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AbstractDrawing on the theory of the legal opportunity structure, this article traces the progress of prison reform in Taiwan by highlighting how a case of parole revocation in the beginning led to an overhaul of the prison system in the end. This article argues that, through four interpretations of the Constitutional Court and the legal opportunity structure shaped thereby, including the split between courts, creation and expansion of inmates' access to court, and the support from allies, the prison reform was eventually achieved. Theoretically, this article makes two contributions to the literature: (1) the combination of inactive legislature and reactive executive branch as the political context is decisive to the openness of the legal opportunity structure for it increases the receptivity of a proactive judiciary; (2) the international human rights frame incorporated into the legal stock by the Constitutional Court made the prison reform an ongoing process rather than a done work.

This study identifies how three prominent Israeli online newspapers frame gay Members of Knesset (Israeli parliament) and cabinet ministers. 2019 was chosen since the number of gay MKs reached a historic milestone of representation. The study employed a mixed-methods design, combining descriptive statistics, based on a quantitative content analysis, with a thematic qualitative analysis. 1015 retrieved news items constituted the initial database. They were divided into two categories: "Gay relevant" (items explicitly referring to, or mentioning the politician's sexual orientation); or "Gay irrelevant" (all other items), to thematically focus on the Gay relevant items ( N = 159). Six themes were then identified: Novelty; LGBTQ Political Representation; Private Sphere; Homophobia; Community Recognition and Rights; and Incongruity. Findings revealed that elite newspaper coverage is similar to popular ones; cabinet ministers' framing is more neutral compared to junior MKs; and liberal MKs are framed differently than conservative ones.

For the last four decades, Pakistan's northwestern Pashtun tribal areas have been in a constant state of imperialist wars. In reaction to this organized violence, a local civil rights movement, the PTM, emerged in 2014 which powerfully challenged the military's discursive regime that legitimates these US-led wars. However, the military challenged the movement's call for justice by launching a concerted discursive drive to construct an enemy image of the PTM. This study aims to discover how the military constructs the identity, as well as the cultural and political meanings of the movement. The authors found that the military strategically organizes its discourse to first build a symbolic order in which an enemy other, less than human, is created, and then its oppression is normalized and made invisible. They hope that the article contributes to the current critical scholarship on the increasing militarization of contemporary public spaces and democratic cultures, particularly in the context of South Asia.

This article is concerned with the often-overlooked role of repressive state agencies in the current eviction and gentrification crisis. Intervening into contemporary research, it provides an empirically based argument to re-include law enforcement into critical housing research for what the police essentially is: a political actor in the evictions crisis in its own right, central to reproducing racial capitalism in the realm of housing. Combining movement-produced data from anti-eviction struggles in Barcelona with US police record research in Oakland, the article shows how law enforcement's policing and military upgrading determines the course of forced removals, much prior to a judge's order. Examples of police activity illustrate how officers use the significant discretion afforded to them by the law to execute extralegal evictions of primarily poor women and racialized populations, seeking to secure above all that any 'opting out' of capitalist, patriarchal and racist power structures is repressed by state violence.

The subject of the article is the phenomenon of successes of right-wing parties and their leaders. The contemporary rise of radical populism and its geopolitical scope are reflected in the discourse of its new features. Such a discussion offers a wealth of concepts and notions. Most of them describe practices of dismantling" democracy, threats of dictatorship or even fascism. The presented analysis focuses on the question of the ideological identity of cases that can be specified as consolidated populism. The thesis I advance shows that the source of the durability of electoral support is a specific narrative based on a thinking style which Zygmunt Bauman termed "retrotopia". This popular world view functions as a legitimizing myth, which the process of limiting democracy hides in the form of culture war. I conclude that the concept of retrotopia adds little to the distinction between today's different varieties of populist movements and political leaders.

AbstractThe number of grassroots members of populist radical right (PRR) parties is on the rise, in contrast to the trend of membership decline in mainstream parties. While scholars have explained this by studying PRR parties' organizational strategies, I focus on party members and ask: Why do people join PRR parties? To answer this, I look not only at motivations, which is the dominant framework in party membership studies, but also at triggers – factors activating those motivations. Drawing on collective action scholarship, I argue that grievances and efficacy can work as triggers for joining PRR parties. Using interviews with 82 members of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the League in Italy and the Sweden Democrats, I uncover three elements in the path to PRR party membership: disaffection, affiliation and action. As well as questioning established narratives on why citizens join parties, my findings provide a novel theoretical framework to investigate this form of political participation.

Human rights abuse tends to increase during national crises, such as civil wars and mass nonviolent uprisings. Under what conditions does this abuse abate or persist? I argue that violent challenges provoke much more coercive state responses, exposing more personnel within the security forces to extreme forms of repression and priming them (both leaders and followers) to reproduce these behaviors after the conflict has terminated. This effect is mitigated or avoided when challengers rely on nonviolent tactics instead of violence, leading to less post-conflict abuse. I test this argument with several quantitative methods, which establish a positive association between nonviolent resistance campaigns and subsequent freedom from political killings. Results also suggest that democratization can partially – but not fully – counteract the repressive legacies of violent conflict. By choosing to specialize in nonviolent tactics, therefore, resistance leaders avoid a repression trap that not even democratization can fully disarm.

Abstract A central conceit to Michael Taussig's writing, as approached herein, lies in its removal of the preposition conventionally deployed to describe ethnography, history, and other modes of "non-fictional" writing: writing about reality. What could such writing be like if it is no longer written "about" that which it purports to describe or narrate but rubbing right up against its still-unresolved materiality? Beginning at "Unpacking My Library" - a title Taussig takes from Walter Benjamin - and detouring through Fred Moten's Black Afro-Diasporic figuration of the "not-in-between," we investigate how such approaches to the "language of things" relate to writing ethnography. Exploring how Taussig's writing works, in part by approaching certain artistic/cultural/cosmo-political practices as "mimetic allies," we similarly touch upon the African-Diasporic traditions with which our own writings engage. Throughout, we flesh out how history - and Black history - figure as interruptive forces both in and beyond Taussig's writing.

AbstractParties usually argue in favour or against a government coalition based on party considerations in terms of projected policy implementation, power in office and vote maximization – that is, the 'policy, office, votes' triad. So far, however, it remains unclear which claims mainstream parties invoke to motivate their choice to rule or not rule with populist parties. Adopting the 'policy, voter, office' triad, this article examines mainstream parties' Twitter claims on ruling with populist parties in Austria, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands (2006–2021, N = 1,919). Mainstream parties mainly reject ruling with (mostly radical right) populist parties. To justify unwillingness, policy-based motives referring to the populist parties' extremist nature trump motives on office-seeking and vote maximization. To justify willingness, predominantly office-seeking motivations are invoked. Party characteristics (ideology, incumbency status, size) and context, however, shape these claims. This study sheds light on mainstream parties' patterns of political communication on coalition formation with populist parties.

AbstractThis article shows that landed property can be an exercise of state sovereignty in micro. I argue that property tightly relates to statehood and that the concept of 'community' offers us a lens with which to investigate that relation. Property's 'communal' character in Cyprus often transcends individual rights to ownership. A house belongs not to an individual, but to persons in their capacity as members of either the Greek‐Cypriot or Turkish‐Cypriot constitutional communities of the Republic. Focusing on the moral and political claims that ensue from this premise, I show how refugee Cypriots encounter and rearticulate the state in a variety of institutions as they lay claims to property (periousia) – their own or others'. Consequently, I argue that thinking through 'community' contributes to understandings of the linkage between property and statecraft (what I call the state/property nexus). In turn, this allows us to better comprehend statehood in post‐conflict domains.

Given Angela Merkel's long-standing reluctance to label herself a feminist, many scholars would find it hard to credit her with the increasingly "intersectional" composition of the Bundestag and the Landtage as of the 2021 elections. The last 16 years have nonetheless witnessed major shifts in German policies affecting the rights of women, persons with migration background, and lgbtqia community members. These developments have arguably contributed, directly and indirectly, to voters' willingness to accept candidates with diverse backgrounds as capable of representing "the people's interests" beyond the needs of their respective identity groups. This article considers multiple factors contributing to increasing diversity among German lawmakers at various levels, including policy shifts that have helped to reconfigure the political opportunity structure and thus the electoral landscape. It concludes with reflections on Merkel's legacy, coupled with the role of generational change in "normalizing" diversity across the Berlin Republic.

This article examines the activism of British women's organisations to establish peaceful internationalism built on women's roles as mothers, while simultaneously opposing the rise of European fascism in the interwar period. It considers the maternalist arguments made by women's organisations in their work for disarmament, which coincided with the increasing militarism of fascist governments and their promotion of the idea that women's roles were primarily as mothers to create future soldiers for the state. These campaigns were also connected to debates about the birth rate, and women's organisations promoted the idea that women were actively refusing biological motherhood until policy makers heeded women's demands. This article demonstrates how feminist activists in interwar Britain fought to claim and mobilise their own gendered and politicised understandings of women's roles as mothers at a time when they feared fascism would strip women of the political rights they had worked for decades to achieve.

Will Kymlicka's Liberalism, Community and Culture attempted to explain why cultural identity was important to people, and how liberal theory could accommodate cultural identity. Kymlicka's book argued that minority cultures deserve to have certain kinds of rights to help them survive. Cultural membership, he argued, was such an important good that liberal political theory was amiss in overlooking it; it needed to be amended in order to recognize that the self-respect of most people was tied to cultural membership, and that people needed a secure cultural context in which to make choices. Yet the importance of the self-respect argument fades in Kymlicka's later book Multicultural Citizenship, which gives more emphasis to larger cultural groups that are marked off by language. In this article, I focus on the shift that Kymlicka makes between the two books, arguing that the revisions that Kymlicka made to the argument in Liberalism, Community and Culture were necessary, while making the argument less theoretically satisfying.

The Position of National Minorities in Serbia – Their Legal Protection and ConflictsNational minorities constitute almost fourteen percent of the population of the Republic of Serbia. The main aim of the article is to present the mechanism for the protection of minority rights in the country. The author also compares them with the corresponding European standards. Moreover, she discusses in detail some of the major political, cultural, educational, linguistic, and social problems of the minorities living in this territory.The article thus deals with the following minorities: Albanians who live in southern Serbia, Muslims from Sanjak, Hungarians from Vojvodina (the second biggest minority in Serbia), as well as the Vlachs, Romanians and Roma people, who are scattered all over the country. All of these ethnic minorities are indeed strongly demanding legal protection from the state. The issues of their distribution and status in the light of their ethnicity versus the global society are also tackled in the article.

The Position of National Minorities in Serbia – Their Legal Protection and ConflictsNational minorities constitute almost fourteen percent of the population of the Republic of Serbia. The main aim of the article is to present the mechanism for the protection of minority rights in the country. The author also compares them with the corresponding European standards. Moreover, she discusses in detail some of the major political, cultural, educational, linguistic, and social problems of the minorities living in this territory.The article thus deals with the following minorities: Albanians who live in southern Serbia, Muslims from Sanjak, Hungarians from Vojvodina (the second biggest minority in Serbia), as well as the Vlachs, Romanians and Roma people, who are scattered all over the country. All of these ethnic minorities are indeed strongly demanding legal protection from the state. The issues of their distribution and status in the light of their ethnicity versus the global society are also tackled in the article.