Suchergebnisse

The South Pacific Forum is one of the few international organizations which successfully integrate members of the First and the Third World, thus functioning as bridge, enhancing mutual understanding. By depicting the genesis of the South Pacific Forum, pointing out its organizational structure and its most important policy issues, and by describing the role of the Forum Secretariat (SPEC) in the process of regional political and economic integration, the article tries to find the conditioning factors for the success of the South Pacific Forum. At the same time, the organizational limits are laid open. The article argues that one special feature of the Forum its ad-hoc character and open institutional framework is the paramount cause for both its success and limitations. In finding common political standpoints, which do not include binding economic obligations or even the transfer of state power but offer the chance of an enhanced regional standing in conflicts ordinating and even policy-making agency. In intra-regional policies, the major interests of the participants are often too heterodox to be reconciled by an organization which lacks the power to inflict legal or economic sanctions on its member states. So the main functions of the South Pacific Forum are the creation of distinct South Pacific political, and to some extent even cultural, identity, the integration of the region's views on conflicts involving outside actors, and functioning as clearing-house for intra-regional policy issues, even if "national interests" mostly have top priority for the national leaders.

In 1963 Malaya and Indonesia completed two projects of state-enlargement, incorporating new territories inhabited by people of different ethno-cultural affiliation into the larger whole of the young states. The styles of integration differed dramatically. I argue that these differences can be explained by taking recourse to the different cultural frames applied to political conflict resolution which were developed during the decades of decolonization and the early years of state- and nation-building. Although the Malay political elite took recourse to an ethno-cultural foundation for state- and nation-building, whereas the Indonesian nationalists turned to the civic variant of nationalism, the outcomes in the processes of policy-making, measured in either degree of violence or democratic participation and representation, contradict the traditional expectations held about different varieties of nationalism. As can be seen in either the early processes of state- and nation-building during the 1940s and 50s or the later efforts at state-enlargement, the ethnocultural foundation proved to be not only more peaceful, but also more democratic. This success is to a large degree dependent on the separation of State and Nation, of devising the state as a rational instrument in an multi-national endeavour at peaceful and cooperative coexistence of ethno-culturally defined "nations". ; In 1963 Malaya and Indonesia completed two projects of state-enlargement, incorporating new territories inhabited by people of different ethno-cultural affiliation into the larger whole of the young states. The styles of integration differed dramatically. I argue that these differences can be explained by taking recourse to the different cultural frames applied to political conflict resolution which were developed during the decades of decolonization and the early years of state- and nation-building. Although the Malay political elite took recourse to an ethno-cultural foundation for state- and nation-building, whereas the Indonesian ...

This article provides a detailed analysis of pre-Duterte and Duterte police use of deadly force in the Philippines. It first develops a set of indicators that allow for assessing the magnitude of police use of deadly force in "armed encounters", its relation to the threat environments in which the police operate, and the lethality of such violence. Then, based on a self-developed dataset for the pre-Duterte decade and the ABS-CBN dataset on Duterte period police killings, it establishes the past and current patterns of police use of deadly force. The analysis shows that in the past decade as under Duterte inter-provincial spatial and temporal variation of police use of deadly force has been very high. Differences in the threat environment play only a minor role in explaining this variation. Differences in sub-national units' reactions to the Duterte campaign mirror those in police use of deadly force during the earlier decade, signaling strong path-dependency. Lethality-levels have been outstanding in both periods despite dramatically differing levels of lethal violence. Clearly, Philippine police tended to shoot-to-kill already before Duterte granted them a carte blanche. (ASEAS/GIGA)

Am 12. Juli 2016 verkündete der Ständige Schiedshof in Den Haag den in seiner Geschichte bislang bei weitem bedeutendsten Schiedsspruch. Damit fand ein 2013 von den Philippinen gegen China angestrengtes Verfahren seinen Abschluss, in dem die Philippinen versuchten, die umfangreichen territorialen und maritimen Ansprüche Chinas auf rechtlichem Wege zu beschränken, nachdem dies zuvor auf politischem nicht gelungen war. Der Erfolg vor Gericht ist rundweg überwältigend.

Der Autor stellt die durchaus provozierende Frage: Was taugt Demokratisierung als Strategie zur Zivilisierung ethnischer Gewalt?

Under President Duterte the Philippine National Police have killed several
thousand suspects in so-called legitimate encounters. While this has engendered much
media attention and scientific research, earlier police violence is still a black-box in
many respects. This article provides at least a partial filling of this void. It establishes
several indicators for measuring lethal police violence. Moreover, it presents a detailed
mapping of regional and sub-regional patterns of armed police encounters for the
decade from 2006 to 2015. The spatial and temporal comparisons show that even
though actual levels of deadly police violence have been quite low in several Philippine
provinces and cities, the Philippine National Police almost always shot to kill suspects
and not to incapacitate them. While there was significant variation over time and
between sub-national units, neither the magnitude nor the levels of lethality of the
violence are related to the threat levels to which the police officers were exposed.

Am 12. Juli wurde vom Internationalen Schiedshof das Urteil im Streit zwischen den Philippinen und der VR China verkündet. Der Schiedshof erklärte, dass große Teile der chinesischen Ansprüche im Südchinesischen Meer null und nichtig sind, da sie einer rechtlichen Grundlage entbehren. Dies betrifft zunächst die auf der sog. nine-dash line basierenden Ansprüche. Dabei handelt es sich um eine aus den 1940er Jahren stammende Karte mit neun unterbrochenen Strichen, mittels derer China seit Jahrzehnten die äußeren Grenzen seiner nicht näher bestimmten historischen Rechte auf große Teile des Südchinesischen Meeres begründet. Gefallen sind auch die Ansprüche auf eine bis zu 200 Seemeilen umfassende ausschließliche Wirtschaftszone (Exclusive Economic Zone; EEZ) in den Spratly-Inseln und rund um Scarborough Shoal im Norden des südchinesischen Meeres, weil diesen vom Gericht der Inselstatus abgesprochen wurde. Der Verlust dieser Rechte wiederum hat zur Folge, dass die chinesische Besetzung mehrerer Riffe und Atolle als illegal eingestuft wird, weil sie innerhalb der ausschließlichen Wirtschaftszone EEZ der Philippinen liegen.