Suchergebnisse

The regional inter-parliamentary cooperation assembly, Euronest, has been described in the context of the Eastern Partnership (EaP) policy, yet not conceptually analysed. This article therefore aims to focus on the identification of the driving forces behind multilateral parliamentary cooperation in the EaP region. Following a literature review, three conceptual interpretations of the drivers of inter-parliamentary cooperation can be pointed out: institutionalization, socialization and parliamentary diplomacy. The research shows that all the three possible explanations play a role in driving the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly. Parliamentary diplomacy, including both formal and informal tracks, is concluded to play the leading role in the development of Euronest. Institutions, such as secretariats and political party families, have a lot of potential but are still in their infancy. Socialization is seen as a goal of Euronest, but with serious limitations.

This thesis examines the provision of classroom music education in Australia and compares the situation here with those in England and Russia. In order to do this, I examine the National Review of School Music Education (2005) to gain an understanding of the current state of music education in Australia. Secondly, I review the literature published since 1967 that focuses on the state of school music education, teacher training and support in music, to understand how the issue has been dealt with over the years across Australia, in comparison to England and Russia. The empirical part of this thesis investigates further aspects which I believe the Review did not adequately address. For example, 62.74% primary and 33.78% secondary schools across Australia do not offer classroom music at all. In order to investigate in more depth the system in Australia, four major national surveys were prepared and carried out, involving 258 primary and 141 secondary school teachers who taught classroom music, 10 university lecturers from a number of Australian universities that provide pre-service training to primary school teacher trainees, and 12 teacher music advisors and consultants. The surveys identified such important matters as teachers' musical backgrounds, formal qualifications and pedagogical training, and linked these to their perceived confidence in teaching music. It is confirmed that teachers' musical qualifications is the major factor impacting the quality of music programs. Perceptions of pre-service and in-service training and curriculum support were also investigated. Finally, a further inquiry was made into what resources for teaching music are available in each Australian state and territory, and comparisons made across government, Catholic, and independent schools. Based on the historical and international data and the results of the surveys, suggestions are made which might enhance the delivery of music education.

AbstractThe many recent crises in Belarus are often seen through the prism of democratization, post-communist transition, and nation- and identity-building. As a rule, it is put into the context of the 1989 democratization in Central and Eastern Europe and compared with similar societal mobilization in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004; 2014), and Kyrgyzstan (2005). This article, however, argues that while these theoretical approaches provide an important explanatory potential, they nevertheless fail to account for informal, hidden, and unstable processes presently unfolding in the Belarusian society, leading to profound change. We argue that, in the vulnerable, unpredictable, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world of today, our knowledge and ability to plan and achieve desirable outcomes are limited in contrast to a largely positivist or interpretivist epistemology of the mainstream theories, which conceive of the world as a closed system. In this article, we offer an alternative explanation of the many crises in Belarus by drawing on the insights ofcomplexity-thinkingto suggest that (hidden) transformative change in the country is now irreversible.

The article examines societal fragilities and local resilience strategies in Belarus with a particular focus on the notion of peoplehood. Premised on the idea of evolving forms of agency under the Anthropocene, and the emergent complexity-thinking in International Relations, the article draws on these approaches to societal fragilities and community resilience to understand and explain the unprecedented levels of mobilization occurring in Belarus since the disputed presidential election in August 2020. To this end, the article zooms onto the local communities to provide an analytical perspective on the study of resilience as self-organization. In line with complexity-thinking, it argues in favor of history-specific processual identities, shaped by the aspirations of a "good life," and realized via local support infrastructures which lie at the heart of societal resilience in Belarus. Yet, the potential of all these elements to actualize into a sweeping transformative force, referred to as "peoplehood" in this article, is rare, and comes at a time of unprecedented crises and existential threats to the life of a community. The Belarusian society seems to be undergoing such a moment that not only makes it more resilient and adaptive to change; it also transforms it into a new form of societal being, self-aware of its worth, self-organized, and self-reliant on its inner capabilities to fight for a life of excellence. The article traces these moments of becoming with, and societal being, via a critical discussion of fragilities and the elements of resilience, actualized into peoplehood.

The presidential election held on 9 August 2020 and the subsequent popular mobilization marked the end of an era in the history of post-Soviet Belarus. Cautious and apolitical for three decades, Belarusian society seems to have awakened (Petrova and Korosteleva, 2021), in a short space of time observing a profound transformation of state-society relations taking them to a qualitatively new level of self-awareness and self-organisation. This article explores the emergence of peoplehood in Belarus from a complexity-thinking perspective. This lens naturally lead us to the principal conceptual frame of this article - societal resilience as a process of self-organisation - which encapsulates and explains the gist of the recent developments in Belarus, and helps us understand why the rise of peoplehood as a process of emergence in the country may result in irreversible change.

AbstractLiving in times of increasing complexity is hard; it becomes even harder with the realisation of diminishing control. How do we adapt our governance to this complexity to ensure peaceful cohabitation of the established and emergent order regimes? This paper contends that it is important to embrace complexity in full, conceptually and practically, by shifting from 'the global' to 'the local', to understand the pressure of transformational change and to prepare the ground for the emergence of more resilient and cooperative orders. We apply this complexity-thinking, using a 3P analysis, to Central Eurasia, presently a battleground of three competing order-making regimes—the EU, China and Russia. We argue that for more resilient and cooperative orders to emerge, it is essential to understand and enable 'the local' and embrace the region in is diversity, to facilitate a more joined-up and bottom-up governance in managing the complexity of a changing world.

By emphasizing concepts such as resilience and local ownership, recent updates in the EU's foreign policy strategy have marked a narrative turn and signaled a shift in EU external governance toward its neighborhood. This article has two aims. First, we unpack the EU's conceptual understanding of resilience and local ownership as reflected in its recent strategic documents. Second, we examine the implications of the EU's narrative turn on actual policy practices in Eastern Partnership countries. We highlight a gap between the EU's broad understanding of resilience and local ownership and the narrow operationalization of these concepts in the EU's eastern policy. The article shows that the EU continued relying on the previously established policy frameworks, according to which resilience develops through approximation with EU templates. This strong path dependence precluded any effective policy turn toward local ownership.

Recent changes in the European Union's (EU) regional and global environment triggered academic revision of the concept of the EU international actorness. A trend is emerging to analyse the EU through the prism of geopolitics, which is often presented as an opposition to the dominating Normative Power Europe approach. This article argues for a more nuanced and comprehensive approach to the EU's power. By applying Barnett and Duvall's (2005) taxonomy of power to EU foreign policy analysis, the study focuses on compulsory, institutional, structural and productive types of power employed by the EU towards Armenia. In a second step, it is contended that since power is a relational concept, it can be better accounted for when analysed from the point of view of policy receiver. To this end, two questions are addressed: how are the different types of power exercised by the EU in the Eastern Partnership region perceived in Armenia? And what explains these perceptions? The findings show that all four types of power are perceived as seriously limited in Armenia, institutional power being the most successful.