Suchergebnisse

Social workers and residents in areas of political uncertainty are exposed to special demands which derive from three sources, residence in the area, exposure to the anxieties and conflicts of neighbors as clients, and being representatives of the establishment. The results of a survey in 1995 of social workers in Judea/Samaria and the Golan Heights show a positive correlation between feelings of surfeit of political issues and difficulty of coping with the role of social worker and state anxiety. Most of the social workers reported difficulties in role performance resulting from political positions held by themselves, their clients and the local leadership. We conclude with a suggestion for a debriefing team model.

The first part of this two‐part special issue on structured sentencing in the U.S. focused on individual jurisdictions and the relationship of five types of sentencing reforms to judicial discretion and to the political and legal forces that originated, maintained, altered or sometimes ended the reform. This issue moves the focus to a comparative one, looking across a variety of different jurisdictions to report common threads of advantage and disadvantage to the various structured sentencing systems. Originating in political and legal arenas, structured sentencing affects not only the sentencing process, but can itself affect the political process and the distribution of sanctioning discretion among the different branches of government.

This paper indicates how what Norbert Elias described as the disciplining of the aristocracy in 17th‐century France, which he took to be essential to the ascendancy of Louis XIV and the growth of the modern state, was itself part of a broader pattern of voiceless politics. The French political bureaucracy and the monarch in this period were able to accumulate power by restraining public political speech, and using a combination of rituals of subjugation and material forms like fortresses to exemplify the power and social efficacy of this political regime. The result was a new form of power, importantly demonstrated in the land and its people: what we have come to call the territorial state.

Following insights of social movement theory, this article looks at movement cycles in the initial development of the Nazi Party. Specifically, it explores the framing strategies the party employed in trying to make efficient use of opportunity structures in the political discourse of the late 1920s. On the basis of a content analysis of the official party newspaper, the authors analyze the topics of political events and speeches the Nazi Party organized in Munich between 1925 and 1930. The results show that after 1928, the Nazi Party managed to achieve a coherent set of themes around economic and political issues that may have facilitated its rise to power.

Discusses uses & abuses of history in theoretical & political development, focusing on how particular approaches can obstruct the development of tolerance, gender equity, & democracy. A tension exists in Eastern Europe between the desire for economic & political reform & the creation of a romanticized past. Analyzing how history is used to legitimate political projects, it is argued that originary myths about the nation conflict with the cultivation of liberal values & institutions, resulting in the withdrawal of protection from individuals & groups who are not part of the organic community. Citizenship based on the exercise of deliberate judgment is rejected, because opposition is easily equated with disloyalty. Serbia provides a telling contemporary example. E. Munson

Politicisation of British Civil Service : Ambitions, Limits and Conceptual Problems.
During the period in which the Conservative government was in power, there was no increase in the political activities of British civil servants who remain independent from any overt political activity. On the other hand, the period is characterised by systematic tendencies aimed at limiting the autonomy of civil servants and at assuring their obedience. This politicisation occurred in accordance with criticism emanating from Conservative quarters and followed a three-stage strategy : first, Conservatives undertook to reduce the influence and autonomy of the civil service, then a reform of its organisational and ideological culture was undertaken, and finally political control over civil servants was reaffirmed.

A BASIC QUESTION IS HOW POLITICS ARE TAMED AND CEASE BEING A deadly, warlike affair. The most dramatic way is through sudden, deliberate and lasting compromises of core disputes among political elites – what we think of as 'elite settlements'. Prior to settlements elites disagree about government institutions, engage in unchecked fights for dominance, and view politics as winner-take-all. After settlements, elite persons and groups continue to be affiliated with conflicting parties, movements, and beliefs, but they share a consensus about government institutions and the codes and rules of political competition. Settlements tame politics by generating tacitly accommodative and overtly restrained practices among competing political elites.

Armed struggle for the liberation of Palestine has been a rallying cry of the Palestinian national movement since its emergence in the 1960s, but its results have never been more than marginal. Instead, military groups have served a primarily political function, offering Palestinians in the diaspora organizational structures for political expression and state building. However, the nature of the PLO as an exile entity attempting to unite a disparate diaspora has necessarily resulted in an authoritarian leadership wary of the administrative, civilian, and social organizations needed to form a state. Ultimately, the political patterns that developed during the armed struggle impede as much as aid the realization of an independent Palestinian state.

Historians and theoreticians of nationalism and nationalist movements are perplexed by the fact that so much of what nationalists believe is evidently not the case. One example of this concerns the ontological or metaphysical status of the nation: whether nations as a form of political community are in the very nature of things or whether they are rather a recent way of imagining the political community.I question the meaning terms such as 'natural', 'imagined' and 'objective'/'subjective' have when we are talking about the nation as the foundation of political legitimacy. Ido this by explaining what meaning those terms have in the philosophical reconstruction of interpretation and communication by the American philosopher Donald Davidson.

Despite renewed opposition from prodemocracy movements, African democracy is in a shambles. Government leaders have simply appropriated the colonial state apparatus to serve their own interests, & the people are still oppressed by the same structures they tried to overthrow in the 1960s. Although some liberalization has occurred -- eg, in Benin, Ghana, & Zambia -- government responses to public agitation have run the spectrum from cooptation to intimidation to divisionary tactics. Changes have been primarily superficial, & deeper problems remain: the repressive, undemocratic state retains its agenda; the same elite manpulates politics; the African economy is a disaster; civil society is ineffective & fragmented; primordialism has increased; elections have been emphasized at the expense of developing democratic institutions; & foreign nations continue to destabilize democracies. Still, democracy can prevail if civil society is strengthened & if prodemocracy movements & new political parties change their strategies. 4 References. E. Munson

Contemporary Africa has little to be proud of. Between starvation, political corruption and economic inefficiency on the one hand and political unrest, political delegitimation and increasing refugization of widespread populations on the other, it is little wonder that many are writing off Africa. Some writers have stated emphatically that Africa is "Falling Off the Map." African problems are many; African solutions seem to be few and far between. In a world where power is being redefined, where the New World Order presents new realities of geopolitic, it is no longer sufficient for Third World nations to play one super-power off against another. Africa is lost.

Between 1873 and 1875 two anonymous pamphlets were published in London with intriguingly similar titles. They were: (A) A Few Remarks upon Certain Practical Questions of Political Economy, 1873; 2d ed., 1873; 3d ed., 1874; and (B) A Few Remarks on Professor Cairnes' Recent Contribution to Political Economy, 1875. Both were published by Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., Stationers' Hall Court, and both carried on their title pages the statement "By a Former Member of the Political Economy Club." The identity of the author or authors has not hitherto been established, but it now appears that John Cazenove (1788-1879) was certainly the author of (A), and most probably the author of (B).