CIAO DATE: 06/2011
Volume: 6, Issue: 2
May 2011
Davor Marko
In the analysis of the media landscape and media reporting on political candidates in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 2010 general election campaign1, it was noticed that major media were affiliated to various political groups and openly advocated for or riled against voter choices. As a result, the media market of the country is characterized by a high level of segmentation between media which exclusively advocates a nationalist position and media which maintain a ‘civic’ orientation. These media organizations, according to their orientation, favor certain personalities that are deeply embedded in the favored national, cultural, or religious position. This paper examines the role of opinion leaders who represent dominant ethno-political groups in BiH via the dissemination of media messages during the preelection campaign.
CHALLENGING THE EAST-WEST DIVIDE: INSIGHTS FROM A COMPARISON OF UKRAINE AND ITALY (PDF)
Nicole Gallina
This article examines how political behaviour has impeded the functioning of political institutions in Ukraine and Italy. It applies an actor-centered institutionalism and argues that even nondemocratic political elites can co-exist within a democratic framework. It analyzes actors’ conduct in regard to the democratic institutions of the constitution, judiciary and media. The paper concludes by identifying three pillars of political elite power.
A CABALISED REGIME: NEOPATRIMONIALISM, PRESIDENT YAR'ADUA'S HEALTH CRISIS AND NIGERIA'S DEMOCRACY (PDF)
J. Shola Omotola
This article analyses President Yar’Adua’s health crisis, defined not only in medical terms, but also the “cabalic” politicisation of his unconstitutional absence from duty, and the attendant unconstitutional efforts to sustain an absentee presidency. These efforts were sustained through lies, propaganda, threats and constant violations of the constitution, which refreshed the centrifugal tendencies of the country to a dizzying height. The article also evaluates the role of various actors in the management and mismanagement of the crisis. The case illuminates the complexity of democratic transitions, showing simultaneously the reality and limits of neopatrimonialism under a hybrid regime. The important lesson is that in the face of regimethreatening development as the case illustrated here, a vibrant and united civil society can make a significant difference.
ACCESS DENIED? EXAMINING THE LOANS BOARD FACILITY FOR HIGHER LEARNING STUDENTS IN TANZANIA (PDF)
Victoria Makulilo
in order to manage funding for students in higher education. The main goal of this board is to identify poor and needy students so as to assist them in accessing higher education. This article examines the key instruments in providing loans to students, that is, the Higher Education Student’s Loans Board Act No. 9 of 2004 and its related regulations and how they impact the access to education. Based on interviews, documents, and newspapers it is argued that the Loans Board has failed to meet its grand objective. Instead, it has turned to be a mechanism for limiting poor and needy students’ access to higher education.
Adriana Marinescu
In the aftermath of the Second World War, right-wing movements were a synonym for genocide and racism and a dark stain on the history of Europe. Scholars such as George Mosse, Roger Griffin or Eugene Weber have tried to explain the roots and causes of this phenomenon in order to prevent its reoccurrence. Nevertheless, a few decades later, extremist groups have begun to take over European politics, in spite of the supposedly learnt lessons of the past. What are the legacies, if any, of the former fascist movements and what are the new features of these parties? To what needs do they respond, who is their public and by what means is their message conveyed? Illiberal Politics in Liberal Times tries to provide an answer to these questions, as it focuses on the rightwing movements through the lens of Europeanization and political culture. They have so far been analyzed from various perspectives, but mainly as arising from expected events and relying only on their inner constituencies to act upon domestic and foreign policies.
Mihail Chiru
Fred Greenstein is one of the most influential presidential scholars in the United States. In his most recent work, he takes on the role of ‘archeologist’ of the oldest trademarks left on the presidential institution, by the first seven chief executives: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. The methodological approach of this book is a provoking experiment in itself: the author assesses the early presidents’ tenures through the conceptual lenses of leadership qualities invented for his renowned analysis of modern presidents, The presidential difference: leadership style from FDR to George W. Bush. Hence, all seven chief executives are evaluated on public communication skills, organizational capacity, political skill (tactical and strategic), policy vision, cognitive style and emotional intelligence. Additionally, each chapter has sections about the ‘formative years’ of the presidents and their public careers prior to election. The seven ‘presidential’ chapters are complemented by an introductory chapter that depicts the political background of the early republic: the Federalist/Republican divide as the main cleavage, the fragility of the new nation, or the general virulence of the political discourse. The final chapter makes a review of the way in which the first chief executives construed their role and influenced the American political development.
Alexander B. Makulilo
After the end of the Cold War imperialism in the form of neoliberalism exerts its hegemony over the entire world. Under what came to be known as the “Washington Consensus”, which emphasizes liberal democracy, market economy and foreign capital investments, the U.S sought to enhance and consolidate its access to cheap natural resources and raw materials from Latin America, thereby capitalizing its domination over the region. Challenging the neoliberal paradigm, the masses in Latin America developed a series of social movements to protest this form of foreign domination.
Christopher Herring
At the beginning of 2010, the State of California in the throes of fiscal crisis decided that it will open its prison doors to some 6,500 prisoners from its bloated penal system, the largest in America159. Yet the savings from this endeavor will only put a small dent in the ballooning budget that is forecasted to continually swell over its current $8 billion price tag and will devour an even greater proportion of its state budget on top of the 11 percent it already consumes next year. As for next steps, the governor proposes handing prisons over to private contractors and opening up a US prison in Mexico for illegal immigrants. None of the plans include reducing judicial sentencing or increasing funds for rehabilitation and counseling for the growing prison population.
Karina Shyrokykh
The state of emergency is a situation when an ordinary life and ordinary laws are not valid any more, and thus, the situation demands emergency decisions. The question is how we deal with such situations and what principles and laws we follow. Discussion of emergency politics has always been a complicated and essential issue for every country, especially so for democratic countries nowadays. It contains many controversial dimensions and inevitably involves us in a discussion of democratic principles, sovereignty, law and human rights. Bonnie Honig enters the discussion with a clear emphasis on democratic values and human rights.
Kevin E. Davis (ed.), Institutions and Economic Performance (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2010). (PDF)
Martino Bianchi
The relevance of institutions for the economic analysis is a theoretical core issue within contemporary debate. Mainstream neoclassical economics, in fact, has traditionally considered institutions as a peripheral element: they are constraints, which can interfere with market outcomes, but that nevertheless are mainly irrelevant in understanding the inner mechanisms of markets. On the contrary, within the Institutional Economics, and later the New Institutional Economics (NIE) many scholars has tried to support the idea that institutions are the crucial element which explains economic performances: moulding actors preferences and behaviour, institutions directly affect each element of economics theory. In their analyses NIE scholars draws from various scientific disciplines, like political science, cognitive theories, social psychology and sociology: they make an attempt to abandon the thrifty descriptions produced by mainstream economists, giving a much broader insight in economic dynamics. At the same time, they try to outline an empirical description of market’s configuration. In the last two decades NIE has gained considerable relevance and scientific recognition: first Ronald Coase, in 1991, then Douglass C. North in 1993, and finally Oliver E. Williamson and Elinor Ostrom who, in 2009, won the Nobel Prize for Economics. Despite this, NIE is still usually referred as a heterodox scholarship.
Ömer Aslan
The post-Cold War endeavor not to take for granted the fundamental concepts in security studies that realism and its kinds had simply presumed, found its resonance in the study of Turkey’s foreign and security policy. The scholarly engagements on that subject embracing a constructivist approach to security studies, or inspired from critical security studies, have recently proliferated.161 Malik Mufti’s Daring and Caution in Turkish Strategic Culture, Republic at Sea, adds to that suite by introducing the concept of strategic culture, a concept that has hitherto been poorly explored in previous studies on Turkey. In it, Mufti aims to explain the peculiar way in which Turkish security policymaking actors throughout the Turkish Republic perceive their external environment and conceive of what constitutes the most proper way to respond to the threats they subjectively perceive. In doing so, he also hopes to offer insights into some of the ongoing debates in the strategic culture literature.
Stephen Pimpare
There may be no simple answer to why governments increasingly promote the participation of faiths in the design and implementation of public policies. For Adam Dinham, the “imperatives driving an interest in faith” are threefold: governments see faiths as a repository of resources (“buildings, staff, volunteers and relationships”), as a potential means of fostering “community cohesion,” and as part of a broader “extension of new forms of participative governance” (p. 5-6). The focus in Faith, Public Policy and Civil Society is on such matters in the UK over the past decade or so, and the attention he periodically pays to the US and Canadian cases is usually not much more than passing reference. They are useful and generally insightful references, typically helping to elucidate one aspect or another of the issue under consideration, but readers needing a thorough-going and systematic comparative study will need to turn elsewhere. But that’s not to suggest that those with interests outside the UK will not find much to value in this volume, and it should surely be required reading for those invested in “faithbased” service provision and political participation in the UK.
Yuliya Zabyelina
In his recent book The Globalization of Security: State Power, Security Provision and Legitimacy Mabee rethinks the impact of globalization on the traditional ability of states to provide security. Representing a new generation of scholars who argue in favor of the expanded interpretation of security, the author acknowledges that threats to the state in the era of transnationalism are critical. Security in this new age is more than just an object of national strategy but a matter of global vulnerability and interdependence. The central question of his book then is to explore the ways and the means states employ to react to globalizing threats. Do states hold the capacity to resist or adapt to transnational threats? Is the state legitimacy infringed when states lack the mechanisms to provide security and exercise a sovereign hold on matters of global concern?
Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All: Piracy and The Law of Nations (New York: Zone Books, 2009). (PDF)
Zoltán Glück
Perhaps the most misleading platitude that one hears all too often in discussions of the contemporary rise of piracy off the Horn of Africa is that piracy has been around since the beginning of recorded history. On the surface, the statement is of course true. But this truth comes at the tremendous price of conceptually flattening differences between diverse social and historical situations into a one dimensional legal category, thereby obfuscating the genealogy of a concept and a figure that has been formative to the history of nations. It is precisely this complex genealogy that Professor Heller-Roazen assails and reconstructs with tremendous acumen and subtlety in his latest work The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations.