Using the Law as a ‘Harmonious Weapon’: The Ambiguities of Legal Activism in Favour of Migrant Workers in China

Abstract

Legal mobilization has spread in China over the past 20 years and is generally considered by both activists and scholars as a way to advance democracy and rule of law. Focusing on the mobilization in favour of migrant workers and on politically moderate practices, which are both more frequent and widely held as more successful, I argue to the contrary that resistance and reproduction of political domination are mutually constitutive. Public interest litigation and administrative litigation appear as new forms of political participation that constitute an internal regulation to the authoritarian regime, thus contributing to explain the regime's capacity to adapt and its durability. This article also accounts for new strategies developed by some lawyers that shun the courts and use law to ‘empower civil society’ and that thus do not contribute to structural reproduction. Though activists are struggling to turn their strategies into more institutionalized practices, they remain an ad hoc mechanism of internal control.     

Sexuality,identity and dissidence: new scholarship on sub-Saharan Africa

In this review essay, I consider three recent monographs on sexuality and sexual cultures in Africa. Each of these three books grapple with the “problem orientation” of scholarship on African sexuality, in which sexuality is conceptualised primarily with reference to AIDS, homophobia and violence. The authors move beyond this problem orientation through a common concern investigating the poles of “modernity” vs “tradition”, “global” vs “local” and “authentic” vs “imported” as these concepts are deployed by activists, policymakers, and ordinary people talking about sex. All three authors also engage the question of how and why social changes happen, treating sexual identities and practices as dynamic, emergent phenomena.     

韩国的环保运动和绿党初探

韩国的环保运动和绿党建设在世界上并不属于先进之列,但在亚洲比很多国家先行一步。正是这先行的一步,为文化相似、经济发展阶段相近的周边国家提供了借鉴经验。20世纪90年代全面展开的韩国环保运动,一直坚持草根政治路线,致力模仿欧洲绿党建党。2012年3月成立的绿党,将政治选举和社会运动结合在一起,具有运动政党的典型特征。但是,由于韩国政治制度和社会环境还没有为绿党的发展提供必要的条件,韩国绿党不仅很难进入国会,甚至不能继续正式注册。如何进一步丰富政党政策,巩固政党组织,增加绿色理念的社会认知度,直接决定韩国绿党能否获得新生。     

Is sextremism the new feminism? Perspectives from Pussy Riot and Femen

As Pussy Riot has changed the face of political protest in Russia, to the south, Ukraine has seen the emergence of Femen, famous for their topless protests against everything from sex tourism and trafficking to hot water shut-offs in Kyiv to sexism in the Ukrainian government to Putin's visits to Ukraine. Their concurrent appearance in the post-Soviet sphere encourages a discussion around the mobilization of sexuality as protest in the region. Both groups appropriate sexual language and imagery as well as physical sexuality in protest of their current regimes. This article engages the question of similarities between the two groups’ efforts and considers what differences structure their political goals and philosophies. What potential does the global visibility of these groups have to influence an emerging women's movement, and, more generally, how can sexuality be harnessed as a unifying force in anti-government activism in post-socialist Russia and Ukraine?     

Political engagement and participation of Thai citizens: the rural–urban disparity

The nature of citizen participation and engagement in public life in Thailand has changed dramatically over the last decade. This article focuses on explaining the changing pictures of political engagement – political interest, knowledge, and efficacy – among rural and urban Thai citizens since the House of Representatives election in 2001. The major attempt made in this article also to explain how these changes affect patterns of political activism (i.e. in voting, political contacting, and protesting activities), particularly between the rural and urban Thai voters. Relying on three latest survey data taken from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, the article suggests that the factors facilitating greater political participation are relatively different between rural and urban residents, and such differences cannot simply be explained as a result of a deeper engagement in the patron–client relationship of the rural than of the urban. Indeed, those differentiations depend on several factors and vary according to different kinds of political activity.     

Mobilizing party activism: A field experiment with party members and sympathizers

Electoral mobilization and persuasion are often characterized as two-stage processes, where parties activate their core supporters, who then mobilize and persuade larger shares of the electorate. While there is a lot of research on the second stage of this process, the mobilization and persuasion of the wider electorate by party activists, there is little causally identified evidence on whether party elites can encourage campaign activism among party members and sympathizers. To address this question, we conducted a randomized field experiment in cooperation with the Swiss Social Democratic Party in the context of the 2015 cantonal elections in Ticino. The experiment consisted of the randomized administration of telephone calls to members and strong supporters of the party, while their self-reported campaign activism and attitudes towards the campaign were measured in a two-wave online panel survey. Against expectations, we record null effects on various measures of campaign activism, including on the mobilization of relatives, and friends. The results raise questions about omitted variable bias in observational studies of party activism that consistently report large positive effects of party contact on the campaign activism of members and sympathizers.     

能动司法:型构“善政”政治图景的司法哲学——从沃尔夫《司法能动主义》的民主与善政谈起

理性的司法制度应当排除行政及权力的肆意干预,但不应拒绝对国家政治生活方式的深刻思考。探寻能动司法的政治意涵,追求司法的政治愿景和保持司法内在规定性之间并不矛盾,司法的理性是对司法权的属性和司法技术的描述,而追求政治愿景则是表达了司法对文明秩序和国家理性政治生活的诉求。     

Critical terrorism studies: an activist scholar perspective

This thematic analysis examines the applicability of Gustavo Correa's constructs of horizontal and vertical honour with regard to prestige as reflected in 21 statements by Osama Bin Laden (OBL) between 2002 and 2008. The relevance of Correa's theory pivots upon whether the individual is considered as the primary locus of honour, as Correa seemed to imply. There was limited support and substantial disconfirming evidence under this condition. Correa's theory appears more applicable to honour when the Ummah rather than OBL's person is considered as the primary locus of honour, with the individual's prestige a derivative of group membership. Under this condition, supported hypotheses derived from the theory include honour being rooted in divinity; vertical and horizontal aspects of honour being mutually constitutive; vertical honour being established with the creation of the Ummah through rank (insofar as the Ummah is presumed precedent above all non-Muslims), competition (including warfare) and functioning as an ideology hierarchically differentiating Muslims from non-Muslims; horizontal honour being gendered (with domination by non-Muslims situating the Ummah in a feminised position). A notable limitation of the theory is that it does not predict or account for the geospatial reification of group honour, whereby the establishment, defence, violation and exoneration of Islamic honour is discussed in terms of establishment, defence, invasion and forceful expulsion of non-Muslims from Islamic territory. Implications of honour are discussed with regard to the Islamist geospatial dichotomy of Islamic versus non-Islamic territories, efforts to encourage disengagement from terrorism and de-radicalisation within non-Islamic settings, legitimisation of complex phenomena such as jihad or suicide bombing according to frameworks of martyrdom and realistic efforts to win hearts and minds within the Islamic world.     

The Increasing Role of Religion in State Failure: 1960 to 2004

This study examines the extent of religious conflict between 1960 and 2004 in the context of all domestic conflicts in that era based on data from the State Failure dataset. The findings show that until 2002 religious conflicts were a minority of all conflicts, but from 2002 to 2004 they were a majority of all conflicts. This study also examines the extent to which groups belonging to different religious traditions (i.e., Christianity, Islam, etc.) participate in conflict. The specific results on the relative participation in conflict by Christian and Muslim groups depend on the method used to measure conflict. However, no matter how conflict is measured, the results consistently show a rise in Islamic participation in conflict since the late 1970s. Also, for nearly the entire period covered by this study, the majority of religious conflicts involved Muslims. All of this supports contentions that rather than causing religion's demise, modernity has caused a resurgence of religion.     

新中国成立以来基层社会犯罪治理的历史图景与法理——以浙江龙泉为例

县域治理在国家治理中居于基础地位,而基层社会的犯罪治理直接关系着国家的长久治安。以浙江龙泉为例,纵观新中国成立后基层社会犯罪治理的发展历程,其治理模式大致经历了"全能主义治理""综合治理""合作式治理模式转型"等三种类型的更替。犯罪治理的变革主要表现为治理主体、治理方式、治理内容与治理模式的变化。70余年来,基层社会犯罪治理一些特有的机制得以延续,成为了当前犯罪治理的基本特征与经验,主要包括国家主导与地方探索、正式制度与非正式制度的综合运用、常规治理与运动式治理并存三个方面。未来,应当创新社会治理,推动犯罪治理的良性运行。