Suchergebnisse

While introducing the four contributions to the special issue "Students, their protests, and their organizations: exploring old gaps and new evidence", we link them with influential literature on students' protests and their organizations. The 'old gaps' refer to the long-standing divide between two traditions of research in students' collective action: social movements and organizational studies. The 'new evidence' refers to the finding that studentship is not conducive to protests (Oana 2019a), while the father's education is a strong predictor. While the 'agentic' character of studentship is one important presumption behind many arguments making sense of campus unrest, this finding does not invalidate it as such, but rather indicates that selection to higher education, and not campus socialization, may be conducive to this form of political participation.

AbstractIn this article, we discuss the relation between the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and its jurisprudence and social mobilizations around the place of religion in the society. We focus on the struggles to define the intersection of religion and public education in Romania after the fall of communism. We show that secularist and counter-secularist civil society activists contending for the place of religion in public education in this country have made strategic use of the ECtHR and its case law, both in legal battles and in debates within the national public sphere. We argue that, since references to the ECtHR and its jurisprudence can be used in discursive battles as a form of symbolic "capital", the strategies of mobilizing actors are at times more important than the strict doctrinal content of the ECtHR's judgments for understanding if and how the ECtHR's "shadow" is cast over religion-related mobilizations.

AbstractThis paper analyzes comparatively the indirect effects of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgments related to religion and education in four countries: Greece, Italy, Romania, and Turkey. It examines whether and how ECtHR jurisprudence on religion and education influences the views and the strategies deployed by various categories of actors. Do religious, secularist, minority, and other actors invoke these judgments and their normative principles in their discourse and mobilization strategies to promote religious pluralism or conversely religious values, in education? How are the norms that are enunciated in these judgments perceived by a diverse array of nationally situated actors who mobilize in this domain?

In this analysis, we discuss the recent dynamics of inter-religious relations in Romania with a focus on the influence of legislative provisions and court decisions. While previous analyses have focused on the domination of the Romanian Orthodox Church in the national religious field, and particularly on its relations with minority denominations, recent dynamics point to partial re- configurations in power relations. We analyse in depth several conflicts between representatives of religious majority and minor- ity denominations (enjoying a higher legal status), on the one hand, and representatives of heterodox religious groups that have recently broken away or represent different religious tradi- tions (with a lower legal status), on the other. We argue that new religious freedom dynamics arise at the intersection of conflicting interests of such communities with higher and, respectively, lower legal recognition. We analyse these dynamics in connection to national legislative provisions, domestic court decisions and the European Court of Human Rights.

The article provides a complementary view to those accounts of the growth of public administration education in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe that (a) explain its development primarily as a reflection of changes in administrative cultures while (b) emphasizing the ongoing process of curricular diversification. Rather, the article shifts the focus on the internal dynamics of higher education. It shows that the development of Romanian public administration education can be attributed, to a considerable extent, to unique opportunities arising in a period of post-communist re-institutionalization, of which enterprising academics ably took advantage. It further argues that, curricular variety notwithstanding, public administration departments in this country may be growing more alike in other respects. In so doing, the article contributes to an expansion of the traditional narrative of the growth of public administration education in post-communist Europe.