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Abstract: China's ever growing importance in world affairs and politics has not gone by unnoticed. However, conventional IR theories fail to explain how the emerging superpower has been expanding its role in regional institutions. The rather novel theory of scholar Kai He of institutional realism will be applied to China's involvement in the formation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). His theory combines traditional neorealism with elements of the neoliberal interdependence theory in an attempt to provide a holistic approach to the PRC's foreign policy decisions.

While the first auto/biography of the heroine of the Afrikaner people, Emily Hobhouse was published a mere three years after her death in 1929, and a steady stream have followed since, in the last three years or so there has been a remarkable resurgence in popular accounts of her life and work. This review essay profiles three of the latest biographies written by Robert Eales, Elsabe Brits and Jennifer Hobhouse-Balme, and variously examines her role in the South African War and her ideas regarding pacifism, war and politics.

This editorial provides the overall context for the five cases—three national and two international—covered in this thematic issue. While the cases are from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), they highlight fundamental questions of journalism everywhere, including contradictions between freedom and control, professionalism and politics, individual and collective. The associations of journalists serve as very useful platforms to study these questions, especially at historical turning points when the whole political system changed, as happened twice in CEE after World War II. ; nonPeerReviewed

This essay amplifies some of Maja Horn's arguments in Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature (2014). First, the essay adds texture to Horn's assessment of the Trujillo regime in relation to race by arguing that what Horn discerns as the Trujillato's "emptying" of racial difference has a long historical precedent in the Dominican territory. Second, it deepens Horn's remarks on the nineteenth century to suggest that it is difficult to limit the frame of Caribbean or hemispheric American scholarship to the twentieth century.

This article argues that Gilbert Simondon's philosophy of technology is useful for both science and technology studies (STS) and critical theory. The synthesis has political implications. It offers an argument for the rationality of democratic interventions by citizens into decisions concerning technology. The new framework opens a perspective on the radical transformation of technology required by ecological modernization and sustainability. In so doing, it suggests new applications of STS methods to politics as well as a reconstruction of the Frankfurt School's "rational critique of reason."

This article analyzes the Association of Southeast Asian Nation's (ASEAN) interactions with China over the South China Sea issue since the end of the Cold War. A neorealist understanding of ASEAN's international relations is advanced. This approach highlights the degree of security maximizing interest convergence between key ASEAN actors and an extra-regional actor, the United States, to explain the varying outcomes in the empirical record. Our approach is contrasted to alternatives in the existing literature that either overemphasize or underemphasize ASEAN's autonomy in regional politics.

Two uncertainties will reshape inter- and intra-state governance in Eurasia over the next five to twenty years. First, the stabilizing anchors of Central Asia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, will see their first leadership change since independence. Second, it is unclear if and how the region's two great powers, Russia and China, will accommodate one another's expanding interests. This paper explores these two uncertainties, their potential to reshape Central Asian politics, and scenarios that may emerge should the current, now quarter century status quo be disrupted.

This is a theoretical contribution to the historic transformation from traditional type of leadership to modern leadership. In traditional forms of leadership, tribal and sectarian politics are the means through which one can rise to leadership position. In modern leadership forms, knowledge, expertise and education create authority and people can become leaders because of competence and knowledge. The paper is an attempt to partially explain why the latter form of leadership failed and continue to fail in Sudan as well as in other developing nations.

Abstract
Public value creation has become a critical challenge, but existing approaches have limitations and it is unclear how they can be integrated. This article addresses this issue by analyzing four best‐practice cases in which public value was created through the integration of community indicators and government performance management. It identifies an iterative process of participation, legitimation, and implementation, with institutional innovations across boundaries between civil society, politics, and administration. These institutional innovations help integrate the often fragmented arenas of participation, legitimation, and implementation.

AbstractIn 2013, the United States Supreme Court decidedShelby County v. Holder, which invalidated Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The ruling is part of longstanding efforts to maintain American institutions that have provided wide-ranging benefits to White citizens, including disproportionate political power. Over time, such efforts are likely to fail to prevent significant increases in political gains for African Americans, Latinos, and other minority citizens. But they threaten to foster severe conflicts in American politics for years to come.

Criticism arising from disagreement is what advances debate, making scholarship progress. A critical review therefore should leave an author unperturbed—as long as it is honest and fair. Kioumars Ghereghlou's review of my book Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan is neither. Rather than engaging in a serious and substantive discussion of the book's content and argument, it offers a string of innuendo-filled swipes and tendentious statements reflecting a prickly type of modern identity politics. I thus feel compelled to respond.

In this interview, Denis O'Hearn presents his views of Ireland's historical and contemporary status in the capitalist world-system and which countries Ireland could be profitably compared with. He discusses how Ireland has changed since the publication of his well-known work on "The Atlantic Economy" (2001) and addresses questions related to the European Union and the looming break-up of Britain as well as contemporary Irish politics on both sides of the border. O'Hearn also touches on the current state of Irish academia.

This article analyses the June 2013 wave of political protests in Brazil, highlighting student movement participation. We make three arguments. First, this was not a single student movement, but a cycle of protest, consisting of many different actors, issues, and forms of demonstration. Second, protesters built what we call hybrid performances, drawing on three repertoires of contention: socialist, autonomist and patriotic. Third, the protests presented a strong rejection of political parties, problematising the relationship between social movements, political parties, and institutional politics.

<p><strong>Simon Geissbühler, ed</strong><strong>. </strong><strong><em>Kiew—Revolution 3.0: Der Euromaidan 2013/14 und die Zukunftsperspektiven der Ukraine</em></strong><strong><em>.</em></strong><strong> </strong>Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society. Ed. Andreas Umland. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2014. 160 pp.<strong></strong></p>

When talking about Yemen, one of the most common phrases amongst analysts is that "it's complicated." True, to a very large extent. Tribal politics, new movements being infiltrated by old power political structures and when looking at the political actors involved, it becomes less clear how the conflict falls under the 'Sunni-Shia' divide that seems […]
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