Wahlen in Jordanien : Islamistischer Boykott und autoritäre Kontinuität

In this article certain economical questions concerning the choice of design of building parts (outer-walls, inner-walls, staircases etc.) are discussed. Primarily the dimensions of building parts as a function-of-the-profitable area are studied. The author has in his economical calculations tried to differentiate strictly between cost and value. This has been considered a basic condition for correct comparative economical analyses. Cost can be characterized as a sacrifice expressed in money for the production and sales of a product including normal profit. The value of the product can on the other hand be regarded as a subjective amount depending in addition to these costs on who the valuer is. The design of the building part can amongst other things be studied from the point of view of the area which it covers. By giving this area a value it is possible to make economical dimensioning calculations. If it is assumed that the floor-area is constant (fixed outerdimensions)the area value can have direct significance on the choice of the design of a building part. For example if the saved area can be valued highly it can be economically defensible to choose constructions which take up a small area even if these relatively mean higher costs. The size of the area value will depend on the assumptions fundamental to the valuing. The following two methods of valuing have been analysed more deeply, namely, each usable square meter is given in principle the same value in the house and each additional usable square meter is valued in relation to its cost (marginal-cost). In the first case mentioned with the constant value per area it is easy to over-value the area won(choice of less space-craving constructions) in relation to its cost.The disadvantage with overvaluing can be avoided if one instead values in relation to the marginal-costs for the extra area. The area value will on the other hand lose all significance if the size of the usable area is determined in the planning work. The result will be that in the choice of the design one can concentrate entirely on analysing the dimensions which require a minimum of costs. This can in its turn mean that one will choose more space-craving but less moneycraving constructions.QC 2011061

Turkey and the Arab revolt: rise or decline in regional politics?

On 20 September 2011, at a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called once again for an end to the regime of Bashar al- Assad in Syria. It was not until after the failure of the most recent Turkish mediation initiative on 9 August 2011 that Ankara began to officially call for regime change in Damascus. The Arab revolt has been changing the regional order in the Middle East since the end of 2010 and, furthermore, has influenced the potential of individual states to move up or down the ladder in regional politics. Under the AKP administration of Prime Minister Erdoğan, Turkey presents itself on one hand as a role model for transitioning Arab countries, but on the other hand its regional policy is marked by inconsistencies. - Turkey’s Middle East policy under the AKP is dictated by two main sets of goals, one dealing with economic and trade expansion and the second with soft power generation. But as the first set of goals requires stability and necessitates cooperating with authoritarian regimes, while the second set of goals, manifested in Erdoğan’s populist rhetoric, has continued to produce instability, the contradictory nature of those goals was evident even before 2011. - At the beginning of the Arab revolt, the Turkish government advocated for an end to the Mubarak regime in Egypt. In regards to Libya, however, Ankara conducted itself quite a bit more carefully due to its close economic ties with Libya, the Turkish government distancing itself only over time from Qaddafi. - Syria represents the biggest political challenge in the region for Turkey. With a twopronged strategy of making direct offers to Assad while simultaneously courting parts of the opposition, Turkey was able to keep many different communication channels open with the country until August 2011. - In the big picture, the alleged “skittishness” of Turkey’s regional policy could also be viewed as a largely successful series of adaptations to the transformation processes brought about by the Arab revolt. Thanks to this pragmatism and Erdoğan’s populism, Turkey will probably occupy a prominent position in the Middle East, at least for a short time

Partner oder „Paria“? : Syriens Nahostpolitik unter Bashar al-Asad

Am 10. Juni jährte sich zum zehnten Mal der Todestag des langjährigen syrischen Präsidenten Hafiz al-Asad. Die erste Vater-Sohn-Nachfolge in einer arabischen Republik hinterließ dem neuen Präsidenten Bashar al-Asad eine große außenpolitische Hypothek: stockende Friedensverhandlungen mit Israel, einen kalten Frieden mit der Türkei, schwierige Beziehungen mit den Golfstaaten sowie ein gespanntes Verhältnis zu den USA und den EU-Staaten

Syrian Refugees in Jordan: Between Protection and Marginalisation

Syrians currently comprise the largest group of refugees worldwide, with the number of people who have fled the country totalling nearly five million. Although hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees landed in Europe in 2015, the vast majority have remained in the immediate vicinity of their home country in the Middle East. In the main receiving countries, they are in urgent need of conflict-sensitive assistance. •• Jordan has taken in more Syrian refugees, in relation to the number of its inhabitants, than has Turkey, but far fewer than Lebanon. From a legal point of view, these refugees in Jordan live in an uncertain limbo between temporary protection and structural marginalisation. •• Within Jordan, the majority of Syrians live in the capital of Amman and in the border towns and communities of the north, while a significantly smaller portion lives in the official refugee camps. In addition, some tens of thousands of refugees are subsisting in makeshift refugee camps without any aid or infrastructure. They are located in the no man’s land between the Jordanian, Syrian, and Iraqi borders. •• In northern Jordanian cities such as Mafraq, property owners and local entrepreneurs are profiting from the presence of refugees and the influx of international aid money. However, the Syrians and many Jordanians are suffering from the subsequent price increases and the tight labour and housing markets. •• This situation harbours potential for conflict, since the competitive climate on the ground could deepen prejudices between Jordanians and Syrians. However, apart from a few exceptions, the existing tensions have not escalated into violence so far. Policy Implications: The ongoing war in Syria is making the return of the refugees in the foreseeable future unlikely. Since European countries, including Germany, are not willing to grant protection to a larger number of Syrian refugees, the host countries in the region are in dire need of a substantial increase in international aid. In this context, the heterogeneous reality of Syrians living in Jordan – be it in cities, villages, or camps – should be given more consideration

The "Victor's Peace" in Syria and the Limits of Multilateral Policies

As of the end of 2019, the regime under President Bashar al-Assad, along with Russia and Iran, controls almost three-quarters of Syrian territory. Despite ongoing fighting for the last-remaining rebel stronghold of Idlib as well as fragmented territorial control in the north-east, the war in Syria has been decided militarily. The "victor's peace" in Syria makes clear the survival of the repressive and corrupt Assad dictatorship, which still does not offer the large majority of the remaining population any security or life prospects. The regime's core elite currently consists of the president's closest family members - this includes his brother Maher and wife Asma. After eight years of war, the Syrian military and economic elites cannot be clearly distinguished. No members of these elite groups can absolve themselves of the accusation of being, at least indirectly, co-responsible for horrendous human rights abuses. Although Iran and Russia repeatedly ensured the regime's survival during the course of war, their influence on the Syrian elite has declined recently. The Assad regime's military victory has further narrowed the diplomatic options of European nations. An international reconstruction programme for Syria should be ruled out for the near future, as it would help to consolidate the current authoritarian and wartime economic structures. Germany should therefore focus on becoming increasingly engaged in related areas within a multilateral framework. This would entail increased documentation of human rights violations and a greater number of international prosecutions of such abuses

Comparative Area Studies and Middle East Politics after the Arab Uprisings

The Arab uprisings have brought about a new wave of Middle East political science research that seeks to comparatively account for the different political trajectories in the region. In order to situate these diverse post-2011 scholarly studies, this paper introduces Comparative Area Studies (CAS) as an analytical perspective which combines the context sensitivity of area studies with the explicit and systematic use of comparisons. It finds that while intra-regional comparisons are the mainstay of political science studies of the Arab uprisings, there is also an emerging, very promising strand of cross-regional comparisons that draws on insights from, for example, the post-Soviet space or from European history. The paper concludes by evaluating the promises, risks and prospects of following a CAS perspective in the study of Middle East politics

Regionale Neuordnung, translokale Mobilität und Flüchtlingskrise im Nahen Osten

The US strategy of external democratization has failed. Iraq is threatened by state failure, militarization and confrontation shape US-Arab relations. These and other global “Iraq Effects” should not cover the equally important but less recognized developments on the regional and local level of Middle Eastern politics. Thus, Iraq effects have primarily affected political processes beyond the “classical” nation-state level. The Iraq war has decisively contributed to the development of a new regional order of escalating intra-and inter-state violence, the rise of Iran as a regional power as well as a general polarization. Secondly, the Iraq war has affected the emergence and consolidation of new forms of cross-border, trans-local mobility of radical Islamist groups, Kurdish activists, but also of business people. Thirdly, the war has caused a massive refugee crisis in the Middle East which transforms local structures in Iraq’s neighboring states of Jordan and Syria. These complex dynamics constitute the “radiance” of the Iraq war for Middle Eastern politics after 2003

The political economy of regional power : turkey under the AKP

The European Union membership of Bulgaria since January 2007 imposes higher requirements to the national waste management system and demands changes in the current waste management practices. In this context it is of great interest to study the contemporary and possible future development of the Bulgarian municipal solid waste management system. A systems analysis was carried out to provide better understanding of the Bulgarian municipal solid waste management and to analyze the possibilities for its future development in a sustainable way. Five different scenarios were constructed and compared using the ORWARE model which is a tool for environmental systems analysis that predicts ecological and economic impacts in a life-cycle perspective. The first describes the present municipal waste management system using landfilling as the only municipal solid waste treatment option. The other four describe possible future developments including business as usual and different combinations of municipal solid waste treatment options including landfilling, composting and incineration. Material recycling was included in all future scenarios. The results from the ORWARE simulations show that landfilling has the overall highest environmental impacts as compared to the other treatment methods. The introduction of composting and incineration proved to has a positive impact on the environment and provides different benefits in terms of recovered nutrients, heat and electricity production. Material recovery and recycling allows the recovery of different materials but is highly energy intensive. European and Bulgarian policies, legislation and different publications were studied to understand the factors that shape the current and future development of municipal solid waste management. Further, the application of tools incorporating life-cycle thinking, like ORWARE, was put in a broader perspective, i.e. their use in the policy and decision making process. The results from the research show that environmental policies in the European Union are changing and the focus has changed from managing specific pollutants or activities to managing resources in long term life-cycle perspective. The present concept of waste is outdated in a sustainable society and waste should be considered as a resource. In the future waste management will become a synonym to resource extraction. The present national environmental policy making does not consider global environmental consequences due to the fact that it is focused on achieving local environmental targets. The incorporation of global life-cycle perspective in the policy making process will allow the consideration of the environmental and social effects irrelevant of where they arise. Tools, like ORWARE, that incorporate life-cycle thinking are and will be used in environmental policy making. This is proved by many cases of their successful application in aiding local and national authorities to make their decisions. Even though problems may exist in terms of the required skills and knowledge, examples show that good cooperation between policy makers, scientists and other experts will be the key for their extensive and successful application.www.ima.kth.s

The political economy of regional power : turkey under the AKP

In 2006/2007 Turkey became a regional power in the Middle East, a status it has continued to maintain in the context of the Arab Spring. To understand why Turkey only became a regional power under the Muslim AKP government and why this happened at the specific point in time that it did, the paper highlights the self-reinforcing dynamics between Turkey's domestic political-economic transformation in the first decade of this century and the advantageous regional developments in the Middle East at the same time. It concludes that this specific linkage - the "Ankara Moment" - and its regional resonance in the neighboring Middle East carries more transformative potential than the "Washington Consensus" or the "Beijing Consensus" so prominently discussed in current Global South politics

Forced Migration in the Global South: Reorienting the Debate

As of 2017, 65 million people worldwide had been forcibly displaced by war and political violence. Several millions more have fled because of environmental disasters and socio-economic marginalisation. As there is no immediate end in sight to this steadily increasing global trend, forced migration is one of the central challenges in world politics today - and it is very likely to remain so in the near to medium-term future. Only a small (albeit increasing) proportion of forced migrants have managed to come to the Global North. The main flows take place within and between Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. A focus on South–South displacement thus represents not only a more pluralistic, but also a more accurate picture of global forced-migration trends. The most visible drivers of forced migration are war and political violence. While Syria stands out in this regard, the country also shows that conflict-induced displacement is often intertwined with forced migration resulting from environmental disasters and the adverse effects of development projects. Disaster-induced displacement denotes population movements in the wake of global environmental change, including fast-onset events such as floods, storms, or fires, and slow-onset events, such as droughts, land degradation, and sea-level rise. With its low-elevation islands, the Pacific region of Oceania is particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels. Development-induced displacement results from socio-economic exclusion as a result of large-scale infrastructure projects, mining, deforestation, urbanisation, and biosphere projects. The case of India underlines that many development-induced forced migrants are typically internally displaced. As forced migration continues to occur mostly within the Global South, it is necessary to better understand its causes, dynamics, and effects in Africa, Asia, ­Latin America, and the Middle East in their own right - and not primarily or even exclusively in terms of the implications for the Global North. Also, when drafting policy responses to forced migration, a holistic understanding of the complex interlinkages between conflict-, disaster-, and development-induced drivers and dynamics precludes one-size-fits-all approaches