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The aim of this article is to understand populism as a hegemonic project involving a struggle for power between different social forces. We take a critical realist approach in defining populism. This implies several things. We develop a new approach to understanding populist politics by taking neither a purely discursive (Laclau), nor a solely structural (Poulantzas), but a critical realist approach and analysing the three-way relationship between structural conditions, agency, and institutional framework. Second, it implies that populist politics is composed of complex and often contradictory dynamics and emergent features involving mainly domestic but also international processes. We develop this through a combination of three concepts – passive revolution, hegemonic depth, and partial hegemony. These indicate how a hegemonic project is situated in deeper social relations and how hegemonic leadership responds to this. We take the policies of AKP government in Turkey as a case in populist hegemonic project. We demonstrate that AKP has followed different hegemonic projects during its rule changing from an initial majoritarian populist politics to one of neoliberal authoritarian populism as it has consolidated its hegemonic depth. These different populist projects involve alternative visions of Turkey but are nevertheless all compatible with a global neoliberal agenda

The European Union is facing multiple challenges. Departing from mainstream theory, this paper adopts a fresh approach to understanding integration. It does so by taking two theoretical steps. One proposes that the state of integration should be understood as the outcome of contestation between competing hegemonic projects. The other introduces the structure-agency debate. EU structures, it is argued, arise from competing hegemonic projects that derive from underlying social processes and that find their primary expression in domestic politics. These two steps facilitate an analysis of the key areas of contestation in the contemporary EU and open up the development of an alternative, critical, theory of integration.

The article provides a critical overview of the rise of resilience at the European Union (EU) level and to what extent its adoption is reshaping the terms of the EU's peacebuilding interventions. In reaction to the perceived shortcomings of the "liberal peace" approach, international actors, including the EU, are now describing their interventions through a new resilience discourse. The article argues that resilience offers a four-fold contribution to promoting sustainable peace: (1) a focus on complexity; (2) a systems approach; (3) a shift toward local capacities; and (4) an emphasis on human agency. Focusing on the EU's discourse and its peacebuilding practices in the Western Balkans, the evidence suggests that the EU has only embraced a systems/integrated approach, while neglecting deeper understandings of complexity, local capacities and human agency. As a result, the contribution of resilience to EU peacebuilding remains limited.

During the past year, the Commonwealth of Virginia has experienced numerous developments in health law on all three major legal fronts-legislative, judicial, and administrative law. These developments have covered a range of health law topics, including everything from revisions to the public certificate of need process for health care facilities and the regulation of body-piercing of minors on the legislative front, to key decisions regarding the scope of the Virginia Birth-Related Neurological Injury Compensation Act and the Health Care Decisions Act on the judicial front, to action on the regulatory front regarding independent external appeals ofhealth plan denials and hospice care under the Medicaid program. This article offers a summary of some of the most significant developments in health law in each of these three legal arenas during the past year.