimacy questions—which perhaps is the case in Nepal.     

日非经贸关系及安倍政权的对非经济政策

日本对非经济关系虽然已有数十年的历史,但进展缓慢,日本学界及经济界也常常批评日本政府对非洲不够重视。90年代以后日本充分利用非洲发展会议（TICAD）这一平台,全方位地加大了对非洲的关注力度,尤其是目前的安倍政权更是推出了一系列的非洲经济政策,旨在增强同非洲各国的经济关系,谋求更多的经济利益和国际话语权。     

An Elemental Definition of Democracy and its Advantages for Comparing Political Regime Types

The way democracy is studied today is confusing due to the many definitions applied. More importantly, it is also flawed in that several cases are excluded as they suffer from the unfortunate circumstances that they have undergone a particular sequence of democratic developments according to a pattern not recognized. This article attempts to spark a debate that will hopefully lead to a new definition of democracy – one that is neutral in its view of the different elements of democracy, can be applied to regimes across the globe, and which also facilitates comparative studies of all kinds. To begin the debate, the article examines previous definitions – and particularly the use of diminished subtypes – before putting forward an alternative: the so-called ‘elemental definition’.     

Conceptualizing and measuring subnational democracy across Indian states

India is often credited for its success as the world’s largest democracy, but variation in subnational democracy across its states has not been systematically incorporated into scholarship on subnational regimes. This paper develops a conceptualization of subnational democracy based on four constitutive dimensions – turnover, contestation, autonomy and clean elections – and introduces a comprehensive dataset to measure each of the dimensions between 1985 and 2013. The inclusion of India – an older parliamentary democracy with a centralized federal system – broadens the universe of cases for the study of subnational regimes, and reveals variation across constitutive dimensions that has not yet been theorized. The paper shows that threats to subnational democracy come from multiple directions, including the central government and non-state armed actors, that subnational variation persists even decades after a transition at the national-level, and that subnational democracy declines in some states in spite of the national democratic track record.     

The transnational protection regime and democratic breakthrough in Taiwan and South Korea

External state pressure is understood to have played a causally significant role in democratic breakthrough in Taiwan and South Korea during the 1980s. This article problematizes the international dimensions of democratization in Taiwan and South Korea by first providing a revisionist account of external agency which involved complex networks of transnational nonstate and substate actors. These included human rights activists, Christian churches and related ecumenical organizations, members of the Taiwanese and Korean diaspora communities in the US, academics and students, foreign journalists, and members of the US Congress. In forming a transnational “protection regime” during the 1970s and 1980s to protect the political opposition from repressive governments, they contributed to the development of effective democratic movements. The case studies provide us with a more comprehensive view of the international dimensions of democratization, speaking to both the country specific and general theoretical literatures on democratization at the same time.