Reinterpreting India's Rise through the Middle Power Prism

Abstract

India's spectacular rise in recent years has been the source of hyperbolic theorising and speculation on its major power status. Middle power theory offers a set of dynamic analytical parameters which allow for re-evaluating India's global influence and identifying both strengths and weaknesses of its power projection and resources. Placing emphasis on themes of Third World leadership, good international citizenship, multilateral activism, bridge-building diplomacy, and coalition-building with like-minded states, the middle power concept can encapsulate key aspects of India's contemporary agency and account for structural dynamics which constitute a reformist world-view through the reconfiguration of the Indian state within the existing world order. Overall, middlepowermanship delineates fundamental continuities in India's foreign policy tradition, epitomises India's existing position in the neoliberal world order, while providing a good indication of the directions India will take on the global stage in the short and medium-term.     

Open-source intelligence and privacy by design

As demonstrated by other papers on this issue, open-source intelligence (OSINT) by state authorities poses challenges for privacy protection and intellectual-property enforcement. A possible strategy to address these challenges is to adapt the design of OSINT tools to embed normative requirements, in particular legal requirements. The experience of the VIRTUOSO platform will be used to illustrate this strategy. Ideally, the technical development process of OSINT tools is combined with legal and ethical safeguards in such a way that the resulting products have a legally compliant design, are acceptable within society (social embedding), and at the same time meet in a sufficiently flexible way the varying requirements of different end-user groups. This paper uses the analytic framework of privacy design strategies (minimise, separate, aggregate, hide, inform, control, enforce, and demonstrate), arguing that two approaches for embedding legal compliance seem promising to explore in particular. One approach is the concept of revocable privacy with spread responsibility. The other approach uses a policy mark-up language to define Enterprise Privacy Policies, which determine appropriate data handling.     

Actively Cultivating Policy Similarity. A Regional Strategy in Education Policy in France and Germany

Regionalization processes across Western Europe have triggered analyses of regional policy divergence. Yet, in a number of cases, regional governments appear to have deliberately strived to achieve policy conformity. Previous research tends to emphasize exogenous explanations of regional policy convergence. In contrast, this paper addresses the issue of regional policy convergence by focusing on endogenous explanatory factors. Its objective is to carry out an investigation of when, how, and with what effect a ‘desire for conformity’ arises, and contends that regional governments may actively cultivate policy similarity as a strategy to develop or secure their policy capacity. Specifically, the paper argues that the adoption of this strategy is contingent upon two requirements that may or may not be met, and that its outcome is the convergence on targeted dimensions of regional policies. The two requirements are: (i) a countrywide public preference for policy uniformity in the policy area of concern, and (ii) the presence of a threat posed to regional policy capacity by various political entrepreneurs, including the central state, who blame regions for providing divergent policies on particular dimensions. This paper is based on the comparison of two case studies where regional governments deliberately pursued policy conformity on targeted dimensions of their education policy: school-building policy in France and curricula policy in Germany. The two case studies also present dissimilar features that make it possible to investigate the effects of institutional setting and policy distribution on the adoption and operation of the active-cultivation-of-policy-similarity strategy.     

The OECD and “The Rest”: Analyzing the Limits of Policy Transfer

Abstract

Prompted by the rise of the emerging economies and the growing importance of the G20, the OECD has formally announced its intention of establishing itself as a key actor in global policy coordination. As part of this ambition, it has embarked on cultivating closer relations with five G20 countries it designated as key partners through the so-called “Enhanced Engagement” programme: Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa. This article mobilizes concepts from the policy transfer literature to explain why the OECD’s attempts to increasingly involve all five countries in its policy have fallen short of its original ambitions, and also why the transfer of its policy work has been uneven across policy and country issue.     

报复社会型行为的模仿机理及其阻断

不断发生的报复社会事件对我国社会稳定形成了严重的挑战,其后大量模仿事件的发生说明我国社会结构和控制能力出现了问题。通过对大量报复社会型行为研究发现,导致此类模仿事件大量产生有两方面原因,一是行为人个体的心理障碍;二是外部环境原因,包括表达诉求机制的缺失、媒体的不当传播、行为实施成本低廉、社会认同心理的出现等。阻断反社会行为的模仿,需要建立良好的社会利益分配和社会保障机制,加强对重点人群的管控工作,积极协调改善媒体的传播效应,同时要保护好"易感人群",加强被害预防工作。     

制定我国《药品再评价管理办法》的法律依据及有关问题分析

本文通过介绍我国开展药品再评价的法律依据,探讨制定我国《药品再评价管理办法》的必要性和急迫性,并 就有关实际工作中存在的问题提出了解决建议。     

Policy or person? What voters want from their representatives on Twitter

Social media have the potential to transform democracies as they allow for direct contact between representatives and represented. Politicians can use social media to show their policy positions but they can also give insight into their private lives. Based on survey experiments in Germany and Switzerland we show that social media messages about politicians’ private lives rather deter voters. Instead, we find that voters prefer candidates that communicate policy positions. The effect of a policy-oriented communication style on Twitter can even lead to appreciating a politician from a different party in Switzerland, which has an electoral system that gives a strong incentive to cultivate a personal vote.     

西方政策网络理论研究的最新进展及其评价

近年来西方政策网络理论研究出现了三个明显趋势:1、理论研究上从新制度主义的视角探讨政策网络为什么产生、为什么改变和为什么能够持续的深层理论问题;2、实践问题上重点探讨了政策网络的管理问题,包括政府间网络的管理问题;3、重视政策网络与政策执行效果关系研究.     

Land use and forestry based CDM in scientific peer-reviewed literature pre-and post-COP 9 in Milan

This article explores the science-policy interactions between peer-reviewed literature and decisions and declarations on Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) projects in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) taken at Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings. The results are based on a literature analysis capturing 88 articles published from 1997 to 2005. By using a matrix search method and a structured reading form, the method and analysis focussed on whether issues of CDM and LULUCF were presented as ‘supportive of the inclusion of LULUCF’ and ‘critical of the inclusion of LULUCF’. A matrix search method and a structured reading form were applied. Of the 88 articles, 66% included discussions supportive to the inclusion of LULUCF. Forty-nine percent had a first author affiliated in natural sciences. Only 19% had first authors affiliated in developing countries while the same number for contributing authors was 38%. The results show no clear connection between scientific literature and decisions and declarations, but indicate that policymakers set the research agenda by declarations, while researchers feed the process up until decisions are made.

未成年人模仿黑社会犯罪的特点及其成因探论

未成年人模仿黑社会犯罪已成为时下社会问题的一大难点。从发展轨迹来看,其演变过程具有由劣到恶、由恶变黑的量变到质变的规律特点,其成员属于易犯罪未成年人群体;从思想意识来看,形成了一种反社会的有着独特的价值观念、文化心理、行为方式的亚文化现象;从组织形态来看,以黑恶犯罪活动所得为主要经济来源,具有顽固的团伙性和职业性;从犯罪手段来看,以武力为后盾,主观恶性强,具有凶残性和佘开性。生理早熟和心理素质滞后的矛盾、家庭教育的偏差和家庭环境不良、学校教书与育人脱节、社会环境的消极影响是未成年人模仿黑社会犯罪的主要成因。