Civil Society

This article demonstrates historically and statistically that conversionary Protestants (CPs) heavily influenced the rise and spread of stable democracy around the world. It argues that CPs were a crucial catalyst initiating the development and spread of religious liberty, mass education, mass printing, newspapers, voluntary organizations, and colonial reforms, thereby creating the conditions that made stable democracy more likely. Statistically, the historic prevalence of Protestant missionaries explains about half the variation in democracy in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania and removes the impact of most variables that dominate current statistical research about democracy. The association between Protestant missions and democracy is consistent in different continents and subsamples, and it is robust to more than 50 controls and to instrumental variable analyses.

Link a la tercera edición del libro (Planeta, 2023): https://www.planetadelibros.com/libro-violencia-y-autoritarismo-en-el-peru/344076 .

Absract: Sendero Luminoso fue una de las insurgencias más brutales jamás visto  en las Américas. Violencia política y el autoritarismo en el Perú: Bajo la sombra de Sendero y la dictadura de Fujimori explora los efectos agobiantes que tuvo sobre la sociedad civil peruana la violencia desplegado por Sendero Luminoso y por la guerra contrainsurgente llevada acabo por el Estado. En base a un trabajo de investigación etnográfico en las barriadas de Lima, la autora aporta conocimientos nuevos sobre el intento de Sendero Luminoso a expandir su revolución a la ciudad capital, así como sobre las respuestas de la población urbana frente a la insurgencia. El libro examina como la amenaza insurgente dio pie a un régimen despótico dirigido por Alberto Fujimori y su principal asesor, Vladimiro Montesinos, hasta que, después de una década, colapsó bajo revelaciones de corrupción y la movilización de la sociedad civil que cada vez más cuestionaba el autoritarismo de Fujimori. El libro ayuda entender cómo sociedades terminan sacrificando la libertad y democracia en el nombre de la lucha contra el terrorismo, pero también cómo los élites gobernantes manipulan los miedos de la sociedad para perpetuar su poder y sus privilegios.

Esta segunda edición del libro contiene un capítulo nuevo sobre el juicio al ex presidente Alberto Fujimori, quien, después de varios años como prófugo, fue extraditado en 2007 y enjuiciado por graves violaciones a los derechos humanos así como otros casos de corrupción y abuso de poder. Fue condenado en abril de 2009 y sentenciado a 25 años de prisión.

The paper aims to reveal one integrated global map which points out the major geographical inequalities in providing basic utilities across the countries using multivariate analysis and thematic cartography. Sixteen indicators with global coverage were selected taking into account the waste collection services, sanitation facilities, drinking water sources, energy, electricity, habitat and demographic conditions. Several data are broken down for the total, urban and rural population in order to outline the rural-urban disparities between and within countries. A special focus is given to waste collection coverage, in order to compute a comprehensive global assessment of this key indicator of public health, which is one of the poorest monitored basic utility. The world countries were divided into 10 classes according to the hierarchical cluster analysis. Each class has particular features outlining the gaps between high, middle and low-income countries with direct impact on quality of life, public health, and environment.

With the deadly ISIS advance, the sudden rousing of Shia militias and the threat of Kurdish secession, Iraq faces a host of deep-seated and intractable problems. Together, these events raise a number of serious questions, not just for Iraq and its future but also for the broader
Middle East, the United States and its Coalition partners and the international community. While these challenges and questions will drive much academic debate, political analysis and media discussion in the months and years ahead, they are not the central purpose of this chapter. While there is always a risk in commenting on unfolding events, including the potential to overstate their significance and likely long-term impact, it is difficult to ignore the significance of the deadly ISIS advance and all that has happened since. This chapter argues that key to understanding these events is coming to terms with the three varied and complex legacies of the 2003 Iraq War. The first central legacy of the Iraq War is the ongoing consequences of several critical mistakes made by the US-led Coalition before, during and immediately after the 2003 intervention. The second legacy addressed here is the fact that the 2003 war shattered – perhaps irreversibly - Iraqis fragile cultural mosaic and its rich and complex history of overlapping and intersecting communities, ideologies and narratives. The third and final legacy of the 2003 Iraq War detailed in this chapter is its significant regional and global consequences – from spiralling sectarianism across the Middle East to a profound challenge to America’s status as the last remaining superpower and its use of military power for ‘humanitarian’ ends. The argument here is that these three important legacies set in train a sequence of events that have served as the collective catalyst for the expansion of the ‘Islamic State’ from mid-2014.

In this paper we argue that the use of the communicative theory of Jürgen Habermas in planning theory is problematic because it hampers an understanding of how power shapes planning. We posit an alternative approach based on the power analytics of Michel Foucault which focuses on ‘what is actually done’, as opposed to Habermas’s focus on ‘what should be done’. We discuss how the Foucauldian stance problematises planning, asking difficult questions about the treatment of legitimacy, rationality, knowledge and spatiality. We conclude that Foucault offers a type of analytic planning theory which offers better prospects than does Habermas for those interested in understanding and bringing about democratic social change through planning.

Power is present in each individual and in every relationship.  It is defined as the ability of a group to get another group to take some form of desired action, usually by consensual power and sometimes by force (Holmes, Hughes & Julian, 2007).

In society governments, organisations and an elite class of people make decisions that affect the lives of a large mass of other people.  A significant amount of research shows these decisions are often made to serve their own economic interests and values of which includes the means of production and property ownership (Holmes et al, 2007; Walters & Crook, 1995; Haralambos & Holborn, 1990; McGregor, 2000).

These decisions cause inequality in society and resentment from people who are excluded from the decision making process.  The unequalness of this decision-making and power allocation enables the fortunate to enforce their will on the less fortunate (Graetz, 2001, Walters & Crook, 1995).

This essay discusses power from two sociological views; the Conflict perspective, predominately from Karl Marx and the Elite theory perspective.  These theories show that power is distributed unequally in society where governments, a ruling class, media and business elites hold the majority of power over others.

Megaproject Planning and Management: Essential Readings contains the seminal articles from the growing body of research on megaproject planning and management along with an original introduction by the editor, Bent Flyvbjerg. The leading and most cited authority in the field, Flyvbjerg has used crowdsourcing and 25 years of experience to cherry-pick from several hundred articles and books the writings that define the field. This volume will be an indispensable source for those wishing to speak with authority about how megaprojects are prepared, delivered, and fought over. The target audience is students, academics, practitioners, and media pundits alike, as well as communities affected by megaprojects.

At the same time that case studies are widely used and have produced canonical texts, it may be observed that the case study as a methodology is generally held in low regard, or is simply ignored, within the academy. For example, only 2 of the 30 top-ranked U.S. graduate programs in political science require a dedicated graduate course in case study or qualitative methods, and a full third of these programs do not even offer such a course. In contrast, all of the top 30 programs offer courses in quantitative methods and almost all of them require training in such methods, often several courses. In identifying this paradox of the case study’s wide use and low regard, Gerring rightly remarks that the case study survives in a “curious methodological limbo,” and that the reason is that the method is poorly understood. In what follows, we will try to resolve Gerring’s paradox and help case study research gain wider use and acceptance.

Increasingly, governments are experimenting with ways to provide public goods by involving the private sector in the planning, financing, building and operating of a range of services, facilities, infrastructure, etc. In the geographical literature on neoliberalism this entanglement of the state and markets has been loosely conceptualized as a process of marketization. This concept describes the insertion of markets or market forces into the state and public sector. In this paper we unpack this concept by highlighting the need to think about a range of marketization processes at play across a range of geographies.

In establishing an anarchic framework for understanding public space as a vision for radical democracy, this article proceeds as a theoretical inquiry into how an agonistic public space might become the basis of emancipation. Public space is presented as an opportunity to move beyond the technocratic elitism that often characterizes both civil societies and the neoliberal approach to development, and is further recognized as the battlefield on which the conflicting interests of the world's rich and poor are set. Contributing to the growing recognition that geographies of resistance are relational, where the “global” and the “local” are understood as co-constitutive, a radical democratic ideal grounded in material public space is presented as paramount to repealing archic power in general, and neoliberalism’s exclusionary logic in particular.

Quote as:
Salvatore, Armando, and Dale F. Eickelman (eds). 2004. Public Islam and the Common Good, Leiden and Boston: Brill.

This was an early, coordinated attempt to explore the public role of Islam in contemporary world politics. "Public Islam" refers to the diverse invocations and struggles over Islamic ideas and practices that increasingly influence the politics and social life of large parts of the globe. The contributors to this volume show how public Islam articulates competing notions and practices of the common good and a way of envisioning alternative political and religious ideas and realities, reconfiguring established boundaries of civil and social life. Drawing on examples from the late Ottoman Empire, Africa, South Asia, Iran, and the Arab Middle East, this volume facilitates understanding the multiple ways in which the public sphere, a key concept in social thought, can be made transculturally feasible by encompassing the evolution of non-Western societies in which religion plays a vital role.

Robert W. Cox's contribution to International Relations theory places the discipline in a transformational framework. Building on Gramsci's ideas and a variety of other sources eclectically, his theory goes beyond the neorealist statecentric framework and brings out the connections between material conditions, ideas and institutions in what he terms the formation of 'world orders'. How people organize themselves in the sphere of production not only determines their own life but also that of their states and the world order. In saying that change can come from any one of the spheres (material conditions, ideas and institutions), he denies and goes beyond the base-superstructure thesis of Marxism. Cox identifies creation of a vibrant civil society, emergence of organic intellectuals representing the marginalized, development of community-level solidarity, participatory democracy, non-violent methods of conflict resolution, pluralism and multilateralism as key elements of his transformational agenda. This essay explores Cox's main ideas relating to transformational international relations and the strategies envisaged for transformation.

This book is about the role of social movements in contemporary
Africa. Its core argument is that social movements—popular
movements of the working class, the poor, and other oppressed and
marginalized sections of African society—have played a central role in
shaping Africa’s contemporary history. In the twentieth century, social
movements were central to challenging the material exploitations
of Western imperialism and bringing an end to formal European control
of the continent. Similarly, they resisted dictatorial and military
rule in postcolonial Africa, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s paved
the way for the return of democracy to much of the continent. In the
last two decades, social movements have critiqued and resisted the imposition of economic liberalization across the continent by the international
financial institutions and their allies among African rulers.

Despite this extraordinary record, African social movements have not
been the subject of systematic analysis. It is the aim of this study to place social movements at the center of the analysis of postcolonial African political change, capturing both their exciting diversity and their capacity to unite as temporary “coalitions of the discontent” in periods of rapid social change.

The book is thus designed as a corrective to the tendency to see
Africa’s postcolonial half-century as one dominated by political repression,
economic decline, and ethnic conflict. Africans have constantly
struggled in difficult circumstances to improve their lot,
using collective forms of action to challenge unjust and unaccountable
systems of political and economic power. This book documents
many of those struggles during the post-1945 period in general, and
those that took place in southern Africa in the 1990s and 2000s in
particular.

As well as celebrating the successes of these movements, much
of the book therefore asks the implicit question “What went
wrong?” If social protest has been at the heart of Africa’s politics,
then why is much of the continent so resolutely undemocratic, authoritarian,
and poor? How have vibrant movements of the sort analyzed
here failed to develop into broader political forces for radical
social and political change? Why have their achievements been so
consistently hijacked by economic and political elites, both Western
and indigenous? Answering this question certainly necessitates a
critique of the politics of African nationalism and the nature of postcolonial African elites. It also requires a critical analysis of the politics and composition of social movements themselves. By addressing
these concerns, it is the authors’ hope that this book will
make a modest contribution to strengthening the activists and
movements currently active on the continent.

Quote as:
Salvatore, Armando, 2016. The Sociology of Islam: Knowledge, Power and Civility, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

This is the Introduction to the book The Sociology of Islam, which provides an accessible introduction to this emerging field of inquiry, teaching and debate. The study is located at the crucial intersection between a variety of disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. It discusses the long-term dynamics of Islam as both a religion and as a social, political and cultural force.
The volume focuses on ideas of knowledge, power and civility to provide students and readers with analytic and critical thinking frameworks for understanding the complex social facets of Islamic traditions and institutions. The study of the sociology of Islam improves the understanding of Islam as a diverse force that drives a variety of social and political arrangements.
Delving into both conceptual questions and historical interpretations, The Sociology of Islam is a transdisciplinary, comparative resource for students, scholars, and policy makers seeking to understand Islam’s complex changes throughout history and its impact on the modern world.

This paper investigates the extent to which external reporting by UK best practice companies now includes performance information about gender equality in the workplace. It examines the reasons for company disclosure on this issue and the barriers to better reporting.

Back cover text: If the new fin de siècle marks a recurrence of the real, Bent Flyvbjerg’s Rationality and Power epitomizes that development and sets new standards for social and political inquiry. The Danish town of Aalborg is to Flyvbjerg what Florence was to Machiavelli: a laboratory for understanding the real workings of power, and for grasping what they mean to our more general concerns of social and political organization. Politics, administration, and planning are examined in ways that allow  a rare, in-depth understanding. The reader witnesses, firsthand, the classic and endless drama which defines what modernity and democracy are and can be.

This research, conducted by the author when a Senior Researcher at Newcastle University, UK, was funded by a UK governance organisation to help them assess, integrate and improve their understanding of the governed population.

ABSTRACT: Governance organisations have been urged to develop more holistic evidence-based approaches with partners to better deal with issues affecting the governed population. This presupposes an understanding of the population, yet there has been little research work addressing how governance organisations come to understand their governed population, nor how this understanding can be improved upon within such organisations.

This case study examined in-depth how understanding of a governed population was developed within one UK local governance organisation and it explored how such understanding might be developed and improved through more holistic and evidence-based organisational learning within the organisation and its governance partnerships.

The research methodology involved placement within the governance organisation, participant observations on several projects and innovative initiatives, observations within, across, and outside the organisation, and also interviews with varied key stakeholders.

The study examined:

- stakeholder engagement and networks
- current and varied understandings of the population
- mechanisms actually used for developing understandings
- the influence of context on organisational learning

and analysed these to arrive at a recommendations to improve organisational understanding of the governed population.

In the case studied, significant strengths were found: including innovative past learning trials for development, extensive ongoing networking activities, and many varied and accumulating quantitative datasets available across partnerships.

However, entrenched organisational approaches and practices constrained the development of holistic evidence-based understanding, for instance: the absence of systematic maintained collective learning processes; weak recording and forgetting of understandings; methodological exclusion of stakeholders from the development of understanding; the relative neglect of qualitative data, explanations, investigations, interpretations, and reflexivity; and also implicit organisational acceptance of such limitations and low aspirations.

Nonetheless, untapped opportunities existed to enable change including: latent practitioner knowledge and innovative management champions, the desire for improvement and raised aspirations within learning networks, and the development potential of alterative learning approaches.

It was concluded that more holistic evidence-based understanding was possible, but required new learning approaches beyond those then in use in both local government or academia.   

Recommendations are made to utilise and develop improved organisational learning approaches trialed and reported in the case study.

It is argued that the case study findings, conclusions, and recommendations may be applicable to other similar local governance organisations and partnerships that seek to better understand local populations, services and interventions.

The work was also submitted for, and awarded, an MPhil (at Newcastle University, supervised by Prof. Patsy Healy)

In India, the Constitution is regarded as Supreme law of the land. No one is above the Constitution. It provides for three organs of the Government, viz., the Legislature, Executive and the Judiciary, each to function independently so that the rule of law in the state could be
upheld in the State. But, due to ineffective legislature and also because of the powers of the executive being in the hands of one person, there has been a series of inaction by the legislature. Henceforth, the Judiciary has involved itself to bridge the gap in the law which the state is lacking by means of establishing new doctrines, expanding the horizons of the law by giving wide interpretations and also by declaring new principles. Thus, the question arouse is that whether in doing so, is Judiciary encroaching the powers of the Legislature?

Taken together, the works of Jurgen Habermas and Michel Foucault highlight an essential tension in modernity. This is the tension between the normative and the real, between what should be done and what is actually done. Understanding this tension is crucial to understanding modern democracy, what it is and what it could be. It has been argued that an effective way of making democracy stronger is to strengthen civil society. This article contains a comparative analysis of the central ideas of Habermas and Foucault as they pertain to the question of democracy and civil society. More specifically, the discourse ethics of Habermas is contrasted with the power analytics and ethics of Foucault evaluating their usefulness for those interested in understanding, and bringing about, democratic social change.

In December 2009, political attention was turned towards the
15th UN Climate Conference, COP15. For the Global Justice Movement (GJM) this provided an opportunity to promote their agenda. The use of online media conjured up memories of the success of alternative media in mobilising large-scale protests around previous WTO and G8 counter-summits. However, the COP15 saw a turn to the use of what can be termed mainstream – online sites among activists. Drawing on a case study of the activist network NTAC, we explore how YouTube served both the purpose of reaching broader publics and of mobilising for confrontational direct action within activist circles.

Back cover text: Megaprojects and Risk provides the first detailed examination of the phenomenon of megaprojects. It is a fascinating account of how the promoters of multi-billion dollar megaprojects systematically and self-servingly misinform parliaments, the public and the media in order to get projects approved and built. It shows, in unusual depth, how the formula for approval is an unhealthy cocktail of underestimated costs, overestimated revenues, undervalued environmental impacts and overvalued economic development effects. This results in projects that are extremely risky, but where the risk is concealed from MPs, taxpayers and investors. The authors not only explore the problems but also suggest practical solutions drawing on theory, experience and hard, scientific evidence from the several hundred projects in twenty nations and five continents that illustrate the book. Accessibly written, it will be the standard reference for students, scholars, planners, economists, auditors, politicians and interested citizens for many years to come.

The intent of this chapter is to re-imagine and apply the term " civil disobedience " to the cyber domain. The full extent of how it can apply will be analyzed in a framework of the evolutionary rights of protest. Traditional civil disobedience is a " performance " via visual and physical mediums, while cyber disobedience is essentially a digital performance with difficulty in attributing true ownership of the act. This is an interesting antithesis to the physical protestor, who uses strategic visibility, threat of arrest, and popular backlash against state behavior as vital aspects of the disobedience. These variables are noticeably absent in cyber disobedience.

Background: European and national policies on citizenship education stimulate the implementation of a participative approach to citizenship education, fostering active citizenship. The reason given for fostering active citizenship is the decline of participation in political and social life jeopardizing democracy. Schools have to implement a participative approach through stimulating participation within school and its direct environment, while fostering a certain kind of political literacy, critical thinking and analysing skills, certain kind of values, attitudes and behaviours. Purpose: The purpose of this article is to problematise the participative approach of citizenship education advocated by policy makers and several researchers. In order to do so, four different categories that citizenship education has to cover will be theoretically and empirically analysed: political knowledge, critical thinking, values, attitudes and behaviours, and active participation. The practical implications for educational practice will be discussed.
Source of evidence: Two types of documents have been analysed: The 2005 and 2012 Eurydice reports and the 2009 International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) research reports. These documents are exemplary of the mainstream idea of citizenship and citizenship education held by policy makers and many researchers on citizenship education. The Eurydice reports have analysed citizenship education in more than 30 countries while promoting a certain concept of citizenship education, namely active citizenship. The ICCS has researched pupils’ competencies on citizenship education and school practices in 38 countries. It is an interesting source because it had to define and operationalise the different constituents of citizenship education.
Main argument: In jurisdictions where citizenship education is compulsory, schools have to implement this participative approach and account for it. We suggest that this educational approach to citizenship education may be problematic because each aspect – political literacy, critical thinking and analysing skills, values, attitudes and behaviours, and active participation – presents challenging demands on the curricu- lum, head teachers and teachers. We argue three kinds of constraints that make the implementation of such a participative approach unrealistic: (1) insufficient specialist knowledge on the part of teachers and head teachers, (2) time and budget constraints and (3) an overcrowded curriculum. We demonstrate that the broad range of themes that political literacy has to cover demand specific knowledge on the part of teachers regarding each of the themes. Then we argue that critical thinking skills are hard to learn and demand continuous practice. Implementing and sustaining active participation structure within school and in the direct environment, again, require specific skills and curricular organisation. The demands made by values, attitudes and behaviours on teachers and pupils could not be explored because of the lack of conceptual clarity in the documentation under scrutiny.
Conclusion: The feasibility of a participative approach to citizenship education has been questioned through theoretical and empirical critical analysis. On this basis, we suggest that the scope of the citizenship education curriculum should be reconsidered or that teacher and head teacher should receive the necessary and adequate training, and support to implement such a participatory structure.

This chapter offers a bold critique of the notion that Baathist rule in Iraq was a product of a culture of authoritarianism in Iraq. It is important to acknowledge from the start that while this chapter does offer a more nuanced view of the Post-Colonial period, it is no way a defence of the tyranny of the Baath and the brutal megalomania of Saddam. Specifically, the first section examines the quashing of Iraq’s civil society and the tight restraints exerted over the nation’s media throughout the period. It also addresses the ways in which various Post-Colonial regimes, but especially the Baath, were adept at manipulating the discourses of democracy in order to mask their tyranny and coerce people into patriotism. Moving beyond this, however, the second section documents the various clandestine opposition groups that began to emerge across Iraq’s divergent ethno-religious and political divides who resisted Baathist oppression and agitated for democratic change. They produced their own media outlets which proved effective in voicing the various frustrations and grievances of Iraqis of all backgrounds and shades of opinion, giving way to a renewed public sphere. The Post-Colonial era, therefore, alternative history of Iraq from the mid-twentieth through to the early twenty-first century in which one finds a sophisticated political culture deeply concerned with the issue of democratic governance.

This article aims to explore emerging trends for the Sunni religious elite and the Islamic legal tradition in the new context of the Arab Uprisings by focusing on Yusuf al-Qaradawi, arguably the most prominent of these ʿulamāʾ alive today. The article will follow al-Qaradawi’s articulation, transmission and reconstruction of the Islamic legal tradition in his own discourse as he has attempted to negotiate the politically fraught contexts of the Arab Uprisings while also maintaining his horizontal commitments to a diverse base of supporters be they the wider Arab Muslim public, the Muslim Brotherhood or indeed the Qatari royal family. The article will focus on al-Qaradawi’s highly publicised interventions and fatwas in relation to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and Syria from the perspective of Islamic studies, and also draw on personal interviews with al-Qaradawi, his personal staff, as well as supplementary media. In so doing, the article will elucidate al-Qaradawi and his colleagues’ attempts, ranging from the highly creative to the markedly conservative, to respond to unfolding events through the legal tradition and play an increasingly active role in the public sphere while their own status simultaneously becomes ever more vulnerable and unstable.

This dissertation analyses the relationship between civil society and political leadership within the context of Zimbabwe’s protracted social conflict, particularly through the lens of land policy. Through the use of strategic informants, it yields important insights into the origins, form and impact of political leadership and civil society in a way that will expose the dynamics of elite and grassroots mobilisation and the political context in which land policy is either made or obstructed. Specifically, this dissertation examines two research questions. First, if political leadership is not representative of the citizenry, is land policy more likely to engender overt conflict? Second, if civil society has an autonomous role in the public sphere, is land policy more likely to benefit citizens? This dissertation also confronts an emerging empirical problem: the absence of descriptive data in regards to how civil society and political leadership have engaged in reforming land policy in Zimbabwe during the period of transition from 2008 to 2013. By measuring representation and autonomy – indicators of human needs satisfaction– this dissertation traced each phase of the protracted social conflict as it both helped to create the conditions for a liberation model of representation while simultaneously further exacerbating protracted social conflict within Zimbabwe.

Cross-national empirical research consistently suggests that, on average, former British colonies are both more democratic and have more stable democratic transitions. I argue that former British colonies are distinct not because Great Britain was a democracy – so were France and Belgium during the late 19th and early 20th century. Nor were the British more altruistic. However, British colonial elites were more divided and thus more constrained. In particular, religious groups were more independent from state control in British colonies than in historically-Catholic colonies (i.e., colonies of France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and Italy). Initially the British restricted missions in their colonies, but Evangelical Protestants forced the British to allow religious liberty in 1813. Protestants were not able to win religious liberty in most other European colonizers during the entire period of colonization.
    Protestant missionaries were central to expanding formal education in the colonies because they wanted people to read the Bible in their own language. Governments wanted a small educated elite that they could control. Other religious groups invested in mass vernacular education primarily when competing with Protestants.
    Missionaries also constrained colonial abuses when they were independent from state control (i.e., chose their own leaders and raised their own funds). If colonial exploitation was extreme, it angered indigenous people against the West and made mission work difficult. Thus missionaries had incentive to fight abuses. Other colonial elites had no incentive to expose their abuses, and indigenous people had little power in the colonizing state. This left missionaries in a unique bridging position. Non-state missionaries also fostered institutions outside state control, institutions that nationalist leaders later used to challenge British colonization and birth political parties.
    Statistical analysis confirms the centrality of missions in expanding education and fostering democracy. Controlling for Protestant missions removes the association between democracy and British colonization, other “Protestant” colonization, percent European, percent Muslim, being an island nation, and being a landlocked nation. Other controls (such as current GDP, and current education enrollments) do not remove the strong positive association between Protestant missions and democracy.

With the deadly ISIS advance, the sudden rousing of Shia militias and the threat of Kurdish secession, Iraq faces a host of deep-seated and intractable problems. Together, these events raise a number of serious questions, not just for Iraq and its future but also for the broader Middle East, the United States and its Coalition partners and the international community. While these challenges and questions will drive much academic debate, political analysis and media discussion in the months and years ahead, they are not the central purpose of this chapter. While there is always a risk in commenting on unfolding events, including the potential to overstate their significance and likely long-term impact, it is difficult to ignore the significance of the deadly ISIS advance and all that has happened since. This chapter argues that key to understanding these events is coming to terms with the three varied and complex legacies of the 2003 Iraq War. The first central legacy of the Iraq War is the ongoing consequences of several critical mistakes made by the US-led Coalition before, during and immediately after the 2003 intervention. The second legacy addressed here is the fact that the 2003 war shattered – perhaps irreversibly - Iraqis fragile cultural mosaic and its rich and complex history of overlapping and intersecting communities, ideologies and narratives. The third and final legacy of the 2003 Iraq War detailed in this chapter is its significant regional and global consequences – from spiralling sectarianism across the Middle East to a profound challenge to America’s status as the last remaining superpower and its use of military power for ‘humanitarian’ ends. The argument here is that these three important legacies set in train a sequence of events that have served as the collective catalyst for the expansion of the ‘Islamic State’ from mid-2014.

Cite this article: Raszkowski, A., Bartniczak, B. Towards Sustainable Regional Development: Economy, Society, Environment, Good Governance Based on the Example of Polish Regions. Transformations in Business & Economics, 2018, Vol. 17, No 2 (44), pp.225-245.The presented study discusses problems referring to the concept of sustainable development at regional level, based on the example of Polish regions in the period 2005-2011. The first part presents theoretical aspects of sustainable regional development, raises the problems of primary phenomena hindering such development, sustainable development definitions, the role of creativity, the importance of NGOs, good governance of regional space. The next part of the article provides the characteristics of sustainable development indicators selected for the analysis in accordance with the approach adopted by the Central Statistical Office in Poland towards measuring the level of sustainable regional development. The synthetic measure of development (SMD) represents the applied research method, which offered the basis for constructing the ranking and identifying the position of particular Polish regions. The research results remain the core of the study since they illustrate the indicator values in the years under analysis. Within the framework of the final remarks and conclusions it was emphasized that in none of the studied regions, in terms of implementing sustainable development standards, the situation can be assessed as favourable or very favourable and the reasons for such state of the matter were provided. In spite of the relatively unfavourable results, a gradual improvement of the situation was observed over the years. It was pointed out that one of the fundamental barriers to the implementation of sustainable development standards is the absence of awareness and understanding of the discussed development concept.

For know the controversial history of the Druids in the Celtic world, will investigate the sources of its origin, through stories of classic texts and medieval legends of Gaul, Britain and Ireland. His role in Celtic society surpassed the religious sphere, covering war, politics, medicine and the law. Almost unknown is the participation of women in this institution.

This article concerns the extent to which corrupt behavior is dependent on the organizational power structure and the resources available for illegal exchange. This qualitative study is based on 42 in-depth interviews with organizational actors in different organizations in Hungary. Four core themes emerged from the analysis of the interviews: (a) isolated corruption at the bottom, (b) the middle level’s own corruption, (c) “technicization” when middle-level professionals and expert groups are used to legalize the corruption of the dominant coalition, and (d) “turning-off controls” when organizational elites intentionally deactivate internal and external controls to avoid detection.

The Supplementary Green Book Guidance on Optimism Bias (HM Treasury 2003) with reference to the Review of Large Public Procurement in the UK (Mott MacDonald 2002) notes that there is a demonstrated, systematic, tendency for project appraisers to be overly optimistic and that to redress this tendency appraisers should make explicit, empirically based adjustments to the estimates of a project’s costs, benefits, and duration. HM Treasury recommends that these adjustments be based on data from past projects or similar projects elsewhere, and adjusted for the unique characteristics of the project in hand. In the absence of a more specific evidence base, HM Treasury has encouraged departments to collect data to inform future estimates of optimism, and in the meantime use the best available data. In response to this, the Department for Transport (henceforth DfT), has contracted Bent Flyvbjerg in association with COWI to undertake the consultancy assignment "Procedures for dealing with Optimism Bias in Transport Planning". The present Guidance Document is the result of this assignment.

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have come to be recognised as key ‘third sector’ actors on the landscapes of development, human rights, humanitarian action, environment and many other areas of public action, from the post-disaster reconstruction efforts after the Indian tsunami or the West African ebola outbreak, to
campaigns for aid and trade reform and developing country debt cancellation. As these examples illustrate, NGOs are best-known for two different, but often interrelated,
types of activity - the delivery of services to people in need, and the organisation of policy advocacy and public campaigns in pursuit of social transformation. NGOs are also active in a wide range of other specialised roles such
as democracy building, conflict resolution, human rights work, cultural preservation, environmental activism, policy analysis, research and information provision. This
paper mainly confines itself to a discussion of NGOs in the international development context, but much of its argument also applies to NGOs more widely.