Suchergebnisse

The recent claiming of Simone de Beauvoir's legacy by French feminists for a policy of assimilation of Muslim women to Western models of self and society reduces the complexity and richness of Beauvoir's views in inacceptable ways. This article explores to what extent a politics of difference that challenges the ideals and political strategies of abstract liberalism can be extracted from and legitimized by the philosophies of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Without assuming their thought is identical, we can read them as elucidating each other and as implicitly exposing weak and strong points in their respective philosophies on ethnocultural relations and social identities.

In the early 1990s, large numbers of children in India remained out of school. International commitments to achieve education for all (EFA) globally meant that India was an important case for donors. India was pressed to accept aid for primary education, and agreed with some
reluctance. Although subsequent donor involvement was substantial and influenced aspects of both policy implementation and management, it is shown that Indian education policy priorities remained self-determined. The government of India – though falling short of securing universal
education for its children - succeeded in using external resources and expertise in ways which suited its own purposes, whilst minimising external impact on policy development. The politics and economics of this process are discussed.

During World War II the Canadian Army was a small cadre force augmented by citizen volunteers. It was a colonial institution, dependent on the British Army for doctrine and staff training. After the war, the army became involved in a lengthy struggle to define its concept of professionalism. Modernizers aimed for a well-educated officer corps that was integrated with other elites and able to influence national security policy. Traditionalists wished to preserve regimental traditions and leadership based on social class. Contention between these factions resulted in stalemate, with modern management undercut by internal politics. The result was the failure of professional norms in the 1993 Somalia operation. Subsequent reforms have put a modern "constabulary-realist" model of professionalism in place.

Communist propaganda was sharply critical of all integration attempts made in Western Europe. In numerous political posters and cartoons published in Poland, the brunt of the criticism was borne by the European Defense Community (EDC) from October 1950, when the idea of military integration was first proposed by French Prime Minister René Pleven, until August 1954, when a vote in the French National Assembly effectively killed the project. Through a contextualized discussion of selected posters and cartoons, which are reproduced in the text, this article relates Polish visual anti-EDC propaganda to aspects of Communist ideology, Soviet geostrategic interests, and Polish domestic politics and shows how the propaganda was intended to help the Communist authorities achieve specific goals.

- Drawing on the concept of Europeanization, the paper analyses the interaction between the process of European integration and the Spanish state of the autonomies from a twofold perspective. Firstly, it shows that, though European integration strengthens national executives at the expenses of the regions both at the EU and the national level it may also bring about adaptations under certain conditions related to the specific characteristics of domestic institutions and politics. Secondly, the example of the Euroregions illustrates the extent to which Europeanization provides the regions with opportunities to play a role beyond the nation state.Parole chiave: integrazione europea, europeizzazione, regionalismo, euroregioni.Keywords: European integration, Europeanization, Regionalism, Euroregions.

This article argues that post-socialist Albanian myths and images surrounding the concept of Europe need to be considered from a triadic dimension of (geo)politics, modernities, and cultural identity as well as within a larger historical perspective of the modern Albanian political and intellectual landscape. Seen from a perspective stretching from the late nineteenth century to the present, a triadic Europe appears pluralistic with continuous as well as contested images and narratives. Yet, behind these images and narratives stands one constant understanding of the continent: a political and military power and prosperously untamed marketplace through which Albanians have attempted to navigate their modern existence.

Abstract

On the global stage, competitive advantages are gained by creating, transferring, and exploiting competences across operations and locations internationally.


In consequence, conglomerates are redesigning their strategies to focus on core businesses, yet with a global scope. De‐diversification and internationalization thus complement each other in a process of 'globalfocusing.'


This paper outlines the shifts in the relative barriers to entry to countries and industries that have been driving these processes of change in corporate strategies on the global stage.


On this basis, implications of the change in global strategy are derived for decision‐makers in both business and politics who are operating in the volatile global economy.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

There are many studies of elections under the Second Spanish Republic, some of them of great merit. Most, however, are narrow accounts lacking in contextualization, and fail to examine the broader history of parliamentary politics in Spain. The present article analyzes Republican democracy in its final phase — the months in which the Popular Front was in power — through an examination of the elections of May 1936, the last to be held in Spain until 1977. The comparison between the general elections of February 1936 and the partial elections of May, as well as the comparison with broader electoral history in Spain, reveals the rapid deterioration of parliamentary and electoral practice on the eve of the Civil War.

AbstractThrough a comparative analysis of ethnic relations in two multi‐ethnic cities in southern Nigeria, this article seeks to isolate factors that might explain why some countries manage to avoid violence in the midst of longstanding ethnic conflicts while ethnic relations in other countries are characterised by periodic violence. The factors isolated include the persistence of horizontal inequalities, absence of mediating social capital, institutionalisation of politics of non‐inclusion and construction of indigeneity and homeland discourses. The article explores the interconnections between the different factors. Its main contribution lies in its specification of the contexts in which horizontal inequalities are likely to result in violent ethnic conflicts. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Why do authoritarian dominant parties, once established, continue to win elections or lose power? Employing a time-series cross-national analysis of election outcomes and two country case studies, the author shows that dominant parties endure despite poor economic performance, voter demand for new parties, and sufficiently permissive electoral institutions. Instead, the author demonstrates that dominant parties continue to win when they can politicize public resources, and they fail when privatizations put the state's fiscal power out of their reach.The argument has implications for the fate of dominant parties, transitions to democracy in competitive authoritarian regimes, and the study of incumbency advantages and electoral fairness in comparative politics.

Pork-barrel politics is traditionally associated with presidentialism, strong parties, candidate-centered elections, and/or developing democracies. This paper argues that vote-purchasing behavior by incumbent governments analogous to pork-barreling is likely to be universal. This paper develops a rationale according to which incumbent governments use their partisan ties to lower levels of government to pork-barrel effectively. This argument is tested and corroborated with original data on local government grant allocation from four Nordic countries – traditionally considered to be systems that are least prone to localism. Furthermore, the study also provides preliminary evidence that pork-barreling by incumbent governments is electorally rewarded and thereby a fully rational electoral strategy.

ABSTRACTCommunity‐Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM), once presented as the best way to protect common pool natural resources, now attracts a growing chorus of critiques that either question its underlying assumptions or emphasize problems related to institutional design. These critiques overlook connections between the definition of rights to natural resources and membership in political communities. The potential for competing definitions of political identity and rights across natural resources arises when property rights regimes differ across natural resources and these different systems of rights appeal to alternative definitions of community. In Botswana, the entangling of natural resource policy with identity politics contributed to a partial recentralization of CBNRM in 2007.

As sociological neo-institutionalist theories have shown, social and political institutions are not only a set of rules, procedures, organizational routines and governance structures (see March and Olsen 1984), but they also provide norms and habits that determine individual choices and behaviours. in this chapter, we would like to apply this line of reasoning to propose a theoretical framework for the study of collective action in the field of unemployment politics. We propose a framework for analysis based on the idea that the form and content of political claim-making on issues relating to unemployment are influenced in important ways by the prevailing conceptions of the welfare state and the consequent institutional approaches to unemployment.

10 pages ; International audience ; The aim of this article is to make the reader aware of the regional linguistic situations of France and Italy. An inventory of the local dialects of the two countries will be analysed by considering the regional linguistic politics adopted in the domain of education, public life, and the media. ; Dans cet article, nous souhaiterions sensibiliser le lecteur aux situations linguistiques régionales de la France et de l'Italie, à travers un état des lieux non exhaustif des langues et parlers régionaux de ces deux pays ainsi que l'analyse partielle des politiques linguistiques régionales mises en place dans les domaines de l'enseignement, des médias et de la vie publique.

In this article, the author seeks to understand how citizenship is constructed by examining the case of a local space strongly marked by collective mobilisation. The case study is used to understand how the dynamics of the local community intersect with the logics of control and power of the central state. He argues that the concepts of populism, bossism, caesarism, and so on, reshaped by both media and political elites according to the requirements of the democratic game, point to irrational behaviours and disqualify the capacity for political subjectivation of persons and populations, suppressing the socio-political processes that may explain certain actions and representations in the field of politics.