An oasis of democracy in an authoritarian sea? Civil society,social, and institutional trust in Georgia

We examine whether the existence of civil society in Georgia has promoted social and institutional trust in the population. As much of the literature suggests, Georgia is different from its neighbors in that civil society development is more advanced. Does participation in civil society lead to more social and institutional trust? Using survey data from the Caucasus Barometer and the World Values Survey, we find that attitudes regarding social and institutional trust are more developed in Georgia than in its neighbors, and that activity in voluntary organizations is positively associated with social and institutional trust in Georgia.     

The In-securitisation of Youth in the South and East Mediterranean

The securitisation of youth as a social category has been well-documented. For the South and East Mediterranean (SEM) countries, moral panics over demographic youth bulges, Islamist radicalisation and protracted conflicts have placed youth centre-stage as a threat to the security of states and societies. Rejecting such assertions as themselves being what Foucault might have termed ‘technologies of power’ in a neoliberal order, and instead taking a critical approach to security, the spotlight is turned towards youth themselves as the referent object of study. This reveals the multidimensional hyper-precarity and insecuritisation of young peoples’ lives which derive from that same neoliberal economic order and the political structures that sustain it in the SEM countries. The finding resonates with other studies of new, insecure, formats for adulthood in Africa and suggests that we should look at the insecurity of young people today to understand global neoliberal futures in countries beyond the post-industrial ‘core’.     

Public support for coercive diplomacy: Exploring public opinion data from ten European countries

Scholarship has increasingly acknowledged the importance of public attitudes for shaping the European Union's Common Foreign and Security Policy. Economic sanctions emerged as one of CFSP's central tools. Yet despite the emergence of sanctions as a popular instrument in the EU foreign policy toolbox, public attitudes towards sanctions are yet to be studied in depth. This article explains public support for EU sanctions, using the empirical example of sanctions against Russia. It looks at geopolitical attitudes, economic motivations and ideational factors to explain the variation in public support for sanctions. The conclusion suggests that geopolitical factors are the most important, and that economic factors matter very little. Euroscepticism and anti‐Americanism play an important role in explaining the support for sanctions at the individual level.     

Civil society support for military coups: Bangladesh and the Philippines

As of yet, civil society support for military coups has hardly been investigated in depth. This article compares the attempted military coup in 2006 against Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, which received support from prominent civil society leaders, to the collaboration between civil society actors and the military-backed Caretaker Government that ruled Bangladesh from 2007 to 2008. It argues that in both cases, civil society support for military intervention can be traced to the weakness of the state.     

State Capacity,Regime Type,and Sustaining the Peace after Civil War

About half of the nations that experience civil war eventually relapse into renewed conflict within a few years after the original war ends. This observation has motivated a stream of research into the factors that affect the risk of peace failure in the aftermath of civil war. While the outcome of the previous civil war—for example, military victory versus peace agreement—structures the post-war environment in ways that affect the risk of peace failure, the capacity of the post-war state to enact and implement policies that affect the incentives for and capacity of groups to undertake armed violence as a means of advancing their interests should also affect the risks of peace failure. Using Geddes’ categories of nondemocratic regime types, we will present a theory of how different regime types have varying capacities to repress and/or implement accommodative policies that affect the risk of peace failure. We test propositions derived from this theory with a series of event history models. Our findings suggest that while peace agreements significantly increase the duration of post-civil war peace, peace agreements involving some types of nondemocratic regimes actually increase the risk of post-civil war peace failure.     

Do Civil Wars,Coups and Riots Have the Same Structural Determinants?

The literature on political instability focuses on institutional and leader survival or outcomes like civil wars and coups. We suggest that this approach overlooks lower levels of instability and that isolating outcomes understates the likelihood that they are manifestations of similar structural determinants. We extend the notion of instability to encompass jointly but distinctly civil wars, coups, and riots. Our explanation focuses on the role of political institutions and the related ethnopolitical strife over state power. Using data from 1950 to 2007, we find that the three outcomes share some determinants such as a factional partial democracy and the exclusion from power of a large proportion of the population; the inverted U-shaped effect of political institutions is driven by a subset of semidemocracies; and there is a substitution relationship between civil wars and coups emerging from the composition of governing coalitions.     

The role of foreign donors in rebuilding the Ukrainian nation-state

The viewpoint discusses the role of foreign donors in rebuilding the Ukrainian nation-state. It argues that a gardener’s care is needed – not guidance, traditional teaching, or direction, but assistance. Foreign donors’ activities should be oriented principally to the support of internal points of growth, social and economic. The task of empowering actors that show promise to propel socio-economic development from within can and should be prioritised. The policies of empowering local actors (as opposed to financing the government and established businesses) involve first and foremost supporting bottom-up initiatives and start-ups that have demonstrated their relevance and promise.     

特朗普政府“印太战略构想”评析

特朗普政府推出“印太战略构想”是为了应对世界大变局,替代奥巴马政府“亚太再平衡”战略和保持有利于美国的地区战略平衡。其主要特点包括：在“有原则的现实主义”和“美国优先的国家安全战略”指导下,加强印太地区联盟和伙伴体系;构建“美日澳印四边形安全合作机制”;形成有利于美国的印太地区经济关系。特朗普政府“印太战略构想”将增加美国联盟体系的内在矛盾;美日澳印四边形安全机制面临印度弱角问题;“印太战略构想”目标与财政资源不相称;战略目标之间自相矛盾。特朗普政府“印太战略构想”将进一步增加中美关系的复杂性和竞争性;向美国的盟国和伙伴国发出错误信号;有利于日本加强自身军事实力和扩张海权势力范围。     

Enabling collaborative synthesis in multi-partner programmes

Multi-partner consortia have emerged as an important modality for knowledge generation to address complex sustainability challenges. Establishing effective multi-partner consortia involves significant investment. This article shares lessons from the Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia (CARIAA), which aims to support policy and practice for climate change adaptation through a consortium model. Key lessons include the need to facilitate collaborative spaces to build trust and identify common interests, while accepting that this is not a guarantee of success; the importance of programmatic leadership to achieve synthesis; and the value of strategic planning in supporting motivation and alignment between partners.