Long arm of the regime: who signs extradition agreements with China?
In: International relations of the Asia-Pacific: a journal of the Japan Association of International Relations
ISSN: 1470-4838
In: International relations of the Asia-Pacific: a journal of the Japan Association of International Relations
ISSN: 1470-4838
World Affairs Online
In: Journal of policy analysis and management: the journal of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management
ISSN: 1520-6688
In: Romanian Journal of Military Medicine, Band 127, Heft 1, S. 66-73
ISSN: 2501-2312
"Currently, the educational process must integrate new tools, to keep pace with technological progress. Our paper aims to investigate the extent to which the preferences of medical students for the autonomous use of multimedia resources in the learning process are correlated with their opinions towards the Internet and the intensity of using it in their daily activities. Methods: We investigated 395 medical students from 4 medical universities in Romania, 75.9% females, and 88.8% in the 1st and 2nd years of study. Students were asked to express on Likert-scales their agreement with a list of statements about Internet services, as well as whether they like learning using multimedia tools and how intensively they use Internet services. Results: The students agree to a medium to large extent with the favorable statements about Internet services but are also aware of the negative influences that indiscriminate use of such technology can have. The intensity of Internet usage is high, although not exaggerated. With small exceptions, the students who enjoy using multimedia resources during the learning process have also favorable opinions about Internet services, and use them constantly, mainly for information and instant messaging on social networks."
Blog: Responsible Statecraft
The revolutionary violence that swept Kyiv's Maidan Square on the night of February 21, 2014 unleashed the forces of Ukrainian nationalism and, ultimately, Russian revanchism, and resulted in, among other things, the first full-scale land war in Europe since 1945.President Volodymyr Zelensky has called the Maidan the "first victory" in Ukraine's fight for independence from Russia. Yet too often lost in the tributes to Ukraine's 'Revolution of Dignity' are two simple, though ramifying, questions: What was the Maidan really about? And did things have to turn out this way?Revisiting the events of that time may help us more fully understand how we arrived at this fateful moment in world affairs.So, what precipitated the Maidan Revolution?In November 2013, Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych rejected the terms of the European Union Association Agreement in favor of a $15 billion credit agreement offered by the Russian Federation. Many in the western part of Ukraine had supported the EU deal, as it would have, in their view, secured Ukraine's future within Europe.But, as the Europeans, Americans, Ukrainians and Russians knew full well, the association agreement with Brussels wasn't merely a trade deal. Section 2.3 of the EU-Ukraine association agenda would have required the signatories to:"...take measures to foster military cooperation and cooperation of technical character between the EU and Ukraine [and] encourage and facilitate direct cooperation on concrete activities, jointly identified by both sides, between relevant Ukrainian institutions and CFSP/CSDP agencies and bodies such as the European Defence Agency, the European Union Institute for Security Studies, the European Union Satellite Centre and the European Security and Defence College."In other words, the trade deal also included the encouragement of military interoperability with forces viewed, rightly or wrongly, by the Russian government as a threat to Russian national security.In addition, the EU association agenda required Ukraine to put up barriers to trade with Russia. An alternative proposal put forward by Romano Prodi (former Italian Prime Minister and EU Commission president) would have allowed Ukraine to trade with both Russia and the EU but was rejected by Brussels.Yanukovych's rejection of the EU agreement brought thousands of protesters to Kyiv's Independence (Maidan) Square. Yet policy disagreements over issues of trade and national security can and are routinely adjudicated via democratic procedures, as they are in the U.S. and Europe. And such an adjudication was eminently possible, even as late as the morning of February 21, 2014, when a deal brokered by Russia and the EU was struck between Yanukovych and the Ukrainian opposition that included a revision of Ukraine's constitution, the creation of a unity government, and an early presidential election to be held 10 months later in December 2014.But on the night of February 21, Yanukovych fled, and a new government was installed by voluntarist rather than democratic means. The immediate post-Maidan government included the far-right Svoboda Party, whose members, according to a contemporaneous Reuters report, held "five senior roles in Ukraine's new government including the post of deputy prime minister."Edmund Wilson once wrote that "it is all too easy to idealize a social upheaval which takes place in some other country than one's own." And that was a trap into which the Obama administration — along with almost the entirety of the American media, intelligentsia and think tank world — fell in the immediate aftermath of the Maidan.It would be fair of critics of this view (and there are many) to ask: What were their alternatives to the Obama administration's support for the Maidan and Kyiv's post-revolutionary government?Mr. Obama might have said "A deal was struck. Stick to it." This would have required a degree of statesmanship unusual to any American president. But, as Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer observed only a month later, "...there was a deal that was cut with the European foreign ministers. That deal was abrogated and the Americans were very happy to jump on that immediately in ways that would have been completely unacceptable to anyone in the U.S. administration if we had been on the other side."And so, the U.S. lent its support to the post-Maidan government (and the Anti-Terrorist Operation, or ATO, launched in April 2014) against the largely, but of course far from entirely, indigenous uprising in the Donbas. Thus began the first phase of the war, which lasted until the evening of February 24, 2022 and cost 14,000 dead and 1.5 million refugees.In addition to the ATO, Kyiv also pursued a policy of decommunization in the east (later cited by Putin as among his many grievances with post-Maidan Kyiv) and repeatedly refused to implement the Minsk Accords. As a former U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, Jack F. Matlock, noted in Responsible Statecraft, "The war might have been prevented — probably would have been prevented — if Ukraine had been willing to abide by the Minsk agreement, recognize the Donbas as an autonomous entity within Ukraine, avoid NATO military advisors, and pledge not to enter NATO."The second phase of the war opened on the evening of February 24, 2022, as some 190,000 Russian troops invaded Ukraine. The costs to Ukraine have been staggering.The World Economic Forum recently estimated that the cost of Ukrainian reconstruction will reach $1 trillion. Still more, "Approximately 20% of the country's farmland has been wrecked and 30% of land either littered with landmines or unexploded ordnance." Casualty estimates are known to be among the most closely held state secrets during wartime, but some, like former Ukraine prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko, have estimated Ukraine suffered a combined 500,000 dead and wounded in its war with Russia. Meanwhile, the population of Ukraine has plummeted from 45.5 million in 2013 to an estimated 37 million today.Looking back, the warnings issued by a small minority in the winter of 2014, including, but not limited to: the present authors; Professor Stephen F. Cohen; The Quincy Institute's Anatol Lieven; Ambassador Jack Matlock; Professor John J. Mearsheimer; and others were dismissed by the Obama administration, policymakers, the media and the most influential think tanks in Washington. Yet the effort to wrest Ukraine into the West's orbit via revolutionary violence, despite the objections of fully a third of that country, has been nothing short of catastrophic.
In: Policy studies journal: the journal of the Policy Studies Organization
ISSN: 1541-0072
AbstractThe complexity of metropolitan polycentric governance is still challenging scholars and practitioners, who have mostly been engaged in a normative debate in which scant attention has been paid to the coexistence and interdependence of institutional solutions. The ecology of games framework (EGF) can be used to remedy this gap. By incorporating the analysis of institutional variation into EGF propositions about venues' interdependence, this article examines the mechanisms of metropolitan governance configuration resulting from institutional complexity at the inter‐municipal level. Provincial forums, municipal associations, and inter‐municipal agreements are the policy venues studied in the Santiago Metropolitan Region, Chile. Official documents reporting formal agreements in 2017–2021 help to capture the inter‐municipal governance network to which we apply exponential random graph models (ERGMs). The results show the positive effects of mandated provincial venues on inter‐municipal ties and the absence of the effect of self‐organized municipal associations, tendencies that prevail even when incorporating other relevant covariates into the models. These results nourish the EGF debate about interdependencies between coexisting policy venues, emphasizing the role of the different institutional attributes framing the policy venues and the effects of these differences on governance formation.
In: India quarterly: a journal of international affairs
ISSN: 0975-2684
The Indian patent model is a powerful and well-balanced model that not only complies with the requirements of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) but also considers domestic needs and national interest. This study endorses India's approach of fully availing itself of public health flexibilities provided in the TRIPS Agreement. India's well thought out patent model contradicts with the pro-patentee approaches taken by the European Union, the USA and Japan. This study emphasises the challenges and pressures faced by the Indian patent model because of the closer harmonisation agenda being pushed by some high-income countries through bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements. This study argues that in order to effectively respond to harmonisation demands, India needs to be proactive in terms of building regional coalitions and transmitting its model to other like-minded Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries with similar interests. This is a viable approach because most of the ASEAN countries, despite different levels of development and industry, are facing similar challenges in terms of universal access to affordable medicines.
Blog: Responsible Statecraft
With no ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas in sight and Houthi forces in Yemen still firing missiles and drones at commercial shipping in the Red Sea, the EU's efforts at addressing conflict in Gaza and its broader regional ramifications keep flailing.After weeks of discussions, the EU officially launched its naval operation in the Red Sea on February 19 to protect international commercial shipping from Houthi attacks. The Houthis claim they wantto force a ceasefire in Gaza. Yet, while the ceasefire remains elusive, the attacks impose real costs on EU members: the EU commissioner for economy Paolo Gentiloni recently estimated that the rerouting of shipping from the Red Sea has increased delivery times for shipments between Asia and the EU by 10 to 15 days and the consequent costs by around 400%. Around 40% of the EU's total trade with the Middle East and Asia passes through the Red Sea.Protecting that shipping route thus is an important collective economic and security interest for the EU. Yet only four countries — France, Germany, Italy and Belgium — out of the 27 member states have agreed to provide warships for the new operation. Spain, which refrained from using its veto power to block the initiative, nonetheless declined to participate, having expressed concerns from the outset that any armed operation would reduce pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza. A bigger question is how effective this new EU operation will be in countering the Houthi threat given its purely defensive mandate to provide "situational awareness, accompany vessels and protect them against possible attacks at sea." Accordingly, the participating EU warships will be authorized to fire on Houthi targets only if they themselves or commercial vessels they are to protect are attacked. That rules out pre-emptive action against Houthi missile batteries or related targets.The defensive nature of the operation, however, may not be enough to convince the Houthis to refrain from attacking the European ships. In fact, Houthi leaders warned Italy, one of the new operation's chief promoters, that it will become "a target if it participates in attacks on the Houthis." If this threat comes to fruition, will the EU authorize offensive action against the Houthis, potentially drawing itself into a wider conflict? Will it rely on U.S. hard power for protection given that Washington is already engaged against the Houthis through "Operation Prosperity Guardian," in which a few EU nations – Denmark, Netherlands and Greece, as well as non-EU NATO members Britain and Norway -- are also participating? Would such developments not lead to a de facto merging of the U.S. and EU-led operations under Washington's lead — an outcome Europeans sought to avoid and which is the very reason why they launched their own mission in the first place? That these are not abstract questions is underscored by the failure, so far, of scores of U.S.- and UK-led strikes to degrade the Houthis' capabilities to the point where they would no longer pose a significant threat. Indeed, just as the EU announced its mission, the Houthis hit a British cargo ship which was at risk of sinking in the Gulf of Aden in what the Yemeni rebels claimed was their biggest attack yet. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations confirmed the incident, though it did not name the ship.Ironically, the safest way for the EU to avoid a direct military engagement with the Houthis, apart from testing their vow to stop attacking shipping if Israel ends its Gaza offensive, would be to reduce the number of targets in the Red Sea by encouraging ships to reroute. But such an outcome would, of course, vindicate the Houthi strategy to impose costs on the Western powers for the failure to stop the war in Gaza.And that brings us back to the mother of all conflicts in the Middle East: the continuing war in Gaza. The EU's approach so far has been to delink Gaza from the crisis in the Red Sea and the broader escalation in the region, including clashes between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah. Yet mounting tensions on that front show that its approach is not working. Some actors in the EU understand the urgent need for a ceasefire in Gaza as a necessary condition for regional de-escalation. The EU high representative on foreign policy Josep Borrell has been particularly vocal in his criticism of Israel. He suggested limiting arms sales to Tel Aviv on the grounds that such transfers violate EU guidelines that ban sales to countries accused of violations of the international humanitarian law. A Dutch appeals court recently ordered a halt to exports of F-35 jet parts to Israel on the same grounds. However, it is highly unlikely that the EU as a whole would adopt such a position, given that a number of countries – especially Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary – strongly support Israel.A stronger point of leverage could be to suspend fully or partially the association agreement between the EU and Israel. The EU is Israel's largest trading partner. In 2023, that agreement enabled 46.8 billion euros worth of bilateral trade. The prime ministers of Spain and Ireland, Pedro Sanchez and Leo Varadkar, respectively, asked the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, to "urgently review" whether Israel is violating the human rights clauses included in that agreement. On February 19, the Spanish foreign minister, Jose Manuel Albares, insisted that the review should be completed in time for the next EU foreign ministers meeting on March 18.A full suspension of the agreement seems very unlikely even if the Commission finds Israel to have violated its human rights obligations because that would call for a unanimous decision by all member states. A partial suspension would require a qualified majority: 55% of member states (or 15 out of 27) representing 65% of the EU's total population. Notably, the only precedent for taking such an action came in 2011 when the EU suspended an association agreement with Syria in response to mass violations of human rights by the Bashar al-Assad regime. Meanwhile, the EU proved unable last week to issue even an official appeal to Israel not to follow through with its plans to carry out a ground invasion of Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, which has become the last refuge of nearly a million refugees from elsewhere in the enclave. In the face of a veto threat by Hungary, the other 26 member states instead issued a joint statement warning of the catastrophic humanitarian consequences should Israel move ahead with such an invasion. Notably, however, Hungary was isolated in its opposition to the appeal as Germany and other member states that have traditionally been reluctant to criticize Israel's conduct of war were on board. That is a step forward, but it's too little and it comes too late. As long as the EU keeps avoiding imposing real consequences on Israel for its conduct, it will keep losing influence in the Middle East.
In: Cambridge studies in international and comparative law 181
Since 1995 there has been intense debate about whether the WTO Agreement is just. Many observers point to the association of the treaty with intensive interdependence and the disruptive effects of globalization to assert that it is unjust. Nevertheless, justice in sovereign terms is different from justice in human terms. This book puts forward a theory of WTO law to explain the difference and its implications for the international trading system. It details how economic interdependence gives rise to an interdependent view of the relationship between different forms of justice and to interdependent obligations in WTO law. It also suggests how the WTO dispute settlement system might have a residual value as a locus for transformative outcomes despite contemporary concerns about the system's political acceptability. Taken together, such insights may assist in identifying elements of a general theory of law.
In: Political research quarterly: PRQ ; official journal of the Western Political Science Association and other associations
ISSN: 1938-274X
This paper proposes that the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO), experienced a deepening/widening tradeoff: as their membership increased (greater width), their effectiveness in promoting trade between members/participants declined (lesser de facto depth). This proposition is tested using gravity models of bilateral trade, first separating the GATT and WTO, which are usually combined into a single variable, and then adding a width variable corresponding to each institution. The results show that (1) both regimes were the deepest, or the most trade effective, when they had the fewest member-states and (2) their trade effectiveness declined, eventually becoming statistically insignificant, as more countries joined. As a quantitative case study, this paper provides some of the first evidence consistent with a tradeoff between depth and width within international institutions.
In: Crime, law and social change: an interdisciplinary journal
ISSN: 1573-0751
AbstractBid-rigging harms economies and societies. While existing research has primarily focused on quantifying the economic damages resulting from bid-rigging cartels, there is a relative dearth of studies exploring how firms interact and the specific techniques they use to rig tenders. Our paper examines the bidding behaviours associated with bid-rigging. Specifically, we investigate how cartel companies exploit legal opportunities, engage in joint and similar bidding and adapt tactics based on the number of colluding bidders. Our study relies on judicial evidence and a dataset of 1,242 companies (including 112 colluding entities) participating in 357 roadwork bid auctions in Italy. Through bootstrap logistic regressions, we analyse company-level indicators and their association with cartel involvement. The results reveal that cartels frequently exploit subcontracts and price similarity. Moreover, we find that bid-rigging tactics vary depending on the number of bidding cartel companies involved. When colluding companies are the majority of bidders, cartels rely on widespread member participation to cover a broad range of prices. Conversely, when cartel companies constitute less than half of the bidders, they tend to form temporary associations. These findings untangle the complexity inherent in cartel agreements and strategies, highlighting the importance of assessing firm interactions and relational patterns within co-bidding networks for a comprehensive understanding of collusive dynamics.
In: Political studies: the journal of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom
ISSN: 1467-9248
Junior ministers are very common in coalition governments. Existing research argues that parties assign junior ministers to satisfy the office goals of coalition partners or as a mechanism to manage delegation costs. This article aims to reassess this argument. Using interviews, personal calendars, coalition agreements and an original data set on junior ministers in Israel, it finds that junior ministers are engaged in policymaking either on general issues under the ministry's jurisdiction or issues that are salient to their party. Although rival junior ministers have the capacity and the incentive to monitor the minister, they do so only on the margins, either because they do not need to, or because they focus on safeguarding their policymaking autonomy. Finally, all junior ministers assist the minister and represent the ministry.
In: Nonprofit and voluntary sector quarterly: journal of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action
ISSN: 1552-7395
Religion is one of the most widely recognized predictors of charitable giving and volunteering. Yet there is less agreement on how it matters and whether spirituality matters as well. We explore religion's modes of influence through multidimensional measures of religion and spirituality, including affiliation, membership, and salience. We introduce an analysis of spiritual practices to studies of prosocial behavior and find that six diverse spiritual practices are independently associated with greater likelihood of giving or volunteering. In full models, composite measures of spiritual practices beyond regular religiosity measures are significantly associated with both outcomes. Taken collectively, our results demonstrate the value of recognizing the multiple pathways through which religion and spirituality matter for giving and volunteering, the relevance of diverse forms of spiritual practice, and, most broadly, the importance of further exploring the links between spirituality and prosocial behavior.
In: The Pacific review
ISSN: 1470-1332
In June 2019, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) issued a shared regional vision, the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP). The document ended a debate about how to respond to the concept of the Indo-Pacific, the United States' Indo-Pacific Strategy, and new additions to regional security architecture, especially the Quad. Indonesia, traditionally a leading voice in ASEAN, exerted significant diplomatic capital developing and securing agreement on the AOIP after a period of diminished leadership from the organisation. Dominant explanations for this behaviour cannot fully address why the country led in constructing AOIP despite what most analysts agree was the disengagement of President Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo (2014 -) from foreign policy. Developing an original 'role integration' model, this article argues that Indonesia was able to lead on AOIP because President Jokowi's preference for maritime cooperation and economic diplomacy integrated with the Indonesian Foreign Ministry's efforts to maintain ASEAN unity and centrality in this instance. The findings of this research offer both new empirical insights into the domestic decision-making processes that shaped Indonesia's agency in AOIP and add to the role theory literature by shifting the analytical focus from domestic contestation to cooperative dynamics that can shape the national role conception. (Pac Rev / GIGA)
World Affairs Online
In: Law and Religion in a Global Context Series v.4
Intro -- Acknowledgment -- Contents -- List of Contributors -- Introduction: Religious Pluralism and Law in Contemporary Brazil -- 1 The Legal-Administrative Changes of the Post-Constituent Pluralist State -- 2 Religious Activism and Rights -- 3 Part 1. Pluralism: Minority Rights, Religious Freedom and Secularism -- 4 Part 2. Human Rights as Language -- References -- Part I: Pluralism: Minority Rights, Religious Freedom and Secularism -- Religion and Laicity in Dispute: Two Categories Under Construction in Brazil´s Legal Debate on Religious Education in Public S... -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Religious Education as a Public Issue in a Historical Perspective -- 2.1 Religious Education in Republican Constitutions -- 2.2 Religious Education Regulations in the National Education Guidelines and Framework Law of 1961, 1996 and 1997 -- 2.3 Religious Education Regulations in the Agreement Between the Holy See and Brazil -- 3 Debates on the Unconstitutionality of Religious Education in the Public Hearing -- 3.1 The Characters and the Game´s Rules -- 3.2 The Rules -- 3.3 The Debate: Presentations, Categories, Arguments, and Positions -- 3.4 Presentations of Executive and Legislative Representatives -- 3.5 Arguments of Legislative Representatives -- 3.6 Presentations and Arguments of Civil Society Representatives -- 3.7 Demonstrations by Representatives of Religious Organizations -- 3.8 Demonstration by Representatives of Non-Religious Organizations -- 4 Final Considerations -- References -- Evangelical Jurists and Human Rights in Brazil: A Case Study of the National Association of Evangelical Jurists (ANAJURE) -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Methods -- 3 The Political Context of the Emergence of ANAJURE -- 4 The Process of Mobilizing Jurists on Behalf of Evangelicals -- 5 The Supreme Federal Court´s Criminalization of Violence Against Homosexuals.
In: The Canadian journal of economics: the journal of the Canadian Economics Association = Revue canadienne d'économique, Band 57, Heft 1, S. 331-358
ISSN: 1540-5982
AbstractThis paper examines the relative importance of global, regional, country and idiosyncratic factors as well as the determinants that underpin fluctuations in international trade flows across different regions of the world. Our analysis starts by using a Bayesian dynamic latent factor model (BDFM) to simultaneously estimate the four dynamic factors, followed by the application of Bayesian model averaging to identify the variables that explain the shares of variance. Our key findings are: (i) international factors are the most important in explaining fluctuations in international trade, suggesting that the interconnections between economies and policies/shocks at the regional and global level tend to be more important than country‐level factors and (ii) regional integration, particularly when the agreement goes beyond trade in goods, is positively related to the share of the regional factor and inversely related to the importance of the global factor. Furthermore, the regional factor is more important in the case of economically large trade blocks. Overall, our analysis illustrates the usefulness of applying a BDFM model to study the co‐movements of international trade series.