Duverger, semi-presidentialism and the supposed French archetype

The concept of semi-presidentialism was first operationalised by Maurice Duverger. There are now 17 countries with semi-presidential constitutions in Europe. Within this set of countries France is usually considered to be the archetypal example of semi-presidentialism. This article maps the main institutional and political features of European semi-presidentialism on the basis of Duverger’s original three-fold schema. The most striking feature is the diversity of practice within this set of countries. This means that semi-presidentialism should not be operationalised as a discrete explanatory variable. However, there are ways of systematically capturing the variation within semi-presidentialism to allow cross-national comparisons. This diversity also means that France should not be considered as the archetypal semi-presidential country. At best, France is an archetypal example of a particular type of semi-presidentialism. Overall, Duverger’s main contribution to the study of semi-presidentialism was the original identification of the concept and his implicit insight that there are different types of semi-presidentialism. In the future, the study of semi-presidentialism would benefit from the development of theory-driven comparative work that avoids a reliance on France as the supposed semi-presidential archetype

Poetics of Identity: On entrepreneurial selves of Afghan Migrants in Pakistan

In Peshawar, evenings at tea houses in the ?market of storytellers? or Qissa Khawani Bazaar are busy. Located at the doorsteps of the famous Khyber Pass, Peshawar has historically acted as the main gateway between the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia. Qissa Khawani has always been the major market for traders in this geographical region. Indeed, the British Commissioner to Peshawar, Sir Herbert Benjamin Edwards (1853-1862), called it the Piccadilly of Central Asia (Tikekar, 2004). Every evening, tea houses would be buzzing with traders from all over Asia sipping freshly brewed green tea and relaxing. But the highlight of the evening was the storytellers called Qissa Khawans who would narrate many stories of interest to the traders. They used both prose and poetry to tell stories of traders? expeditions, their valuable items, and of far-away lands of treasures. Today, the same bazaars continue to be full of activity and their small streets have been transformed into a variety of interconnected specialised markets. There is a market for mobile phones, opening into a flower market adjoined by the sweets market, leading to a market for pet birds. One such narrow street is called Jangi Mohallah, ?the fighters? neighbourhood?. Until about three decades ago, the gangsters of Peshawar city used to settle scores there. It was a place for duels which were fought with large handmade folding knives. There is no sign of this today as the ever increasing population has taken over that ground. The u-shaped Jangi Mohallah is the hub of the printing and publishing businesses in the North West Frontier Province (Pakistan) ? the home to the Pashtun tribes. In this paper, the stories narrated by the Pashtun traders of Jangi Mohallah provide a window into their entrepreneurial identities. They stem from Afghan Pashtuns of Qissa Khawani speaking the language of Pashtu and upholding the values of the ?Pashtunwali?- a living and unwritten code of honour that ?regulates? everyday life. This paper thus engages with entrepreneurial life history narratives espousing the ways in which the identities of Afghan entrepreneurs adhere to the main Pashtunwali-tenets, if at all. The latter refer to an ideal self that has been orally transmitted through Pashtu poetry since ancient times. Afghan entrepreneurial identities tend to adhere to the core tenets of Pashtunwali. However, there are multiple uses of poetic tropes expressed in entrepreneurial life history narratives that tell us more about the subtle ambiguity and challenges that might be experienced when relating to the dominant influence of this code of honour. Thus, Pashtunwali values are very much lived and enacted in practice. This paper contends that they are inscribed as poetic tropes in main Afghan poetry shaping the moral compass that becomes central to one?s existence and mode of being an entrepreneur

A Decade of Suffering in Zimbabwe: Economic Collapse and Political Repression under Robert Mugabe

On March 29, 2008, Zimbabwe will hold presidential and parliamentary elections. Few people believe that they will be free and fair or that Robert Mugabe and his Zimbabwe African National Union -- Patriotic Front party will fail to return to office. That is a tragedy, because Mugabe and his cronies are chiefly responsible for an economic meltdown that has turned one of Africa's most prosperous countries into a country with one of the lowest life expectancies in the world. Since 1994, the average life expectancy in Zimbabwe has fallen from 57 years to 34 years for women and from 54 years to 37 years for men. Some 3,500 Zimbabweans die every week from the combined effects of HIV/AIDS, poverty, and malnutrition. Half a million Zimbabweans may have died already. There is no freedom of speech or assembly in Zimbabwe, and the state has used violence to intimidate and murder its opponents. At the root of Zimbabwe's problems is a corrupt political elite that has, with considerable international support, behaved with utter impunity for some two decades. This elite is determined to hang on to power no matter what the consequences, lest it be held to account for the genocide in Matabeleland in the early 1980s and the wholesale looting of Zimbabwe that followed the mismanaged land reform in 2000. When change comes to Zimbabwe, the nation will have to rediscover the rule of law and the sanctity of persons and property. The public discourse and the economy will have to be reopened. The new government will have to embrace a more limited idea of government and rescind legislation that makes the operation of the private sector next to impossible. Moreover, the new government will have to find a way for the people of Zimbabwe to heal the wounds caused by decades of political violence

Polish Road Toward an Illiberal State: Methods and Resistance

Since 2015, Poland has experienced a backsliding in democratic and rule of law standards. The ruling party, “Law and Justice,” has adopted a series of legislative changes affecting the independence of courts and checks and balances mechanisms. Some reforms were copied from Hungary, which, as the first Member State of the European Union, started the way toward illiberal democracy in contemporary Europe. Despite pressure from international organizations, the process of changes in Poland did not stop. However, it is important to look at methods implemented to dismantling democracy, as they can be used in other countries. This paper also analyzes different forms of domestic and international resistance toward non-democratic changes, including the special role of civil society and lawyers, as well as monitoring and judicial mechanisms used by the European Union

Polarization and multiscale structural balance in signed networks

Polarization is a common feature of social systems. Structural Balance Theory studies polarization of positive in-group and negative out-group ties in terms of semicycles within signed networks. However, enumerating semicycles is computationally expensive, so approximations are often needed to assess balance. Here we introduce Multiscale Semiwalk Balance (MSB) approach for quantifying the degree of balance (DoB) in (un)directed, (un)weighted signed networks by approximating semicycles with closed semiwalks. MSB allows principled selection of a range of cycle lengths appropriate for assessing DoB and interpretable under the Locality Principle (which posits that patterns in shorter cycles are crucial for balance). This flexibility overcomes several limitations affecting walk-based approximations and enables efficient, interpretable methods for measuring DoB and clustering signed networks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by applying it to real-world social systems. For instance, our methods capture increasing polarization in the U.S. Congress, which may go undetected with other methods.Comment: 29 pages; 7 figures; preprint before peer revie

Cadres decide everything – Turkey’s reform of its military. OSW Commentary NUMBER 274 | 26.06.2018

Over the last two years, the Turkish Armed Forces (Türk Silahlı Kuvvetlerı – TSK) have been subject to transformations with no precedent in the history of Turkey as a republic. The process of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) subordinating the army to civilian government has accelerated following the failed coup that took place on 15 July 2016. The government has managed to take away the autonomy of the armed forces which, while retaining their enormous significance within the state apparatus, ceased to be the main element consolidating the old Kemalist elites. However, the unprecedented scale of the purges and the introduction of formal civilian control of the military are merely a prelude to a much more profound change intended to create a brand new military, one that would serve the authorities and be composed of a new type of personnel – individuals from outside the army’s traditional power base. This reflects the reshuffle of the elites that happened during AKP’s rule. However, due to the fact that the TSK are a highly complex structure and the political situation both in Turkey itself and in its neighbourhood is tense, the military needs to retain its significance within the state system. Military actions are being carried out in northern Syria and in the south-eastern part of Turkey. In a situation of profound distrust between the political leadership and the military, the government is trying to impact the internal divisions within the TSK by favouring anti-Western, pro-Russian and nationalist groups. At the same time, it is consolidating the interior ministry’s structures, which could potentially defend it against another possible coup. It is also forming voluntary structures subordinated to it. This means that the process of the armed forces’ reconstruction and redefinition of their role in the system, alongside the ultimate creation of a new army, are markedly elevating the potential for internal conflicts and translating into a weakening of Turkey’s institutional ties with the West by gradually weakening its involvement in NATO. The planned purchase of S-400 systems from Russia, which the government intends to use to defend itself against its own army, is another manifestation of this trend

How State Capacity Matters: A Study of the Cooptation and Coercion of Religious Organizations in Southeast Asia and Beyond

This dissertation examines the complex relationship between state capacity, authoritarian regimes and religious organizations in Southeast Asia and beyond. Through an interdisciplinary synthesis of secondary literatures in Comparative Politics, Sociology, and Religious Studies, complemented by archival research conducted at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, this dissertation argues that relative state capacity endowment shapes the strategies that authoritarian regime elites employ against domestic religious organizations as a means of ensuring regime survival. Through typological theory-building and a comparative case-study methodology, I argue that state capacity, imagined in terms of both bureaucratic/administrative and coercive components, influences whether authoritarian regime elites decide to pursue policies of cooptation (bribery, patronage, and political appointments) or coercion (incarceration, threats, violence) vis-à-vis religious organizations. Comparative case- study analysis of the relationship between authoritarian regimes and religious organizations in Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Poland, and Nicaragua reveals clear variations in regime elite strategies across time and space. My findings demonstrate that authoritarian regime elites in states with strong bureaucratic/ administrative capacity and strong coercive capacity have relied on cooptation as their preferred strategy for containing threats posed by religious organizations, while regime elites in states with weak bureaucratic/ administrative capacity and strong coercive capacity have instead tended to employ violence against these groups. Finally, regime elites in states with weak bureaucratic/administrative capacity and weak coercive capacity have cycled, unsuccessfully, between policies of cooptation and coercion in the hopes of containing powerful domestic religious organizations. The comparative analysis in this dissertation provides a nuanced explanation for how authoritarian regime elites leverage state resources to counter threats posed by symbolically powerful religious groups and contributes a new mid-range theory of state-society relations with implications for authoritarian regimes far beyond the region

Multilateralism as Terror: International Law, Haiti and Imperialism

Much of the liberal criticism of the Bush administration's prosecution of the war in Iraq has taken a legalistic form, decrying that law as 'illegal'. This criticism has often implied that US unilateralism has been definitional to the neoconservative project and the geopolitical moment, and that a contrasting and supposedly non-existent 'multilateralism' would be neither illegal nor objectionable. The overthrow of Haiti's President Jean-Bertrande Aristide in 2004 and the subsequent installing of UN MINUSTAH peace-keepers in the country was a model multilateral action, the fact of which should have problematised this model: its almost wholesale ignoring in the scholarly international law literature is therefore investigated. The intervention is understood as a successful imperialist action, and the argument made that multilateralism as much as unilateralism can easily be part of an imperialist strategy

Women in German politics: still jobs for the boys?

Today the proportion of German politicians who are female is at an all time high. This has largely been achieved via quotas and most of the main parties now operate some kind of quota system. But have quantitative improvements in female representation in been matched by qualitative improvements? This article seeks to answer this question by looking not only at the number of women in parliaments and other collective bodies, but also in the highest echelons of power. It outlines each party's policies regarding the promotion of women and the factors which enhance or hamper their impact. A brief comparison of female political representation in eastern and western Germany is also provided. The author argues that measures such as quotas have increased the number of female German politicians but still do not guarantee them equal access to positions of real power. Furthermore, the incorporation of pro-equality principles into party statutes has not automatically led to their assimilation into party cultures, especially in the case of well-established parties which only recently addressed the gender imbalance in their ranks