CIAO DATE: 12/2012
Volume: 7, Issue: 3
September 2012
Democratizing Justice in the Post-Conflict Balkans: The Dilemma of Domestic Human Rights Activists (PDF)
Arnaud Kurze
Years of international and national accountability efforts in the former Yugoslavia have only partially helped post-conflict societies to transition. To complement retributive justice efforts more recently, human rights activists have launched a campaign to establish a regional truth commission. This article explores the intricate efforts among nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in several states across the region – particularly Bosnia and Herzegovina, croatia and Serbia – to coordinate this movement. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews, this study illustrates the movement's struggle from within – caused by the conflicting interests of its members – and from outside, as it seeks support from international and region-specific organizations as well as national governments. While activists have remained unsuccessful in institutionalizing new truth spaces, this article argues that the state-centered strategy of human rights advocates during the campaign widened the gap between the activist leaders and victims' groups, their principal supporters.
Jan Smolenski
This paper critically explores Carl Schmitt's theory of democracy. I present the emergence of the democratic principle of legitimacy as described by Schmitt, then elaborate on the people as sovereign qua constituent power and present its threefold relationship with the constitution. Later I formulate three lessons to be taken from Schmitt's theory and discuss its importance and implications for democratic theory in terms of the normative and formative principle of democracy, core subject and core mode of democratic politics, and conditions of possibility of constituent democratic politics. In concluding Part I discuss the difference between liberal, republican and deliberative model of democracy and Schmitt-inspired theory.
(IN)CONGRUENCE: A Study of Opinion-Policy Distance in 33 Democracies (PDF)
Nicolae Bîea
This article seeks to answer two questions. First, is government policy in contemporary democracies congruent with public opinion? Second, what are the factors that determine opinion-policy congruence? The opinion-policy incongruence is conceptualized as the distance between actual government policy and the policy preferred by the median citizen. This article uses international survey data that assessed citizens' preferences regarding government spending in 33 countries. The results suggest that opinion-policy congruence is more often absent than present in contemporary democracies with significant variation between countries. This variation is explored using fuzzy-set qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). I identify two casual paths leading to the opinion-policy congruence: richness and relatively equal distribution of income or richness, decentralization, and usage of non-proportional electoral system.
One Actor, One Too Many Voices? The EU at the UN General Assembly (PDF)
Attila Molnar
The article tests the assumption that the deepening integration brought on by the European Union's Treaty of Lisbon should have a palpable effect on the dynamics of EU Member States' action at the United Nations. Building on existing scholarly literature, on interviews with diplomats and staff of the European External Action Service at two UN headquarters locations, as well as on a case study of what is arguably the most universal of multilateral bodies, the UN General Assembly, the article asses the "voice of the EU" on the global multilateral scene. It concludes that, in spite of the abundance of theoretical and practical arguments for increasing the unity of European diplomacy, action in the UNGA does not provide grounds fo an overly hasty departure from a state-centric view of EU foreign policy.
Emilian Kavalski
It seems that despite the transformations in world politics in the last two decades, the realist paradigm still continues to provide the main framework for the understanding and explanation of international relations. Tracing its origins to the writings of Thucydides, realism has long been perceived as the cornerstone of the discipline. Dylan Kissane's study, however, emphasizes that the stature that realism has acquired is unfounded. He meticulously goes on to debunk the very foundations of realist thinking – the belief in an anarchic international system, in the awareness that this it merely offers a simplified representation of reality.
Mano Gabor Toth
In her first and very promising book Monika Nalepa presents an entirely new approach to the study of lustration policies in Eastern Europe.
Konstantin Kilibarda
Roland Erne's European Unions examines the potential role of trade unions in democratizing the European Union (EU).
Josette Baer (ed.), From Post-Communism toward the Third Millennium (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011) (PDF)
Klejd Këlliçi
From Post Communism toward the Third Millennium is a collection of contributions whose origins are different in style and content. The main aim of the book can be found concisely within the last part of the title 'toward the third millennium'. It offers a consumptive panorama after a period where most of the political transitions in the area were either resolved or had reached a conclusion defined by the membership in NATO or the EU, or had simply come to a standstill.
David Altman, Direct Democracy Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) (PDF)
Alexander B. Makulilo
Direct Democracy Worldwide links both direct and indirect democracy. It focus on revealing the relationships between the two forms of democracy. Rather than viewing direct and representative democracy as necessarily opposing each other, the author notes that the assumptions and practices of direct and representative democracy interact under different institutional settings.
Consolata Raphael Sulley
Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak's Egypt is indeed a relevant piece on elections and authoritarianism. The book addresses an important aspect of competitive elections in an authoritarian context. This is a distributive function of elections, thereby joining those who see elections as a blessing in an authoritarian regime.
Tatiana Zhurzhenko, Borderlands Into Bordered Lands. Geopolitics of Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine (Stuggart: Ibidem Verlag, 2010)
Viktoria Potapkina
The border between Russia and Ukraine became a political reality in 1991 with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the creation of two independent states. Since then, Ukraine's Eastern border has turned itself into a perfect laboratory for studying processes of border construction.
Kerem Öktem, Angry Nation: Turkey since 1989 (London and New York: Zed Books, 2011) (PDF)
Ömer Asian
Turkey's transformation evidenced best by its more active and assertive foreign policy and economic growth for the last decade has deservedly attracted a great deal of attention. More and more students of Turkish politics have tried to explain underlying domestic, regional, and international dynamics of these monumental changes. As Turkish landscapes alter, a powerful current of scholarship with a revisionist approach to nationalist historiography and the Alevi, Kurdish demands as well as Armenian genocide claims have also surfaced.
Kawu Bala
The last two years have seen a transformation in the Arab world that stunned several regimes after the eruption of protest in Tunisia. Though each each country in the Arab world is unique, the Egyptian protest could be said to be the most dramatic. Robert Bowker's Egypt and the Politics of Change in the Arab Middle East, sounds like a futuristic study whose seeds germinated recently as it came to the reading stand a few months before the inevitable reforms that will have to take place despite the problems of "accommodation, reaction and resistance" under way in the corridors of power in the Middle East.
Simone Selva
Neil Rollings' book targets the historical dynamics of Great Britain's entry into the European community (EC) from the early steps of the European economic integration process at the turn of the 1940s through to the country's final access to the EC in 1973.