608 research outputs found
Europeanization Subverted? The European Unionâs Promotion of Good Governance and the Fight against Corruption in the Southern Caucasus
In order to foster peace, stability and prosperity in its near abroad, the European Union has invoked the European Neighbourhood Policy that seeks to transform the domestic structures of the Newly Independent States in the post-Soviet space thus building a ring of friends that share European norms and principles of democracy, rule of the law, market economy, and good governance. Empirical evidence, however, suggests that the EUâs capacity to hit across its borders and to realize its reform agenda seems limited. Moreover, most neighborhood countries appear to be stuck in transition and suffer from serious problems of both weak state capacity and defect democracy. Hence, EU efforts may also bear the danger of unintended and negative effects on the domestic structures of states, as its policies and institutions do not only empower liberal reform coalitions, to the extent that they exist in the first place, but can also bolster the power of incumbent authoritarian and corrupt elites. This paper intends to capture this dark side of Europeanization (Schimmelfennig 2007). It thus conceptualizes ENP as a political opportunity structure that provides opportunities and constraints to both supporters and opponents of the European Unionâs reform agenda. Which of the two ultimately get empowered depends not only on the EUâs capacity to push for reforms but also on the pull of domestic actors.neighbourhood policy; EU-South-Eastern Europe; EU-South-Eastern Europe; governance; Europeanization; Europeanization
Europeanization subverted? The European Union's promotion of good governance and the fight against corruption in the Southern Caucasus
In order to foster peace, stability and prosperity in its near abroad, the European Union has invoked the European Neighbourhood Policy that seeks to transform the domestic structures of the Newly Independent States in the post-Soviet space thus building a âring of friendsâ that share European norms and principles of democracy, rule of the law, market economy, and good governance. Empirical evidence, however, suggests that the EUâs capacity to hit across its borders and to realize its reform agenda seems limited. Moreover, most neighborhood countries appear to be stuck in transition and suffer from serious problems of both weak state capacity and defect democracy. Hence, EU efforts may also bear the danger of unintended and negative effects on the domestic structures of states, as its policies and institutions do not only empower liberal reform coalitions, to the extent that they exist in the first place, but can also bolster the power of incumbent authoritarian and corrupt elites. This paper intends to capture this âdark side of Europeanizationâ (Schimmelfennig 2007). It thus conceptualizes ENP as a political opportunity structure that provides opportunities and constraints to both supporters and opponents of the European Unionâs reform agenda. Which of the two ultimately get empowered depends not only on the EUâs capacity to push for reforms but also on the pull of domestic actors
Pathologies of Europeanization: Fighting Corruption in the Southern Caucasus
Studies on âNeighbourhood Europeanizationâ have shown that the EUâs capacity to hit across its borders has been limited. Our paper argues that the EU has induced some formal institutional change, which, however, has helped to stabilize rather than change existing regimes. Thus, we do observe the Europeanization of domestic structures of formerly Soviet republics, which, however, appears to have opposite effects of what the EU intends to achieve with its ENP. In order to explore these pathologies of Europeanization, we focus on the EUâs attempts to promote good governance, and in particular the fight against corruption. The Post- Soviet area features some of the most corrupt countries in the world, including the Southern
Caucasus region. High adaptation costs and limited incentives render Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia least likely cases for Europeanization and domestic change. Our comparative study will show that despite high misfit and low pressure for adaptation from above and below, all three have responded to the EUâs demands for good governance introducing similar formal institutional changes. Yet, rather than systematically fighting corruption, incumbent
regimes have instrumentalized the EU selectively implementing anti-corruption policies to cut the power resources of their political opponents
The European Unionâs promotion of good governance and the fight against corruption in the Southern Caucasus
1\. Introduction 5 2\. The Dark Side of Europeanization 6 2.1 The Power to
Transform (EU Push) 6 2.2 The Disposition to Perform (Domestic Pull) 7 3\.
External Push and Domestic Pull in the Southern Caucasus 8 3.1 High Misfit,
Prohibitive Costs and Limited EU Push 8 3.2. Weak Pull and Strategic Elites 11
4\. Fighting Corruption in the Southern Caucasus 12 4.1 Introducing
Institutional Change 12 4.2 Azerbaijan: Settling Internal Power Struggles 14
4.3 Armenia: Pleasing External Donors 16 4.4 Georgia: Consolidating New Power
Structures 17 5\. Conclusions 19 Literature 21In order to foster peace, stability and prosperity in its near abroad, the
European Union has invoked the European Neighbourhood Policy that seeks to
transform the domestic structures of the Newly Independent States in the post-
Soviet space thus building a âring of friendsâ that share European norms and
principles of democracy, rule of the law, market economy, and good governance.
Empirical evidence, however, suggests that the EUâs capacity to hit across its
borders and to realize its reform agenda seems limited. Moreover, most
neighborhood countries appear to be stuck in transition and suffer from
serious problems of both weak state capacity and defect democracy. Hence, EU
efforts may also bear the danger of unintended and negative effects on the
domestic structures of states, as its policies and institutions do not only
empower liberal reform coalitions, to the extent that they exist in the first
place, but can also bolster the power of incumbent authoritarian and corrupt
elites. This paper intends to capture this âdark side of Europeanizationâ
(Schimmelfennig 2007). It thus conceptualizes ENP as a political opportunity
structure that provides opportunities and constraints to both supporters and
opponents of the European Unionâs reform agenda. Which of the two ultimately
get empowered depends not only on the EUâs capacity to push for reforms but
also on the pull of domestic actors
One size fits all?
With the end of the Cold War, states and international organisations have
systematically mainstreamed good governance in their development strategies
for third countries. The European Union is no exception. The promotion of good
governance ranks particularly high in the EUâs ânear abroadâ, which has become
a focal point for EU foreign policy making since the 2004/2006 enlargement
rounds. This paper seeks to systematically compare the EUâs approach to
promoting good governance in the Southern Caucasus. Armenia, Azerbaijan, and
Georgia are equally marked by bad governance. Arbitrary rule and pervasive
corruption are common in all three countries. Nonetheless, they significantly
vary with regard to the degree of statehood, and the quality of the political
regime. Our aim is to explore to what extent these variations have affected
the EUâs strategy of promoting good governance. Looking at the European
Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), a rather recent policy framework, we seek to give
some answers to the question whether the EU sticks to a âone-size-fits-allâ
approach, or whether it has started to practice some differential treatment
An FPGA implementation architecture for decoding of polar codes
Polar codes are a class of codes versatile enough to achieve the Shannon bound in a large array of source and channel coding problems. For that reason it is important to have efficient implementation architectures for polar codes in hardware. Motivated by this fact we propose a belief propagation (BP) decoder architecture for an increasingly popular hardware platform; Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The proposed architecture supports any code rate and is quite flexible in terms of hardware complexity and throughput. The architecture can also be extended to support multiple block lengths without increasing the hardware complexity a lot. Moreover various schedulers can be adapted into the proposed architecture so that list decoding techniques can be used with a single block. Finally the proposed architecture is compared with a convolutional turbo code (CTC) decoder for WiMAX taken from a Xilinx Product Specification and seen that polar codes are superior to CTC codes both in hardware complexity and throughput. © 2011 IEEE
Between a rock and a hard place: corporate elites in the context of religion and secularism in Turkey
Drawing on discourse analyses of 36 in-depth interviews with elite business people from Turkey, the study identifies the networking patterns of new and established business elites in the context of economic liberalization and socioreligious transformation of the country. Through a comparative analysis of the so-called secular and religious elite networks, we demonstrate the role of institutional actors such as the government, and identity networks, based on religion and place of birth in shaping the form and content of social networks among business elites in Turkey. In order to achieve this, we operationalize Bourdieu's notion of theory of practice and Granovetter's theory of social networks, illustrating the utility of combining these approaches in explicating the form and content of social networks in their situated contexts, in which power and divergent interests are negotiated.Galatasaray University Research Fund [grant number 12.102.005]
A two phase successive cancellation decoder architecture for polar codes
We propose a two-phase successive cancellation (TPSC) decoder architecture for polar codes that exploits the array-code property of polar codes by breaking the decoding of a length-TV polar code into a series of length-â L decoding cycles. Each decoding cycle consists of two phases: a first phase for decoding along the columns and a second phase for decoding along the rows of the code array. The reduced decoder size makes it more affordable to implement the core decoder logic using distributed memory elements consisting of flip-flops (FFs), as opposed to slower random access memory (RAM), leading to a speed up in clock frequency. To minimize the circuit complexity, a single decoder unit is used in both phases with minor modifications. The re-use of the same decoder module makes it necessary to recall certain internal decoder state variables between decoding cycles. Instead of storing the decoder state variables in RAM, the decoder discards them and calculates them again when needed. Overall, the decoder has O(â L) circuit complexity excluding RAM, and a latency of approximately 2.57V. A RAM of size O(N) is needed for storing the channel log-likelihood variables and the decoder decision variables. As an example of the proposed method, a length N = 214 bit polar code is implemented in an FPGA and the synthesis results are compared with a previously reported FPGA implementation. The results show that the proposed architecture has lower complexity, lower memory utilization with higher throughput, and a clock frequency that is less sensitive to code length. © 2013 IEEE
Decentralised innovation systems and poverty reduction: experimental evidence from Central Africa
We use experimental data to investigate whether a decentralised approach to promoting
innovation in central African agriculture outperforms conventional extension ap proaches. Our main result is that this decentralised approach, based on so-called innova tion platforms, is effective in reducing poverty â more effective than conventional
extension approaches. However, we also document considerable heterogeneity in
terms of platform performance
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