Suchergebnisse

This contribution discusses the regulatory approaches of German-speaking countries to the design of European and international economic law since World War II. The US initiatives for the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreements and the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade were driven by neo-liberal, multilateral approaches prioritizing rules-based liberalization of market access barriers, deregulation, privatization and 'financialization' of markets as spontaneous information, coordination and sanctioning mechanisms enabling private economic actors to pursue their economic self-interests. By contrast, the post-war German and European ordo-liberalism and the 'Virginia School' of 'law and economics' perceived markets as legal constructs, which cannot maximize general consumer welfare without legal limitations of 'market failures', 'governance failures' and 'constitutional failures'. The federalism and constitutional protection of common market freedoms inside Austria, Germany and Switzerland contributed to their promotion of ordo-liberal, constitutional approaches also in their external economic policies aimed at creating and progressively developing Europe's micro-economic 'common market constitution' not only inside the European Union, but also in the broader 'European Economic Area', the European Free Trade Area and the EU's common commercial policies. The worldwide WTO legal and dispute settlement system was influenced both by neo-liberal US initiatives as well as by ordoliberal European proposals (e.g. for the design of the WTO dispute settlement system). The current US assault on the WTO Appellate Body system is driven by neo-liberal interest group politics and hegemonic mercantilism by the US Trump administration.

The object of this master thesis are sporting mega-events. The research subject: comparison of expected and actual impacts (effects, legacy) of the II European Games held in Minsk in 2019. The goal of this study is to analyze the political, socio-economic, urban and media aspects and effects of the II European Games. The main tasks of the thesis are: reviewing the theoretical literature on the mega-events and their impact on politics, symbolic and real economy of cities and states that host these events; overviewing the issues of mega-events legacy evaluation, their 'soft power' and potential for political legitimization; analyzing the specific context of mega-events held in the countries of the former Socialist bloc; analyzing the political and cultural context of Belarus and image management measures undertaken by the country in the last 10-12 years - including during the World Hockey Championship in 2014; analyzing the process of event organization, specific features of PR-campaign and media-representation of the II European Games based on the official documents and state media; analyzing the range of responses to this event by the international and Belarusian independent media, as well as in social media; conducting and analyzing the expert interviews; analyzing of my own experience as a participant of the II European Games Opening Ceremony. This master thesis can be useful for mega-events researchers and organizers, sociologists, urbanists and cultural studies scholars, PR, media & communication professionals, creative industries actors, journalists and the general public.

The object of this master thesis are sporting mega-events. The research subject: comparison of expected and actual impacts (effects, legacy) of the II European Games held in Minsk in 2019. The goal of this study is to analyze the political, socio-economic, urban and media aspects and effects of the II European Games. The main tasks of the thesis are: reviewing the theoretical literature on the mega-events and their impact on politics, symbolic and real economy of cities and states that host these events; overviewing the issues of mega-events legacy evaluation, their 'soft power' and potential for political legitimization; analyzing the specific context of mega-events held in the countries of the former Socialist bloc; analyzing the political and cultural context of Belarus and image management measures undertaken by the country in the last 10-12 years - including during the World Hockey Championship in 2014; analyzing the process of event organization, specific features of PR-campaign and media-representation of the II European Games based on the official documents and state media; analyzing the range of responses to this event by the international and Belarusian independent media, as well as in social media; conducting and analyzing the expert interviews; analyzing of my own experience as a participant of the II European Games Opening Ceremony. This master thesis can be useful for mega-events researchers and organizers, sociologists, urbanists and cultural studies scholars, PR, media & communication professionals, creative industries actors, journalists and the general public.

The assumption that history posits itself as a fact, while literature is taken to be an artistic form, only for entertainment (i.e. a difference between truth and falsehood, reality and illusion) has been a contention for long between the formalist and sociology of literature theorists. In Yorùbá society, literature and history are important in letting us understand the world around us; both explain the full meaning of life. It is against this background that this paper examins the relationship between literature and history and how Yorùbá novelists use their works as vehicle of representation of history. We adopt the theory of New Historicism to analyse T.A.A Ladele's Igbì Ayé ń yí and Olu Owólabí's Ọ̀tẹ̀ Nìbò. Some of the findings reveal that: both Yorùbá literature and history are closely related, they are both based on Yorùbá experience and Yorùbá existence either in the past or present; while Ladele interpreted the history of the dignity and royal glamour of the Yorùbá ọba in pre-colonial era as a form of domination which is often achieved through culturally-orchestrated consent rather than force, Owólabí represented the history of party politics in Yorùbá society as fraudulent, deceitful, full of bitterness and violence. The paper concludes that both novelists are subjective in their representation of Yorùbá history, but they successfully establish the fact that the novel is a banker of history. However, such history is not a mere chronicle of facts and events, but rather a complex description of human reality and evolution of preconceived notions.

In their contribution to this book (Chapter 9), Helene Pristed Nielsen and N oralis Rodriguez-Coss argue that all views and perspectives are views from somewhere. If 'everything takes place' (Hubbard et al., 2002), then we are really blind to context when we fail to acknowledge its relevance and significance. Surprisingly enough, the post-modem and post-materialist tum in the social sciences tried to make short shrift of anything material. Place, along with class, status, political parties and trade unions, was old hat: these paradigms, we were told, have long dominated, and stunted, alternative conceptualisations of society and community. It was high time to rectify this ontological state of affairs. It was not only unfashionable, but also academically suspect, to refer to people in place (or out of place, in the case of diasporas, nomads, and migrants); and even worse to suggest that the place had something to say about people. But globalisation and seamless connectivities have come upon us accompanied by borders and boundaries. Some walls have come dramatically crashing down (think Berlin in 1989) but others have sprung up with gusto (think Israel and Palestinian settlements separated by walls and checkpoints in the West Bank) and show no signs of going away. Protectionism is back with a vengeance. The culture wars of the 1960s have been replaced by the identity politics of the 21st century. Democratic institutions the world over have been taken over and brought rudely into the service of pseudo-ethnicity, territoriality, and national greatness. Long live the fatherland. ; peer-reviewed

Caste has always generated political and scholarly controversy but the forms that this takes today newly combine anti-caste activism with counter-claims about the irrelevance or non-existence of caste, or claims to castelessness. Such claims to castelessness are in turn viewed as a new disguise for caste power and privilege, as well as being an aspiration for people subject to caste-based discrimination. This article looks at elite claims to 'enclose' caste within religion (specifically Hinduism) and the (Indian) nation so as to restrict the field of social policy with regard to caste, to exempt caste (as a basis of discrimination) from the law, and limit the social politics of caste. It does so taking the comparative cases of caste and caste-based discrimination among non-Hindus, and outside India — the exclusion of Christian and Muslim Dalits (members of castes subordinated as 'untouchable') from provisions and protections as Scheduled Castes in India, and responses to the introduction of caste into anti-discrimination law in the UK. While Hindu organisations in the UK reject 'caste' as a colonial and racist term, deploying postcolonial scholarship to deny caste discrimination, Dalit organisations (representing its potential victims) turn to scholarly discourse on caste, race or human rights. These are epistemological disputes about categories of description and how 'the social' is made available for public debate, and especially for law. Such disputes engage with anthropology whose analytical terms animate and change the social world that is their subject.

Over the last years, cryptocurrencies gained attention from all over the world. However, one of the main reasons for their popularity, namely their independence from central banks and politics, might similarly impose severe threats to the financial system. The aim of this paper is to consider cryptocurrencies from a monetary economic standpoint by assessing what sets them apart from fiat money and why they might impose risks on existing financial systems and players. Based on that, we assess their current and potential application in practice by observing their traits as investment object, their ability to act as a safe haven and as a medium of exchange in cross-border trade from a traditional monetary economic point of view. Finally, this paper analyzes whether cryptocurrencies could serve as money in a traditional sense, hurdles they needed to take and potential implications of their implementation. Based on our assessment, their current functioning as currency in a traditional sense is still very limited so far, whereas regulatory forces will closely monitor and attempt to prevent unwanted developments. Consequently, their most promising field of application rather lies in other areas of application, especially in cross-border trade, as their unique characteristic bringing considerable potentials for saving intermediary and exchange costs. However, if States and Central Banks are capable of maintaining and improving all functionalities of fiat money, to keep it transparent, stable and technically up-to-date and to meet the demand of publicity, the desire to hold cryptocurrencies as alternative currencies might become obsolete.

During the last decade, the Catalonian secessionist challenge induced a chronic crisis within Spain's politics that does not offer hints of a viable arrangement. The rapidly escalating demands for secession ran almost in parallel with the accentuation of the economic recession that followed the disruption of the world financial system in 2008-2010. Such secession claims reached maximums during 2012-2014, attaining support levels of nearly 50% of citizenry in favour of independence. These figures subsequently diminished a bit but remained close to that level until today. Despite the coincident course, previous studies had shown that the impact of economic hardships was not a major factor in explaining the segregation urgencies, connecting them instead to triggers related to internecine political struggles in the region: Harsh litigations that resulted in an abrupt polarization along nationalistic features in wide segments of the population. In this longitudinal analysis based on the responses of 88,538 individuals through a regular series of 45 official surveys, in the period 2006-2019, we show that economic factors did play a role in the secessionist wave. Our findings showed that the main idiomatic segmentation (Catalan vs. Spanish, as family language) interacted with economic segmentations in inducing variations on national identity feelings that resulted in erosions of the dual CatSpanish identity. Moreover, our findings also showed that the more privileged segments of Catalonian citizenry where those that mostly supported secession, whereas poorer and unprotected citizenry was clearly against it. All the data points to the conclusion that the secessionist challenge was, in fact, a rebellion of the wealthier and well-situated people.

AbstractCaste has always generated political and scholarly controversy, but the forms that this takes today newly combine anti-caste activism with counter-claims that caste is irrelevant or non-existent, or claims to castelessness. Claims to castelessness are, in turn, viewed by some as a new disguise for caste power and privilege, while castlessness is also an aspiration for people subject to caste-based discrimination. This article looks at elite claims to "enclose" caste within religion, specifically Hinduism, and the Indian nation so as to restrict the field of social policy that caste applies to, to exempt caste-based discrimination from the law, and to limit the social politics of caste. It does so through a comparative analysis of two cases. The first is the exclusion of Christian and Muslim Dalits—members of castes subordinated as "untouchable"—from provisions and protections as Scheduled Castes in India. The other case is that of responses to the introduction of caste into anti-discrimination law in the UK. While Hindu organizations in the UK reject "caste" as a colonial and racist term and deploy postcolonial scholarship to deny caste discrimination, Dalit organizations, representing its potential victims, turn to scholarly discourse on caste, race, or human rights to support their cause. These are epistemological disputes about categories of description and how "the social" is made available for public debate, and especially for law. Such disputes engage with anthropology, whose analytical terms animate and change the social world that is their subject.

Focusing on the time span from the 1960s to the late 1980s, that is, on the period during which Airbus established itself as a serious competitor on the world market, this article analyses the German aircraft industry's interests, its representation within the transnational Airbus project, and the relevance of what might be called 'Europeanness'. Occasionally also touching upon the situation in its partner countries, the central question is whether the respective political strategies of collaboration in the German aircraft industry were motivated by self-serving national interests or broader European ones. The article is divided into three sections. It begins by scrutinizing the motivations of German politics in the establishment and promotion of the Airbus project. Second, it deals with the representation of national interests in the allocation of production shares and the organization of cooperation, and, finally, with the European aspects of the massive subsidization of national manufacturers. It comes to the conclusion that the German case in particular illustrates that European collaboration in the aircraft sector was appreciated as an instrument to facilitate the survival of national industries pursuing their own business interests. The establishment of Airbus was supported as a European project to ensure the survival of the German aircraft industry and sometimes even as an instrument of business concentration. Nevertheless, notions about European integration or Franco-German friendship certainly increased the willingness to spend a lot of money on the Airbus project as the flagship of entanglement and interconnectedness in a 'future industry'.

This article introduces the Strategies of Resistance Data Project (SRDP), a global dataset on organizational behavior in self-determination disputes. This dataset is actor-focused and spans periods of relative peace and violence in self-determination conflicts. By linking tactics to specific actors in broader campaigns for political change, we can better understand how these struggles unfold over time, and the conditions under which organizations use conventional politics, violent tactics, nonviolent tactics, or some combination of these. SRDP comprises 1,124 organizations participating in movements for greater national self-determination around the world, from 1960 to 2005. Despite the fact that few self-determination movements engage in mass nonviolent campaigns, SRDP shows that more organizations employ nonviolent tactics at some point in time (about 40%) than employ violence (about 30%). Many organizations switch among tactics or use both at the same time. This dataset will allow analysts to examine the use of different combinations of tactics and patterns of change. We compare the data with the most-used dataset on nonviolence, the NAVCO 2.0 Data Project, to demonstrate what we gain by employing an organization-level dataset on tactics. We present a set of descriptive analyses highlighting the utility of the SRDP, including an examination of tactic switching. We show that more organizations change from violence to nonviolence than the reverse – challenging the widely held assumption that organizations 'resort' to violence. SRDP allows scholars to examine organizational choices about tactics, and trends in these tactics, with much greater nuance.

AbstractThis article argues that the late 1940s in India should no longer be reduced to the twin events of partition and independence. A generalized political crisis unsettled, for a brief period, the structures of social and economic power, and not just intercommunity relations and the constitution of the state. These years were thus, among other things, a catalytic moment for the definition of 'labour' as both a political category and a parameter of post-colonial politics: processes dating back to the First World War, at least, were consolidated, under pressure from this crisis, into a new labour regime that has withstood political pressure for almost seven decades. The article offers an analysis of the almost-forgotten post-war strike movement, which was nevertheless unprecedented in its social and geographical spread. The movement elicited both repressive and reformist responses: the extraordinary level of emergency powers applied to suppress it are, therefore, as much examined as the series of momentous legislative and institutional changes of the late 1940s. In conclusion, the long-term consequences of this cycle of strike–reform–repression for India's post-colonial labour regime are adumbrated. A strongly etatist, potentially authoritarian, regime of industrial relations, it is argued, was checked by an enduring political trade union pluralism. At the same time, divisions within India's working classes were deepened and consolidated as labour law and social legislation sealed off the comparatively small 'core workforces' of public sector and large-scale industrial enterprises from the majority of workers in what would soon be called the 'informal economy'.

We live a dangerous world "scenery" due ideas and ideologies manipulation / proliferation, the inherent social perceptions and the consequently tampered behaviors engaged in violence. If the Humanity is a complex context, States, Governments, politic, politics, societies, cultures, religions, ideological groups (social, ethnic, legal, illegal, declared and unknown), the Media… all have a powerful action being important "actors" which actions should be careful and critically studied. The manipulation is a riskily reality being disproportionate developed with the worst consequences. Discourses are the easiest instrument to analyze, with insidious messages, considered "normal" but being a simple manipulated information generating tampered and seriously dangerous violent actions is the question of the Religions and the Terrorism. For instance, it´s absolutely unacceptable when Islamism is presented or blended with the violence and the terrorist attacks responsible; when the Human Rights are violated by Catholics or Jewish, but it is strategically hidden, there are strong "pressures" concealed acting to promote wrong ideas and ideologies having as consequence serious problems. This is a reality adapted strategies to the context and place, but the Social Education is being manipulated which consequences are not only for today society, but the discrimination and xenophobia are being learned and will be frighteningly felt in future generations. It´s urgent to invest in the equality and "construct" the respect for all religions, cultures, specially promote the education for the different thinking, way of living and face the realities.

Nigeria has had a chequered history of conflict situations such as civil war, inter and intra ethnic conflicts, religious conflicts among others. Northern Nigeria, in particular, has been greatly threatened by armed conflicts in recent years. Indeed, the remote northeast region is ground zero for many of the world's most vexing problems, including an Islamic militant insurgency, crippling poverty, and declining development. In 2014, no fewer than 276 schoolgirls were abducted in Borno state by the Boko Haram sect that has ravaged the region since 2009. The audacious kidnapping brought the insurgency to world attention, triggering global outrage that galvanised support from many local and international actors. The girls have become a symbol of Nigeria's brutal conflict. The failure of Nigeria's former government to act quickly to free the girls sparked a global Bring Back Our Girls movement. While the abduction sparked international outrage in a frantic bid to rescue the girls, some undercurrents were playing out locally that now deserve academic review. This essay is thus, an attempt to further interrogate the nature, nuances, shenanigan, politics and various rescue missions that characterise the Chibok girls' abduction. It particularly reviews the activities of both local and international dimensions of #Bring Back Our Girls campaign within the socio-cultural and political contexts of the time while putting on spotlight issues of post-trauma facilities expected for the rescued girls and the fate of those still in captivity. Recebido em: setembro/2018. Aprovado em: setembro/2019.

After the massive outbreaks of violence and catastrophes at the dawn of the twentieth century, experiences of dislocation and dissonance, as well as their reflection in the human psyche, nostalgia, captivated the interest of various disciplines from literary studies to politics. Although viewed through various lenses, nostalgia as a state of a wistful affection for the past still permeates the present discourses. These studies on nostalgia overlap with a rising trend in the Western literary canon, the surge of derivative forms of utopia. Building on the contemporary interdisciplinary approaches on nostalgia and dystopian tradition, this paper investigates the individual's position in a dystopian setting with an emphasis on the experience of nostalgia in Paolo Bacigalupi's novel The Windup Girl (2011). Set in a near future in which the world is dominated by mega companies, the novel exhibits intertextual features shaping its meaning through the readers' knowledge of various myths, Biblical stories and canonical texts. The novel's acknowledgement of a text prior to itself bears a thematic significance in terms of nostalgia. Hence, this paper aims to explore the web of textual relations from a perspective of nostalgia in the selected work. And retrospectively, through understanding the nature of the textual dialogue that The Windup Girl engages, we shall gain more insight into the relationship between dystopian novels and nostalgia. This paper aims to investigate how the novel problematizes the nostalgic attitude of four different characters through representing their inability to move on and to adapt themselves to their new environment.