Suchergebnisse

On 25 January 2015, the fourth anniversary of the uprising that toppled Hosny Mubarak and brought the Muslim Brotherhood into power, Egyptian security forces arrested Aya Alaa Hosny in front of the Journalists Union in central Cairo. Aya is one of the spokeswomen and leader of the Women against the Coup (WAC), one of the most active women-only movements established by the Muslim Sisterhood following the Egyptian coup d'état in 2013. Since then, thousands of Islamist women and sympathisers have joined the Sisters in street demonstrations, human rights advocacy, and anti-regime protests, notwithstanding the high risk associated with political activism in a context of retrenched authoritarianism. This article offers a gendered analysis of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood by examining the activism of the Muslim Sisterhood, its female wing, post July 2013. Contrary to mainstream academic literature on Islamist women's activism, which considers Islamist movements' conservative gender ideology and sexual division of labour as an impediment to female political leadership, this study argues that Islamist informal networks can be conducive to female leadership under 'negative' political circumstances. As the case of the Muslim Sisterhood demonstrates, the repression of Islamists following the coup favoured the emergence of women's leadership, firstly within women-only movements and subsequently, as the very survival of the MB became increasingly compromised, in the MB movement as a whole.

This article investigates how elite U.S. correspondents recast their journalistic paradigm in response to the momentous collapse of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, which dealt a fatal blow to the validity of much of their previous writings. Elements of the constructed "virtuous socialist China" in the 1970s came to be discredited in the 1980s and were replaced by celebratory discourse on China's adoption of market economy. The romantic imaginings about China's "new socialist way" stood in sharp contrast to Western-cum-universal values of freedom, democracy, and individualism, as well as American lifestyles, capital, and know-how. The reporting hinged on how journalists employed the "enduring values" of America as paradigms to make sense of China's conditions and U.S.–China relations. The "radical" journalistic paradigm of the 1970s was repudiated by the collapse of the Cultural Revolution, whereas the "liberal" paradigm of the 1980s was shattered by the Tiananmen crackdown.

In Early Modern Europe, mercenary armies were the norm. With the rise of the state military, mercenaries seemingly disappeared, but private security has reemerged since the end of the Cold War. In many discussions of this phenomenon, privatization is seen as a policy choice undertaken by 'bad' leaders and as a sign of state failure. To evaluate these claims, however, requires a more objective investigation of the conditions under which leaders in weak states choose to privatize. This dissertation seeks to answer the following two questions: (1) under what conditions are states most likely to hire privatize military services, and (2) how can we predict which services will be privatized? I argue that dysfunctional civil-military relations, reliance on appropriable natural resources, and civil conflict all increase the likelihood that a regime leader will hire PMCs. I also argue that existential threats to the regime from the military (via dysfunctional civil-military relations) or rebels (via civil conflict) drive leaders to privatize at the tip of the spear. Evidence from original quantitative and qualitative data on security privatization in sub-Saharan Africa from 1990-2010 supports my theory.

This study examines the Trans-Pacific Partnership's labour chapter and finds it cannot adequately protect, let alone enhance, labour rights across the TPP region, as promised by the Canadian and U.S. governments. This is because the TPP ch

Abstract The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) sets the standard in revenue transparency in 46 countries and works under the assumption that compliance with the initiative will improve transparency and curb corruption in member states. However, individual case studies raise doubts about the success of the initiative. Building upon the literatures on compliance and governance, this paper analyzes the impact of EITI membership on transparency and corruption levels between 2006 and 2013. By using interrupted time series and panel data analyses, this research makes an original contribution to show that affiliation with the EITI immediately improved overall aggregate data disclosure in member countries in this period. At the same time, the paper also shows that perceptions of corruption did not change. This outcome questions the effectiveness of promoting only a narrow definition of transparency in extractive industries as a measure to prevent corruption. The results imply that a more comprehensive treatment of transparency might be necessary; specifically to distinguish regimes that use transparency reforms for public relations purposes as opposed to genuine reformers.

This paper explores both the role that local content measures can play in advancing sustainable development, and the impact that trade and investment treaties concluded over the past 20 years have had and will continue to have on the ability of governments to employ those tools. Certain local content measures had been restricted under the WTO due to wide agreement by negotiating parties that their costs outweigh their benefits. But the WTO also left a number of local content measures in governments' policy toolboxes. As is discussed in this paper, however, that is changing, with the range of permissible actions for many countries being significantly smaller than it was even a decade ago. This narrowed policy space, in turn, can limit the steps governments can take to make progress on the universally adopted Sustainable Development Goals.