Urban heritage conservation and rapid urbanization : insights from Surat, India

Currently, heritage is challenged in the Indian city of Surat due to diverse pressures,  including rapid urbanization, increasing housing demand, and socio‐cultural and climate changes.  Where rapid demographic growth of urban areas is happening, heritage is disappearing at an  alarming rate. Despite some efforts from the local government, urban cultural heritage is being  neglected and historic buildings keep being replaced by ordinary concrete buildings at a worryingly  rapid pace. Discussions of challenges and issues of Surat’s urban area is supported by a qualitative  dataset, including in‐depth semi‐structured interviews and focus groups with local policy makers,  planners, and heritage experts, triangulated by observation and a photo‐survey of two historic  areas. Findings from this study reveal a myriad of challenges such as: inadequacy of urban  conservation management policies and processes focused on heritage, absence of skills, training,  and resources amongst decision makers and persistent conflict and competition between heritage  conservation needs and developers’ interests. Furthermore, the values and significance of Surat’s  tangible and intangible heritage is not fully recognized by its citizens and heritage stakeholders. A  crucial opportunity exists for Surat to maximize the potential of heritage and reinforce urban  identity for its present and future generations. Surat’s context is representative of general trends  and conservation challenges and therefore recommendations developed in this study hold the  potential to offer interesting insights to the wider planners and conservationists’ international  community.  This  paper  recommends  thoughtful  integration  of  sustainable  heritage  urban  conservation into local urban development frameworks and the establishment of approaches that  recognize the plurality of heritage values

Chapter 7 The development of political systems in post-communist countries

This book focuses on social transformations as one of the central topics in the social sciences. The study of European social transformations is very valuable in the context of universal discussions within social sciences: explaining invariable, universal attributes of societies and examining changing attributes. The book consists of 20 chapters on European social transformations, written from the perspectives of distinguished scholars from such disciplines as economics, political science, educational science, geography, media and communication studies, public management and administration, social psychology and sociology. The temporal and spatial range of the book is wide, including such global changes as time-space compression, focusing particularly on change processes in Europe during the last two decades. The book consists of four main parts, beginning with an overview of the theoretical and methodological approaches, and then focusing separately on post-communist transformations, institutional drivers of social transformations in the European Union, and European transformations in the context of global processes. The book presents current theoretical, empirical and methodological approaches that complement the scientific literature on social transformations. This book is both an invaluable resource for scholars and an indispensable teaching tool for use in the classroom and will be of interest to students, academics, and policy-makers studying how this diverse region has changed over recent years

Press Freedom Under Threat in Europe: SLAPPs and Democracy

This paper critically examines the legal systems of European countries and their relationship to press freedom, particularly the vexatious legal threats used by government officials and corporations to silence journalists. These legal threats are known as SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation) and their use has increased exponentially in the last decade. Although the issue is global, this research analyzes the issue through the lens of Greece, Italy, and Hungary. As member states, each one of these countries has an obligation to uphold the democratic standards put forth by the EU. Journalists are a vital aspect of the democratic process and are protected by both domestic and international laws. Corruption within democratic governments is on the rise, and the inability of European countries to recognize and prevent these attacks against journalists is cause for increasing concern. This paper aims to answer the question of whether current domestic and international law is being enforced in a manner that protects journalistic authority

Order in the Court: Judicial Stability and Democratic Success in Haiti

Haiti faces many challenges in its attempt to build a stable, liberal democracy. Haitians have endured a legacy of chaotic and heavy-handed rule in recent decades, and the success of democracy in Haiti is both hoped for and doubted by Haitians and the international community. One reason for the doubts has been the failure of the Haitian government successfully to implement free and fair elections. Citizens and candidates are often hesitant even to participate in elections. Though both were tragic, neither the failed legislative and presidential elections of 2000, nor the subsequent coup d\u27etat in 2004 that resulted in the ouster of President Jean Bertrand-Aristide were particularly unique in Haiti\u27s history. In order for Haiti to implement elections in a manner that creates legitimate leaders and an engaged electorate, the rule of law and the order of the Haitian Constitution must be enforced. This Note argues that while far from perfect, the Haitian judiciary has the potential to play the most vital role in the institutional stabilization and democratization of Haiti. As judges are not subject to election, Haiti\u27s judicial system stands at an arm\u27s length from the government\u27s suspicious electoral practices. The judiciary has already achieved a relatively impressive level of competence as demonstrated in the Raboteau trail of 2000, and it is the most promising of Haiti\u27s governmental institutions to foster the rule of law and electoral stability. Haiti is in a truly desperate condition and requires steps toward authentic democratization to put its government and its people on the road to success. Judicial implementation and enforcement of a potent and reasonable body of electoral and constitutional law is a good first step, and the Haitian judicial system may be able to lead the way to electoral success in Haiti

Walking the Talk: How to Identify Anti-Pluralist Parties

The recent increase of democratic declines around the world – “the third wave of autocratization” – has sparked a new generation of studies on the topic. Scholars tend to agree that the main threat to contemporary democracy arises from democratically elected rulers who gradually erode democratic norms. Is it possible to identify future autocratizers before they win power in elections? Linz (1978) and Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) suggest that a lacking commitment to democratic norms reveals would-be autocratizers before they reach office. This article argues that the concept of anti-pluralism rather than populism or extreme ideology captures this. We use a new expert-coded data set on virtually all relevant political parties worldwide from 1970 to 2019 (V-Party) to create a new Anti-Pluralism Index (API) to provide the first systematic empirical test of this argument. We find substantial evidence validating that the API and Linz’s litmus-test indicators signal leaders and parties that will derail democracy if and when they come into power

The future of Cybersecurity in Italy: Strategic focus area

This volume has been created as a continuation of the previous one, with the aim of outlining a set of focus areas and actions that the Italian Nation research community considers essential. The book touches many aspects of cyber security, ranging from the definition of the infrastructure and controls needed to organize cyberdefence to the actions and technologies to be developed to be better protected, from the identification of the main technologies to be defended to the proposal of a set of horizontal actions for training, awareness raising, and risk management

Risk, Courts, and Agencies

Public risks are precisely the risks that have recently captured the attention of the legal community and the world at large, in no small part because they give rise to such novel problems for lawyers and such grave apprehensions among lay people. Public risks have moved the legal system to relax doctrines--regarding, for example, standards of causation and culpability, burdens of proof, sharing of liability--that were designed to deal with the private risks that once dominated the landscape. And public risks have moved lay people to intensify their demands for risk control measures. These developments suggest that public risks are subject to especially harsh treatment, yet such treatment might often be contrary to minimizing the sum of all risk-related costs. If some public risks, whatever their dangers, are in fact safer or otherwise more beneficial than the risks they would displace, then cost minimization requires open-minded efforts to encourage many of the very technological threats that current legal and popular opinion would instead deter. As a consequence, the question of what to do about public risk has become a subject of considerable (and sometimes heated) debate. That debate is our concern throughout all that follows. We begin in Part I with a summary of the contending views in the ongoing argument about public risk, giving particular attention to two important points of contention. The first of these has to do with attitudes. The general public, and to some degree the legal system as well, have a particular aversion to public risk. Is this justified? The second point of contention, intimately related to the first, has to do with institutions, and especially with judicial versus administrative rule. At present, the courts are playing an important part in shaping the legal response to public risk. Is this sensible? According to one powerfully stated outlook--an outlook that runs directly against the grain of prevailing sentiments--the answer to each of the foregoing questions is a firm no. Our actions increase, rather than minimize, risk costs. We worry too much about public risks and not enough about private ones. We control public risks with a haphazard mix of market, judicial, administrative, and legislative measures that too often proceed in the wrong direction, without coordination, and with too little reliance on agencies and too much on courts. The courts especially are said to pander to uninformed and irrational risk attitudes; their decisions show a myopic bias against new technology and in favor of its victims. New or complex technologies are subjected to a degree of scrutiny that riskier but established (often private) risk sources never underwent and could not survive. As a result, we have too much private risk and too little public risk, not more safety but less. Some of the critics advancing this line call for a reduction of the judicial role in risk assessment and management, and for more reliance on administrative agencies. Agencies, they argue, have more expertise, are more objective and rational, can be more attentive to the net effects of technological advance. Courts, they conclude, should defer to them. This is the set of views that we call into question here. After sketching the lines of debate in Part I, we turn in Part II to a prefatory discussion about why risk has to be regulated at all, and under what circumstances. Part III and much of Part IV then address the debate about institutions, taking up courts and agencies in turn. In Part III, we model the litigation process in a way that suggests how courts might well be managing risk much more productively than one would at first suppose. In Part IV, we pursue a similar model to show why agencies might fall far short of what is claimed on their behalf, were the courts to be more deferential. A significant portion of the agency discussion is devoted to attitudes about risk. The question of attitudes has been begged in the legal debate about public risk, yet the topic is of fundamental importance: attitudes about risk--about the meanings of risk--have much to do with choosing or devising the right management institutions. The comparative analysis of courts and agencies in Parts III and IV leads us to conclude that ambitious proposals to increase the scope of agency authority at the expense of judicial scrutiny are remarkably premature. We stop short of saying that the present institutional arrangements are, however imperfect, the best we can hope for given current understanding. We insist, though, that those critics who would alter existing arrangements through sweeping delegations to experts and bureaucrats have utterly failed to carry a reasonable burden of proof. A careful comparative assessment simply raises too many doubts about the wisdom of wholesale abdication to technocratic rule. Part V underscores this conclusion with some speculation about the larger implications of technocracy in a democratic system. Our concerns in this respect lead us to consider an alternative and currently popular view that public risk should be managed through one or another version of participatory democracy. We end up being as skeptical here as we are about technocracy. Obviously, then, we think that much ground has still to be covered before anyone can confidently come forth with ambitious programs for risk assessment and management. As we see it, the public risk debate presently rests at the inside edge of a vast and expanding universe, an unsurprising thing given that risk has only recently been highlighted on social and legal agendas. The entire topic--its attitudinal, institutional, and scientific aspects--is still so shrouded with uncertainty that it is difficult to be confident about anything other than the need for more information and more argument. What we hope to do is move matters forward by bringing into view some considerations that must (but thus far do not) figure in the ongoing debate