Suchergebnisse

Socio-economic justice lies in the normative core of Islam. The concepts of fard-al-kifāyah and zakāh reveal its commitment to protect the poor from the arbitrariness of the rich and treat the state as an institution that maximises collective welfare. The political economy of Safavid Iran indicates that the establishment of Islam as Iran's state religion facilitated the empire's administrative modernisation, economic development and class formation. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that religion did not only offer legitimacy grounds to the Safavid government. It also provided institutional incentives that transformed clerics into intermediaries between people and the Imperial Court, improved fiscal capacity and increased general trust toward the central government.

AbstractThis article analyses aid effectiveness from the donor's perspective. An aid contract is effective for the donor when she is able to observe her required levels of trade and institutional change on the territory of the recipient. The distinction between reciprocal, normative and just donors indicates three different approaches to aid effectiveness. The aid systems of the United Kingdom, Germany and the European Union are cases that differentiate along the lines of donors whose primary intentionality lies in the accumulation of trade and investment profits, donors that advance the implementation of institutional change and donors that put equal weight in both strategies. The existence of numerous veto players in the German aid system and the singularity of administrative organization in the British aid system operationalise the distinction between normative and reciprocal donors. The aid system of the European Union is defined as just because economic cooperation or institutional change alone is treated as insufficient for aid effectiveness. Hence, the success of the Technical Assistance to the Commonwealth of Independent States Program (TACIS) is due to the strategic choices of European Union bureaucrats and their treatment of antithetical donor preferences as complementary in the process of aid implementation. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The paper analyzes the political economy of nuclear power in Russia and France from a social justice perspective. While Russia prioritizes national security over environmental safety, France follows the inverse order of policy priorities. Nuclear innovation defines the ability of any state to provide efficiently public goods and implement redistributive policies, based on its nuclear potential. The distinction between hierarchical and multilevel regulation of the nuclear sector in Russia and France is critical for my argument; because hierarchical regulation is less likely to facilitate innovation, emerging nuclear-intensive economies are less inclined to approximate energy-induced redistributive justice. Explaining the four possible outcomes of the French-Russian nuclear cooperation, I maintain a high degree of optimism that technology can serve the needs of the poor without hampering global sustainability, growth and international investment relations.

Gegenstand des Beitrags sind Praxis und Ziele in der deutsch-russischen Erdgaspartnerschaft. Deutschland will das Zentrum der Erdgaswirtschaft der EU werden. Wegen der fast vollständigen Abhängigkeit von Erdgasimporten haben EON/Ruhrgas und Wintershall hart an einer gemeinsamen Partnerschaft mit Gazprom gearbeitet. Konsequenterweise führt dies zu einem Konflikt mit der Europäischen Kommission, die ebenfalls die Erdgaswirtschaft der EU in der Hand haben will. (ICE2)

We explore the effects of Libya's administrative division into Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and Fezzan on the onset of the Libyan conflict. We argue that Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, in particular, followed two different and distinct paths of political development and socioeconomic transformation. While Tripolitania and its elites are connected to the core of Libyan statehood and the legacies of Italian colonization, Cyrenaica is defined by localized political autonomy and economic autarky with respect to natural resources. Furthermore, the Qadhafi regime marginalized Cyrenaica politically, despite its major significance for the Libyan economy, because of its strong royalist inclinations. By offering an overview of Libya's political evolution and socioeconomic development, we indicate that the current conflict has largely been due to the asymmetric and artificial dominance of Tripolitania over the other two regions, particularly Cyrenaica.