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4831. Rabindranath's Nationalist Thought: A Retrospect

Author:
Narasingha P. Sil
Publication Date:
05-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Alternatives: Turkish Journal of International Relations
Institution:
Center for International Conflict Resolution at Yalova University
Abstract:
Tagore's anti-absolutist and anti-statist stand is predicated primarily on his vision of global peace and concord—a world of different peoples and cultures united by amity and humanity. While this grand vision of a brave new world is laudable, it is, nevertheless, constructed on misunderstanding and misreading of history and of the role of the nation state in the West since its rise sometime during the late medieval and early modern times. Tagore views state as an artificial mechanism, indeed a machine that thrives on coercion, conflict, and terror by subverting people's freedom and culture. This paper seeks to argue that the state also played historically a significant role in enhancing and enriching culture and civilization. His view of an ideal human society is sublime, but by the same token, somewhat ahistorical and anti-modern.
Topic:
Nationalism

4832. Democratizing Justice in the Post-Conflict Balkans: The Dilemma of Domestic Human Rights Activists

Author:
Arnaud Kurze
Publication Date:
09-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Central European University Political Science Journal
Institution:
Central European University
Abstract:
Years of international and national accountability efforts in the former Yugoslavia have only partially helped post-conflict societies to transition. To complement retributive justice efforts more recently, human rights activists have launched a campaign to establish a regional truth commission. This article explores the intricate efforts among nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in several states across the region – particularly Bosnia and Herzegovina, croatia and Serbia – to coordinate this movement. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews, this study illustrates the movement's struggle from within – caused by the conflicting interests of its members – and from outside, as it seeks support from international and region-specific organizations as well as national governments. While activists have remained unsuccessful in institutionalizing new truth spaces, this article argues that the state-centered strategy of human rights advocates during the campaign widened the gap between the activist leaders and victims' groups, their principal supporters.
Topic:
Human Rights
Political Geography:
Bosnia, Yugoslavia, and Balkans

4833. Substantive Equality, Popular Sovereignty, and Antagonistic Politics: An Introduction to Carl Schmitt's Democratic Theory

Author:
Jan Smolenski
Publication Date:
09-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Central European University Political Science Journal
Institution:
Central European University
Abstract:
This paper critically explores Carl Schmitt's theory of democracy. I present the emergence of the democratic principle of legitimacy as described by Schmitt, then elaborate on the people as sovereign qua constituent power and present its threefold relationship with the constitution. Later I formulate three lessons to be taken from Schmitt's theory and discuss its importance and implications for democratic theory in terms of the normative and formative principle of democracy, core subject and core mode of democratic politics, and conditions of possibility of constituent democratic politics. In concluding Part I discuss the difference between liberal, republican and deliberative model of democracy and Schmitt-inspired theory.
Topic:
Politics and Sovereignty

4834. (IN)CONGRUENCE: A Study of Opinion-Policy Distance in 33 Democracies

Author:
Nicolae Bîea
Publication Date:
09-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Central European University Political Science Journal
Institution:
Central European University
Abstract:
This article seeks to answer two questions. First, is government policy in contemporary democracies congruent with public opinion? Second, what are the factors that determine opinion-policy congruence? The opinion-policy incongruence is conceptualized as the distance between actual government policy and the policy preferred by the median citizen. This article uses international survey data that assessed citizens' preferences regarding government spending in 33 countries. The results suggest that opinion-policy congruence is more often absent than present in contemporary democracies with significant variation between countries. This variation is explored using fuzzy-set qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). I identify two casual paths leading to the opinion-policy congruence: richness and relatively equal distribution of income or richness, decentralization, and usage of non-proportional electoral system.

4835. One Actor, One Too Many Voices? The EU at the UN General Assembly

Author:
Attila Molnar
Publication Date:
09-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Central European University Political Science Journal
Institution:
Central European University
Abstract:
The article tests the assumption that the deepening integration brought on by the European Union's Treaty of Lisbon should have a palpable effect on the dynamics of EU Member States' action at the United Nations. Building on existing scholarly literature, on interviews with diplomats and staff of the European External Action Service at two UN headquarters locations, as well as on a case study of what is arguably the most universal of multilateral bodies, the UN General Assembly, the article asses the "voice of the EU" on the global multilateral scene. It concludes that, in spite of the abundance of theoretical and practical arguments for increasing the unity of European diplomacy, action in the UNGA does not provide grounds fo an overly hasty departure from a state-centric view of EU foreign policy.
Topic:
Foreign Policy
Political Geography:
Europe, United Nations, and Lisbon

4836. Dylan Kissane, Beyond Anarchy: The Complex and Chaotic Dynamics of International Politics (Stuttgart: Ibidem Veriag, 2011)

Author:
Emilian Kavalski
Publication Date:
09-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Central European University Political Science Journal
Institution:
Central European University
Abstract:
It seems that despite the transformations in world politics in the last two decades, the realist paradigm still continues to provide the main framework for the understanding and explanation of international relations. Tracing its origins to the writings of Thucydides, realism has long been perceived as the cornerstone of the discipline. Dylan Kissane's study, however, emphasizes that the stature that realism has acquired is unfounded. He meticulously goes on to debunk the very foundations of realist thinking – the belief in an anarchic international system, in the awareness that this it merely offers a simplified representation of reality.
Topic:
Foreign Policy

4837. Josette Baer (ed.), From Post-Communism toward the Third Millennium (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011)

Author:
Klejd Këlliçi
Publication Date:
09-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Central European University Political Science Journal
Institution:
Central European University
Abstract:
From Post Communism toward the Third Millennium is a collection of contributions whose origins are different in style and content. The main aim of the book can be found concisely within the last part of the title 'toward the third millennium'. It offers a consumptive panorama after a period where most of the political transitions in the area were either resolved or had reached a conclusion defined by the membership in NATO or the EU, or had simply come to a standstill.
Political Geography:
Europe

4838. Tatiana Zhurzhenko, Borderlands Into Bordered Lands. Geopolitics of Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine (Stuggart: Ibidem Verlag, 2010)

Author:
Viktoria Potapkina
Publication Date:
09-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Central European University Political Science Journal
Institution:
Central European University
Abstract:
The border between Russia and Ukraine became a political reality in 1991 with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the creation of two independent states. Since then, Ukraine's Eastern border has turned itself into a perfect laboratory for studying processes of border construction.
Topic:
Politics
Political Geography:
Russia, Ukraine, and Soviet Union

4839. Kerem Öktem, Angry Nation: Turkey since 1989 (London and New York: Zed Books, 2011)

Author:
Ömer Aslan
Publication Date:
09-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Central European University Political Science Journal
Institution:
Central European University
Abstract:
Turkey's transformation evidenced best by its more active and assertive foreign policy and economic growth for the last decade has deservedly attracted a great deal of attention. More and more students of Turkish politics have tried to explain underlying domestic, regional, and international dynamics of these monumental changes. As Turkish landscapes alter, a powerful current of scholarship with a revisionist approach to nationalist historiography and the Alevi, Kurdish demands as well as Armenian genocide claims have also surfaced.
Political Geography:
Turkey

4840. Editorial

Publication Date:
11-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Goettingen Journal of International Law
Institution:
The Goettingen Journal of International Law
Abstract:
Once more the Goettingen Journal of International Law was involved in organizing an international conference and publishing the contributions. On 9 and 10 March 2012 scholars from Germany, Israel and Norway assembled in the “Paulinerkirche” in Goettingen to present their research on “Precursors to International Constitutionalism: The Development of the German Constitutional Approach to International Law”. The symposium was the final step of a research project organized by the Institute of International and European Law of the Georg-August University Goettingen and the Minerva Center for Human Rights, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Its central idea is that international constitutionalism is not only a topic contemporarily much discussed, but finds its precursors in earlier “German” constitutional approaches.
Topic:
International Law
Political Geography:
Israel and Germany