Suchergebnisse

One of the main characteristics of any political regime is the power correlation between the legislative and executive branches of state power. In a democratic environment, it should reflect a certain balance of branches of power.The Constitution of Ukraine has defined the principle of separation of power into legislative, executive and judicial (art. 6), each of them is independent from the other one and acts within its competence. Theoretically fixed in the Constitution principles of power separation aim between legislative and executive branches. However in the conditions of social-economic crisis, in which the country has been acting since 1990s, between multi-vectored political forces and striving of executive power for widening of its authorities, that is fixed in the Constitution, the presidential-parliamentary form of administration very often has led not only to constitutional cooperation of powers but to the competition between the President and executive power on the one hand, and Verhovna Rada, on the other hand. So, today the need for reconsideration of both the correlation of authorities and cooperation between branches of power in Ukraine has become obvious.
Keywords: legislative branch of government, executive branch of government, cooperation, political system.

It is widely believed that international cooperation can arise through strategies of reciprocity. In this paper, we investigate whether citizens in the United States and 25 other countries support reciprocity to deal with climate change. We find little public enthusiasm for intrinsic reciprocity, in which countries restrain their consumption of fossil fuels if and only if other countries do the same. In contrast, we find significant support for extrinsic reciprocity, in which countries enforce cooperation by linking issues. Citizens support economic sanctions against polluters and are willing to shame them in international forums, especially when the polluters are violating a treaty. Cooperation could, therefore, emerge from efforts to link climate with other issues and to embed climate commitments in international law. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

"The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is one of the most rapidly developing centres of the multipolar world, covering an enormous landmass including China, India, Russia and its southern Eurasian neighbours. With both its eight member states, and a growing group of observer states, the SCO's activities have expanded beyond its initial focus on security and stability to broader cooperation with the UN and other groupings such as the G20, BRICS, NATO and ASEAN. Bringing together large and disparate nation-states with often rival geostrategic agendas means that it faces substantial structural challenges but also has great potential. The contributors to this volume, representing a range of the states within the SCO, evaluate the possibilities for the Organization, and the challenges it faces in achieving them through a prism of legal regulation. They evaluate the bloc's prospects for economic, humanitarian, legal, trade, labour, migration, and environmental cooperation, as well as it's more traditional concerns with security and defence. The authors, analyzing the quality of cooperation between states within the SCO, note the controversial character of this process: it demonstrates both efficiency and declarative and decorative nature of the SCO. A valuable read for scholars and policy-makers with a focus on Eurasian cooperation, and processes of regionalism and universalism in international relationships"--

Interstate relations are highly interdependent: a change in relations between a pair of states can impact the relationship each of those states has with third parties, as well as relations among those third party states. This is particularly salient in cases where emerging security threats have the potential to destabilize existing patterns of interstate behavior. While the interdependent nature of states' strategic responses to varied security challenges is often discussed and theorized in the international relations (IR) literature, it is less frequently modeled empirically. We present an approach for analyzing state relations that takes into account higher-order dependencies in the position of states within a network. We apply the approach to a unique context: diplomatic relations between Middle East and North African (MENA) states during a period in which the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) becomes a significant destabilizing force in the region. We find that the emergence of ISIL dramatically reshaped the region's politics, improving relations among the region's major powers while worsening relations for the states facing territorial threats from the group.

Although international crises are often believed to represent windows of opportunity to strengthen European defence cooperation, recent crises have not seemed to produce a clear convergence of European Union (EU) member states' security interests. This article seeks to address this puzzle by arguing that European defence cooperation is a response to crises that place European states in a situation of military interdependence. Conversely, asymmetric crises, i.e. crises that affect European states unevenly, encourage those states to maintain their autonomy of action. This theoretical argument is supported by two case studies: the failure of the European Defence Community in the early 1950s and the current difficulties experienced by the EU's military operations. These two cases illustrate a striking continuity in that, because of (neo)colonial ties in particular, European states are often unevenly affected by international crises, which tends to make defence cooperation less effective.

How do minor states protect themselves against coercion from their major power allies? Asymmetric security cooperation is often reduced to tradeoffs between security and autonomy, but coercion is another factor that minor states fear while cooperating. Coercing partner states can take the form of major powers threatening or undertaking regime change, and minor states must weigh the benefits of cooperation against this risk. To this end, I suggest that minor states with anti-major power political oppositions cooperate more extensively with their major power partners than minor states with pro-major power oppositions. A pro-major power opposition provides opportunities for major powers to threaten or replace the incumbent regime; therefore, such minor states limit their cooperation out of fear of coercion. I employ original data on opposition characteristics to present evidence from security relations between the United States and 65 minor states during 1950–1991 to support the hypothesis.