National identity-building and the “Ustaša-nostalgia” in Croatia: the past that will not pass

Most scholarship on post-Communist Croatia claims that the first Croatian president, Franjo Tu?man, intentionally rehabilitated the legacy of the World War II (WWII) Croatian Usta?a and its Nazi-puppet state. The rehabilitation of the Usta?a has been linked to Tu?man’s national reconciliation politics that tended toward a particular “forgetting of the past.” The national reconciliation was conceptualized as a joint struggle of both the Croatian anti-fascist Partisan and the Croatian WWII fascist Usta?a successors to achieve Croatian independence. However, the existing scholarship does not offer a comprehensive explanation of the nexus between national reconciliation and the rehabilitation of the Usta?a. Hence, this article will present how “Usta?a-nostalgia” does not stem from Tu?man’s intentions, but rather from the morphological gap occurring in Tu?man’s nation-building idea. Namely, Tu?man’s condemnation of the entire idea of Yugoslavism and Yugoslavia eventually brought about the perception that any historical agent advocating the idea of an independent Croatia is better than any form of Croatian Yugoslavism. Finally, the article will present how contemporary Croatian society is still seeped in “Usta?a-nostalgia” due to the hesitation of the post-Tu?man Croatian politics to come to terms with the legacy of his national reconciliation politics.     

The mioritic nation – an alternative approach to Moldovan national identity

Moldova has been widely argued to be a failed nation-building project, with two national identity discourses coexisting within Moldovan society and amongst Moldovan elites: Romanianism and Moldovanism. Challenging the dominance of these discourses in the literature, this article argues that in spite of its absence from the nationalism debate in Moldova, the ballad Miori?a is a key element for the Moldovan articulation of national identity. The analysis employs a discursive approach focused on language as a constituting phenomenon and draws from Miori?a's appeal to the grass roots level, its banality in day-to-day life, and, more importantly, its promotion by Moldovan cultural elites. This latter part focuses specifically on the writings of novelist Ion Dru??. Dru?? places Miori?a at the very center of his construction of Moldovan national identity. He highlights its links with Moldovan history, culture, religious thinking, and geographical space, both reproducing a structure similar to the two national identity discourses, Romanianism and Moldovanism, and building on their similarities. But more importantly, Dru??'s representation of national identity sheds light on the possibility of an all-encompassing Moldovan identity, overcoming the existing cleavage, and a series of mechanisms that can be employed to achieve this.     

Erzählungen des Kindes‐ und Erwachsenenschutzes: Eine Anwendung und Erweiterung des Narrative Policy Frameworks

The Child and Adult Protection Authorities (KESB) have been the subject of controversial discussion since their establishment in 2013. The reform of the Guardianship Law provided for an institutional shift away from local guardianship authorities to regional specialist authorities. This article uses the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to examine the history of today’s controversy, simultaneously proposing an analytic strengthening of said framework. Previous NPF studies summarize policy actors into opponents and proponents. As a result, we do not know whether different actors use different narratives. We therefore separate the expert from the MP discourse. The analysis shows that the experts' arguments for a new institutional arrangement and a person‐oriented narrative dominated, which put the fundamental rights of the persons affected by guardianship measures up front. The study contributes to the understanding of the current controversy, in which a person‐oriented narrative seems to be dominant again, directed against the new authorities.     

Terrorist violence and the enrollment of psychology in predicting Muslim extremism: critical terrorism studies meets critical algorithm studies

Discourse on terrorist violence has long facilitated an especially liberal form of securitisation. Originally evoked in reference to anarchists and communists, a rational consideration of terrorist violence, inaugurated by the concept, asks for deferred judgement about the nature of, or reasons behind, violence related to terror on the premise that state and international legal norms governing the legitimate use of violence fail to circumscribe the proper capacities of the state to regulate and explain terrorism. Where sovereign powers along with their military and civilian instruments of coercion are deemed unable to regulate violence effectively, analysts of terrorist violence and their readership are invited to consider and cultivate new sensibilities. Beginning in the 1980s, studies by psychologists found renewed urgency among a growing cadre of interdisciplinary terror experts who found religion, Islam especially, a key variable of analysis. I situate their contributions in a longer history of secular and racialising discourse about terrorist violence. Central to this history are practices of reading, translating, interpreting and archiving texts. Evidence for the argument is based on the analysis of an algorithm that allegedly predicts the likelihood of terrorist strikes by counting words spoken by al-Qa?ida leaders and correlating their frequency with over 30 psychological categories.     

Regionalisierung und Dezentralisierung in Mittel- und Südosteuropa 1997–2007

The review essay takes stock of the last decade of decentralisation and regionalisation research in Central and South Eastern Europe. Classifying the existing scholarship with regard to its focus of analysis, its explanatory programme, and methodological predilections, we suggest to distinguish three different agendas: system transformation, EU conditionality and subnational governance. We argue that scholarly interest in regionalisation and decentralisation issues from the perspective of state transformation or Europeanisation is vanishing. Instead, we witness the emergence of a subnational governance approach which is rooted in comparative politics and policy analysis. The debate about decentralisation and regionalisation in CEEC is thus in a process of “normalising” and converging with the Western European subnational political discourse.     

自然法思想对民法和国际法的贡献

自然法理论与罗马法学相结合,使罗马法优越于同时代其他国家的法律;自然法观念促使人们发出对法典化的呼唤,著名的《法国民法典》和《德国民法典》得以诞生;自然法是国际法的基础或渊源。     

Managementreformen in internationalen Organisationen: Eine vergleichende Analyse der Europäischen Kommission und des OECD-Sekretariats

The article comparatively investigates reforms of human resource management in the European Commission and the OECD Secretariat. It analyzes to what extent both organizations have adjusted their respective structures towards the ideal type of the so-called New Public Management (NPM). The empirical findings show that reforms towards NPM are more pronounced in the Commission than in the OECD Secretariat. These findings are surprising for two reasons. First, it seems rather paradoxical that the OECD as central promoter of NPM at the international level lags behind the global trend when it comes to reforming its own structures. Second, this result is in contradiction with theoretical expectations, as they can be derived from theories of institutional isomorphism. To nevertheless account for the surprising results, it is necessary to modify and complement existing theories especially with regard to the scope conditions of their causal mechanisms.     

The intersectionality of gender,sexuality, and religion: novelties and continuities in Turkey during the AKP era

ABSTRACT

This article argues that in the AKP era, gender and sexuality play a central role in reshaping the secular-religious divide to instil ‘yeni milli’ (new national) – or as AKP members call it, ‘yerli ve milli’ (homegrown and national)- values. Adopting a feminist and reflexive approach, this article seeks to demonstrate that Erdo?an and the AKP have used gender and sexuality-related issue areas not as diversions to highjack the public agenda, as it is often assumed, but as a medium to regulate the neoliberal redistribution of conservative values. After a brief presentation of the historical background of the gendered evolution of the secular-religious divide in Turkish politics, this article focuses on the following three particular cases: the policies and discourse on LGBTI rights; the link that was established between the reproductive rights of women and ethnic identity; and how the AKP created new types of ‘other men’ and ‘other women.’ The article also seeks to show that in each case the meanings attributed to the secular and the religious in the secular-religious divide have shifted accordingly and that shift was reflective of, and was used to instil the particular set of values supportive of particular political positions.     

Reflections on the prehistory of the Abdālī Afghans

ABSTRACT

The Abdālī Afghans-Pashtuns played a leading role in the creation of the Durrānī polity (est. 1747) – the precursor of present-day Afghanistan. Given their lasting contributions to the process of state formation in Central Asia, it is somewhat surprising that the early history of the Abdālī remains obscure. Nevertheless, authors of recent generations have not been deterred from speculating on the origins of the Abdālī. This article explores the prevailing theories concerning Abdālī prehistory, including the tribe’s purported connection to both the Hephthalites and the Sufi saint Abū A?mad Abdāl, as well as some of the motivations undergirding these theories. It also considers the place of the Abdālī within the Afghan-Pashtun tribal system and ventures to reconcile their Afghan identity with their alleged non-Afghan origins. The present study thus aims to offer a more nuanced understanding of the history of the Abdālī – the most politically prominent group in Afghanistan’s history.     

单位共同犯罪及其刑事责任剖析

单位共同犯罪,是我国刑事立法和理论的一个发展,文章对单位共同犯罪的特征、形态、责任,在与自然人共同犯罪进行比较的基础上,作了具体剖析