Freedom of expression, accountability and development in the Arab region

Mechanisms for ensuring government transparency and accountability have yet to become established in the Arab region, where oil rents and security rents have traditionally enabled governments to provide jobs and services without having to rely heavily, if at all, on raising revenue through personal income tax on citizens. Yet various forms of resource mobilisation, which will be needed in future, are likely to require a greater degree of accountability from those responsible for such mobilisation. This paper considers whether a move in this direction is under way. It reviews government approaches to freedom of expression in the media and among non-governmental organisations. It notes changes that have taken place in this sphere since the start of the 1990s, not all of them positive, and concludes that many more steps remain to be taken if media organisations and NGOs are to exert pressure for accountability on behalf of citizens, and especially the disadvantaged

Social Movements and International Relations: A Relational Framework

Social movements are increasingly recognized as significant features of contemporary world politics, yet to date their treatment in international relations theory has tended to obfuscate the considerable diversity of these social formations, and the variegated interactions they may establish with state actors and different structures of world order. Highlighting the difficulties conventional liberal and critical approaches have in transcending conceptions of movements as moral entities, the article draws from two under-exploited literatures in the study of social movements in international relations, the English School and Social Systems Theory, to specify a wider range of analytical interactions between different categories of social movements and of world political structures. Moreover, by casting social movement phenomena as communications, the article opens international relations to consideration of the increasingly diverse trajectories and second-order effects produced by social movements as they interact with states, intergovernmental institutions, and transnational actors

Aktivisme islam : pendekatan teori gerakan sosial/ Edit.: Quintan Wiktorowicz

x, 389 hal.; 21 cm

Aktivisme islam : pendekatan teori gerakan sosial/ Edit.: Quintan Wiktorowicz

x, 375 hal.; 21 cm