Suchergebnisse

Saudi Arabia's foreign policy is one of the central elements in the analysis of the current dynamics of the Middle East. King Salman and the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, are introducing significant changes in the international activities of the kingdom, through a more assertive and militaristic policy, especially to deal with the different outbreaks of the region and the Muslim sphere. This article analyzes the objectives and strategies that support the responses of the Saudi Government, as well as the use of force as a resource for foreign policy. This paper studies the main challenges and resistance to the power of the Saud House. The formulation and development of the current monarch's doctrine is determined by Saudi interpretations of possible security threats and opportunities at different levels, which may have a direct effect on the interests of the crown.

Donald Trump won the 2016 US presidential election without a clearly articulated policy for either Cuba or the Latin American/Caribbean region as a whole. Two years into that presidency, this article seeks to describe that policy and place it within Trump's wider foreign policy. The article deconstructs the worldview of 'America First' as lying within the perspective of the neo-conservative wing of the Republican Party, epitomised by John Bolton, the current National Security Advisor. The implications of that worldview for Cuba and Latin America make for a reversal of Obama's opening to Cuba, a hardline on immigration from Mexico and Central America, and greater pressure for regime change in both Venezuela and Nicaragua. Also analysed is the resonance of Trump's policies with the recent turn to the political right in Latin America, notably in Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Colombia.

Mexican development policy is guided by the country's dual function as both a recipient and a provider of international cooperation. Over the past 17 years, the country has taken several initiatives to promote gender equality nationally, and today gender equality norms cut across Mexican priorities in foreign policy and South-South cooperation activities. Paradoxically, the gains achieved at policy formulating tables have been accompanied by a rise in gender-based violence. To approach this paradox, this article engages with gender equality norms to show how they have been introduced, developed and transformed in the context of a national security crisis and extreme violence directed at women. The analysis points to the important role of Mexican feminists and anti-feminicide activists in the promotion of gender equality norms, as well as to the existence of a political landscape in which structural inequality persists and such norms remain highly contested.

AbstractThe current Chilean Migration Act is the oldest in South America. It was created under the paradigm of national security, not human rights, and today does not adequately serve a participating democratic state, active within the international community. The Chilean government will soon be moving to discuss in congress a new migration act. We want to emphasize that the government should not forget the importance of incorporating international standards of migration policy into the national sphere. Chile is part of the United Nations system and, as a participating member, ratifies all core human rights treaties. Given that the United Nations Human Rights Bodies have made recommendations about migration policy, it is essential that this discussion be brought to the attention of our governing officials. This article reviews the UN recommendations as a concrete approach to the implementation of international standards in Chilean migrant policy.

"The office of the High Representative was created in order to increase the visibility and the coherence of EU external relations. Based on foreign policy statements, this article analyses to what extent the first High Representative after the Lisbon reforms, Catherine Ashton, achieved these aims. With an average of more than 400 statements per year, she made active use of this tool as an underpinning of her foreign policy. Most of these statements are, however, event driven and devoid of any strategic initiatives, in particular with regard to the EU's strategic partners. Despite the High Representative's 'double hat', the cooperation with the Commission was almost negligible, nor did Ashton visibly link the EU's external relations with its security and defence policy. After Federica Mogherini's first 100 days in office as the new High Representative, there are however already signs of a better use of the tools at hand." (author's abstract)

Marianne Camerer co-founded Global Integrity, a leading international anti-corruption non-profit. She is the Programme Director of Building Bridges, a new policy-focused research and outreach programme at the Graduate School of Development Policy and Practice at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She previously headed anti-corruption research at the Institute for Security Studies, was a founding director of the Open Democracy Advice Center and lectured in applied ethics at the University of Stellenbosch. Marianne holds a doctorate in Political Studies from the University of Witwatersrand, masters' degrees in public policy and political philosophy from Oxford and the University of Stellenbosch, and was a Yale World Fellow and former fellow of the Yale Council on African Studies. Marianne trained as an integral coach at the Centre for Coaching at the Graduate School of Business of the University of Cape Town.

В статье представлено обоснование авторской позиции, в соответствии с которой в качестве релевантного контента государственной культурной политики в системе национальной безопасности рассматривается изучение вопросов развития человеческого потенциала; в рамках позиционируемой гипотезы государственная культурная политика в целевых контурах повышения качества человека выступает фактором гармонизации общественной и политической жизни, условием социального развития и предпосылкой системной модернизации страны. ; The article shows the explanation of the author's opinion about the relevant content of state cultural policy. The main idea is that the study of human potential development is considered to be a relevant content of state cultural policy in the national security system. According to the declared hypothesis the cultural policy within the frames of increasing human quality appears as the factor for social and political life harmonization, as the condition for social development and as the supposition for systematic country modernization.

Nuclear energy policy should have been a major area of cooperation for France
and Germany, playing a lead role in the energy policy of the EU. Yet they
have retained different options, especially regarding nuclear energy while
the EU energy policy remained very indicative. These two ?coordinated
economies? should have been able to cooperate more closely on this issue.
While the reasons for this difference in behavior have much to do with the
specificities of the nuclear energy, they are more precisely related to the
continuously rising level of security requirements, a learning process in
which the magnitude of risks and time lengths appeared, even before
Fukushima, to go beyond rational boundaries on which cooperation (as well as
market) ventures could be based. This raises the issue in the present state
of the technologies of the possibility of an international governance of this
nuclear industry.

The collection of papers selected for this special issue brings to a wider audience a deep understanding of the achievements, challenges, and prospects in several key issue-areas of Brazilian politics. Taken together, the articles provide a comprehensive review of the legacy of the most popular president in Brazilian history, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a tough act to follow. They also bring an early assessment of policy change and continuity under Dilma Rousseff, the first female president in Brazilian history. In this special issue, UK and Brazil-based authors reflect upon the most controversial aspects of the transition from Lula da Silva to Dilma Rousseff and provide analyses from different theoretical perspectives and disciplines. At a time when Brazil is increasingly visible on the world stage, trade and macroeconomic policy, defence, public security, media, culture, human rights and environmental policy have been highlighted here.

In this paper we introduce a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model for the Finnish regional economy, RegFin. This multi-sector and interregional model characterizes economic activity in the regions of Lappi, Pohjois-Pohjanmaa, Kainuu, Keski-Pohjanmaa and the rest of Finland. Unemployment and net migration are determined endogenously within the model. We consider the macroeconomic effects of a regional policy applied to North Finland that is similar to tax reforms which have been implemented in Norway. The key feature of the policy concerns regionally differentiated tax rates. Tax incentives affect individual choices regarding both migration and employment. We also study a value-added tax reform where labour costs are exempted from the tax base. Our simulations seem to indicate that the regional differentiation of the social security payments of the employers and the value-added tax reform could be effective tools of regional policy.

Gennadij A. Bordjugov, The policy and ideology behind emergency measures between the Stalinist revolution from the top and the Great Terror, 1930-1936. This article emphasizes the "crucial points" of the policy and ideology behind the emergency measures applied as a special means of administering the country. On the basis of "special files" of the minutes of the Politbiuro, it studies the limits and the causes of the transformation of the emergency measures into "chrezvychaishchina." This change in the measures applied weakened the social bases of Stalin's regime and undermined the foundations of the productive forces of the country. The author shows how the policy of taking drastic action, which was first applied to production (grain supply, etc.), was progressively extended to the problems of security and political control, and how those in power tried to find ways of preventing a shift towards "chrezvychaishchina."

Aside from the United States, Germany is Latin America's .most important economic partner. Despite this fact, Germany has never appeared to have a very strong overall relationship with the region and, due to its postwar history, has never developed a true "Latin American policy." For obvious reasons, Germany has given high priority to (1) relations with its Western neighbors and (2) its security relationship with the United States. As far as its policy towards the South goes, it has tended to concentrate on major actors, such as Egypt and India, and its relations with Brazil should be viewed in that context.The absence of a defined policy does not mean that Germany lacks a visible profile in the region. The role and image it projects reflects a relationship that is much broader, and far more complex, than its economic and diplomatic activities in the region would indicate.

We investigate the dynamics of superpower rivalry. Participants in policy debates within each state use information about expected future threats and economic costs to influence other policy actors, and this process of sophisticated reaction links the security policies of these two states into a single rivalry system. Analysis of vector autoregression models of U.S. and Soviet military expenditures and diplomatic hostility and U.S. gross national product supports the hypothesis that these policies approximate the behavior of unitary rational states capable of forming rational expectations of each other's future behavior. The dynamic response of this system to a wide range of exogenous shocks (or innovations) reveals the underlying stability of this rivalry system. The military expenditures of both states exhibit a cyclical response to innovations, with a shorter U.S. cycle. This lack of synchronization creates several problems for analysis and for policy change.

The article is the report of a study into the structural and policy-factors that do or do not enhance at least two types of moonlichting in Belgium during the eighties: the evasion of the labour legislation and of the social security contributions and fraud concerning unemployment benefits. After analysing the socio-economic and political context (the policy concerning the flexibility, the précarisation of labour, the disciplinarisation of the labour force), the researchers examined on the basis of statistics and files the functioning of two inspection services in three areas (Leuven, Antwerpen, Hasselt): it's about the Inspection of Social Legislation and the control by the Administration of Employment and Unemployment. The analysis reveals that the government policy as well as the functioning of the inspection and control services in no way stop moonlighting and even legitimize the unequal socio-economic positions of employers and employees.