Comparative Politics

Lorenzo Rodríguez V-25.754.475 Segundo año, sección 04. Julio, 2016 La Revolución Bolivariana: ¿Un fascismo tropical? En las primeras décadas del siglo XX, en Europa y el mundo, ocurriría un acontecimiento que se encargaría de marcar con tinta indeleble el destino de la humanidad por las décadas venideras: La gran guerra de 1914, mejor conocida como, la Primera Guerra Mundial. Fueron cinco cruentos años de descarnada e inhumana lucha, donde el simple hecho de matar por obtener centímetros de terreno se había convertido en una obsesión. No obstante, al culminar esta, en teoría, con la firma del Tratado de Versalles, el 28 de junio de 1919, el fin todavía no se avizoraba cerca. Por el contrario, muchas naciones empezaron a sentir los estragos del conflicto. Por lo cual, se llegó a cumplir esa máxima de que lo peor muchas veces no era la guerra, sino la postguerra. A raíz de esto, surge en Italia, una de las naciones más humilladas en la guerra por los dispares términos a los cuales fueron sometidos durante la negociación del Tratado en lo que respecta a la repartición de los territorios obtenidos, un movimiento radical, inicialmente militante de la izquierda revolucionaria, con la figura de Benito Mussolini, ex combatiente en la guerra, a la cabeza: el fascismo. Este movimiento, por sus características únicas e inigualables, sería recordado, documentado, advertido, y estudiado alrededor del mundo en los años venideros. En tal sentido, surge la siguiente interrogante: ¿Qué es el fascismo? ¿Cuáles son sus características? ¿Cuáles son sus elementos más distintivos? Fascismo: revolución, negación, teatralización y violencia. Del Duce en Italia, al Führer en Alemania. La empresa que llevaremos a cabo en las subsecuentes páginas, es, desde el punto de vista intelectual, de gran complejidad teórica: realizar la conceptualización del fascismo. Sobre esta acuciante y necesaria tarea se han dedicado miles y millares de obras, muestra esto de lo complejo del tópico en cuestión. Pero a todas estas, ¿Qué es el fascismo? Según Linz, citado en Romero (2010: 374), este es:

What are the legacies of violence on gendered patterns of political representation? We examine the long-term effects of a watershed conflict of the twentieth century: the Khmer Rouge genocide, during which 50–70% of Cambodia’s working-age men were killed. Using original data on mass killings and economic and political conditions in Cambodian communes, we find that genocide exposure is positively associated with women’s economic advancement and present-day indicators of women’s representation in local-level elected office. We conduct in-depth, ethnographic interviews with genocide survivors to explore the mechanisms by which violence spurred women into elected office. A crucial finding emerges: In areas that suffered the genocide’s worst killings, widows obtained economic autonomy, providing a template for the economic advancement of women in households maintaining conventional gender roles. The shift in norms regarding the sexual division of labor created intra-communal and intergen...

To cite:
Wilkins, A. 2017. Rescaling the local: Multi-academy trusts, private monopoly and statecraft in England. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 49 (2), 171-185

For the past six years successive UK governments in England have introduced reforms intended to usher in less aggregated, top-down, bureaucratically overloaded models of service delivery as well as secure conditions for greater school autonomy.  Yet the ‘hollowing out’ of local government has not resulted in less bureaucracy on the ground or less regulation from above, nor has it diminished hierarchy as an organising principle of education governance.  In some cases, monopolies and monopolistic practices dominated by powerful bureaucracies and professional groups persist, albeit realised through the involvement of new actors and organisations from business and philanthropy.  In this paper I adopt a governmentality perspective to explore the political significance of large multi-academy trusts (MATs) – private sponsors contracted by central government to run publicly funded schools – to the generation of new scalar hierarchies and accountability infrastructures that assist in bringing the gaze of government to bear upon the actions of schools that are otherwise less visible under local government management.  On this account, it is argued, MATs are integral to statecraft and the invention and assemblage of particular apparatuses for intervening upon specific organisations, spaces and peoples.

This book examines the emergence of protective labor legislation and maternity benefits in Sweden and Germany. It addresses three central questions. Why was the early formation of welfare states in some countries more gendered than in others? Were gender politics relevant for the emergence of different welfare state regimes? How do we conceptualize gender as an explanatory category in comparative welfare state analysis? The study focuses on two countries that played a prominent role in the development of welfare states. With its legislation from the 1880s, Germany was the pioneer of compulsory workers’ insurance, and with its pension law of 1913 Sweden became the first country to introduce a universal social insurance scheme. In spite of these landmark innovations, there is extraordinarily little research looking into the rise of these two countries’ welfare states from a gendered perspective. For example, it is not well known that Bismarck’s health insurance law of 1883 made Germany the first country to introduce a maternity allowance for women workers. Roughly the same is true of Sweden. It was not in the era of social democracy, the 1930s, that maternity benefits were first proposed, but much earlier, in 1912, and as a state-subsidized allowance within the framework of voluntary health insurance.
Maternalist policies are rather contested among feminist scholars. On the one hand, some see these polices as having created and solidified a status of secondary citizenship for women. I argue that it is important to distinguish between visionary concepts and Realpolitik. Maternalist policies must be situated within a continuum of paradoxical gender relations: Motherhood can be used both to exclude women from citizenship and to include them. Social provisions for mothers were the focus of multiple and often contradictory objectives. They were a means to promote women’s economic independence – and its opposite. National women’s movements could be proponent as well as opponents of a gendered differentiation within protective labor legislation. This book examines the objectives that decisively influenced the strategies and identities of the political actors who shaped the conception of maternalist policies in Sweden and Germany before the First World War. Why Sweden and Germany? Sweden and Germany are ideal subjects for a comparative study of two countries. On the one hand, they present two similar cases of sociohistorical development. Both countries were characterized by late and rapid industrialization, late democratization, a traditionally strong state, a weak bourgeoisie, and early mobilization of the labor movement. On the other hand, despite these similarities they produced quite different types of welfare states. Today their welfare states are regarded as representative of two contrasting types: in Germany a conservative welfare state based on status and labor, and in Sweden a social democratic, universalistic welfare state based on citizenship. Both welfare states are also seen as having radically different gender specifics, with Germany representing a strong male breadwinner model and Sweden a weak one. Even in the early phases of welfare state formation, important differences were becoming evident. This study, by contrast, will show that each of these two countries had a considerably different gender order from the outset. I argue that greater gender solidarity was not a product of Sweden’s later, universalist welfare state; rather, it was an important element in the very rise of that kind of welfare state. On the other hand, the status orientation of German social policy was intrinsically related to safeguarding masculine status and to male closure of the public and political sphere during the early phase of welfare state formation. The research strategy pursued in this book links the explanatory framework of historical institutionalism to insights from discursive analysis. A fine-grained inquiry into decision-making processes is combined with a long-term perspective on state- and nation-building and on the formation of social classes and political actors. In Chapter 1 I critically review the variety of theories within comparative welfare state analysis and formulate a gender-inclusive approach based on interweaving historical institutionalism with discursive analysis. Chapter 2 examines the emergence of protective labor legislation in Germany. It demonstrates that the gendering of protective regulations was the result of a particular political constellation, enormously conflict-ridden and loaded with cultural cleavages, in which social welfare rights were posed against political citizenship. The feminization of protective labor legislation had its counterpart in an extreme masculinization of political identities. A strongly gender-differentiated citizen status rendered work in home and family care invisible while coding women’s wage labor as harmful to the social body. Chapter 3 shows how the pioneering invention of the maternity allowance in Germany amounted to a carryover of this constellation. Though its incorporation into the status-differentiated system of sickness insurance, however, the maternity allowance was tied into solidaristic relations that had very little to do with mothers’ life situations. Chapter 4 seeks to explain why Sweden did not adopt any gender-specific regulations for its first modern social welfare legislation around 1890. It is significant that there was initially no link between efforts at workplace protection and strategies against female work. The priority of economic over cultural cleavages eased the way for a “rational” manner of dealing with gender conflicts in both the political arena and in the processes of class formation. Two main pillars of modern gender dualism were not yet established in Sweden at the end of the 19th century: the interpretive patterns of physiological sexism and the universalization of political citizenship for men. Chapter 5 traces the struggle for the extension of the maternity allowance in Germany before the First World War. From the moment of its birth, the German welfare state is marked by a paradox that will leave a lasting imprint on it. Germany pioneered motherhood-oriented social policies, yet the German women’s movement had no influence at all on these early provisions. These benefits were embedded in relations of solidarity, which hindered polices friendly toward women in the long run. Chapter 6 explores Sweden’s introduction of a maternity leave for factory workers in 1900 and its ban on night work for women in 1909. Chapter 7 investigates the failure to invent an independent motherhood insurance in Sweden in 1912. Because Sweden had no compulsory sickness insurance at that time, the government drafted a bill to introduce a stand-alone maternal insurance for female factory workers. Swedish women were strong enough to prevent the institutionalization of a program based, as they perceived it, on false solidarities. Swedish women explicitly rejected the notion that there can be solidarity among women based on the experience of maternity and that might give rise to redistributive policies.

Úvod do studia politiky Miroslav Novák et al. Tato učebnice je určena zejména vysokoškolským studentům sociálních a humanitních věd bakalářského a magisterského stupně. Jde o práci kolektivní a svým pojetím i rozsahem v českém prostředí ojedinělou. Je rozdělena do čtyř částí. V první části je politika vykládána očima nejrůznějších disciplín-od politologie přes filosofii, psychologii, antropologii, právo, geografii a ekonomii až po his-torii. Obsahem druhé části jsou úvody do vybraných subdisciplín politické vědy, jako je komparativní politologie, teorie mezinárod-ních vztahů a správní věda. Ve třetí části jsou zpracovány úvody do kvantitativních a kvalitativních metod v politické vědě, včetně tzv. kvalitativní srovnávací analýzy. Čtvrtá část pak pojednává o někte-rých velkých tématech politiky, jako jsou stranické a volební systémy, národy a nacionalismus nebo demokracie a nedemokratické režimy. Učebnice tvoří vnitřně propojený celek, i když se názory, pojetí nebo hodnocení autorů jednotlivých kapitol od sebe mohou poněkud lišit.-Kdy vznikla politická věda?-Jaké další disciplíny se zabývají politikou?-Jaký je vztah mezi politickou vědou a politickou sociologií?-Proč se v češtině více ujal výraz "politologie" než "politická věda"?-Co je politika? Jaký je vztah mezi politikou a mocí?-Je řadový občan v politice kompetentní?-Jak nám analýza stranického systému pomáhá pochopit mo-derní politické režimy?-Co je předmětem komparativní politologie? Jaké metody pou-žívá?-V čem spočívá rozdíl mezi komparativní politologií a teorií mezi-národních vztahů?-Čím se vyznačuje dobrá veřejná správa? Rozsáhlý autorský tým pod vedením Miroslava Nováka tvoří čeští odborníci nejrůznějších generací z mnoha akademických pracovišť. vydání druhé, rozšířené a doplněné o 2 nové kapitoly.  Doporučená cena 749 Kč

Ethnic identity is often cited as an important variable explaining
voter choices in Africa. Ethiopia, since 1994, has adopted an
ethnically-based federal system, which makes it an interesting test
case of the importance of ethnicity in shaping voter preferences. Indeed, one might expect higher levels of ethnification of voter preferences in Ethiopia when compared to other African countries. Using cross-national data from the World Values Survey and Afrobarometer, it is found that Ethiopian voters have relatively higher levels of concentrated partisan support than do other African countries. However, when examining the propensity of individual voters to express partisan preferences that “defect” from their ethnic position, I find that the evaluations of government performance explain defections better than does the intensity of ethnic identity or expectations for patronage.

Based on an original definition of modern populism as “democratic illiberalism” and many years of meticulous research, Takis Pappas marshals extraordinary empirical evidence from Argentina, Greece, Peru, Italy, Venezuela, Ecuador, Hungary, the United States, Spain, and Brazil to develop a comprehensive theory about populism. He addresses all key issues in the debate about populism and answers big questions of great relevance for today’s liberal democracy, including:

What is modern populism and how can it be differentiated from comparable phenomena like nativism and autocracy?

Where in Latin America has populism become most successful? Where in Europe did it emerge first? Why did its rise to power in the United States come so late?

Can Trump's America be compared best with Venezuela’s Chávez, France’s Le Pens, or Turkey’s Erdoğan?

Why has populism thrived in post-authoritarian Greece but not in Spain? And why in Argentina and not in Brazil?

Can populism ever succeed without a charismatic leader? If not, what does leadership tell us about how to challenge populism?

Who are “the people” who vote for populist parties, how are these “made” into a group, and what is in their minds?

Is there a “populist blueprint” that all populists use when in power? And what are the long-term consequences of populist rule?

What does the expansion, and possibly solidification, of populism mean for the very nature and future of contemporary democracy?

Populism and Liberal Democracy will change the ways you understand populism and imagine the prospects of liberal democracy.

International conference. Trieste, Novembre, 13-15 2014
This conference aims at analyzing the history of Italy’s nuclear energy policies during the Cold War, by placing the Italian case in a comparative perspective and highlighting the importance of the international context in shaping the country’s specific experience. It builds upon a previous conference, organized by Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A and the University of Trieste in 2012 (Nuclear Energy in Italy after the Second World War: Research, Culture, Politics - http://www.elettra.trieste.it/Ippolito/). This conference proposes to examine the ways in which international politics and economics, technological and scientific exchanges, as well as social and cultural movements, influenced Italian nuclear energy policies, both civilian and military. Furthermore, it seeks to understand how the Italian case compares to other national histories, in Western and Eastern Europe, the U.S., Latin America, Asia and Africa.
With few important exceptions, the Italian case has largely remained on the margins of a growing scholarship on the history of nuclear energy. This conference intends to provide a venue for work-in- progress by junior and senior scholars, with the aim of consolidating a national and international research group on this topic. We are particularly interested in fostering an interdisciplinary dialogue and encourage papers that use a variety of approaches, such as history, science and technology studies, physics, engineering, political science, economics, international relations, anthropology, and geography.
Some of the issues that the conference will address are:
1. The ways in which the Cold War shaped Italian civilian and military nuclear policies.
2. The role public opinion, social and cultural groups, anti-nuclear and pro-nuclear movements, had in shaping Italian nuclear policies.
3. The ways in which an interdisciplinary approach such as that of Science and Technology Studies (STS) might provide a new understanding about the history of nuclear energy in Italy.

This conference is organized by Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A., the Department of Humanities of the University of Trieste, the Department of Political Sciences of the University of Roma Tre, and the Department of Documentary, Linguistic-Philological and Geographic Sciences of the University of Rome “La Sapienza”.
The working group responsible for the conference programme includes professors and researchers from the University of Trieste – Humanities Department; University of Roma Tre – Political Science Department; Machiavelli Center for Cold War Studies – CIMA; University of Rome “La Spaienza” - Physics Department and Departments for Documentary, Linguistic-Philological and Geographical Sciences; Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A.


Scientific Committee:
Giovanni Battimelli (University of Rome “La Sapienza”)
Elisabetta Bini (University of Trieste)
Igor Londero (Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A.)
Leopoldo Nuti (University of Roma Tre)
Giovanni Paoloni (University of Rome “La Sapienza”)
Carlo Rizzuto (Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A.)
Elisabetta Vezzosi (University of Trieste).


Organizing offices: Giulia Iannuzzi (University of Trieste)
Contacts: [email protected]
Web: www.elettra.eu/Conferences/2014/NuclearItaly

where she originated the Women and the Law (now Law Gender Equality) and Feminist Jurisprudence courses. Currently she teaches Public Law, Constitutional Law, and Equality Rights under the Charter in the Faculty of Law, as well as Law and Public Policy in the School of Public Policy. She is cross-appointed to the Department of Women's Studies where she was Coordinator, 1991-3. Her research interests include issues in constitutional law, feminist legal theory, antidiscrimination law, multiculturalism, and equality rights. She has published articles in Canadian and international journals, as well as contributing chapters on women and constitutional law to Conversations among Friends-Entre Amies: Women and Constitutional Reform, Changing Patterns: Women in Canada, and Women and the Constitution.

Just as Neon Genesis Evangelion remains a cultural touchstone that signalled the end of Japan’s unfounded optimism of the bubble economy era, Attack on Titan is the revenant marking the post-2008 cultural shift from the free movement of globalised neoliberalism to the rising populism of the far-right and the normalisation of conspiracy theories. Game of Thrones, in the end, succumbed to the temptation of uncomplicated crowd-pleasers, which is why it has no re-watch value for me under lockdown. AoT and Eva, on the other hand, tackle what Mark Fisher termed the sense of a cancelled future under capitalist realism.

Across the world, governments design and implement policies with the explicit goal of promoting social justice. But can such institutions change entrenched social norms? And what effects should we expect from differently designed policies? This book is an empirically rich study of one of the most extensive electoral quota systems in the world: the reserved seats for the Scheduled Castes (SCs, the former “untouchables”) in India’s legislative assemblies. Combining evidence from extensive quantitative datasets, archival work, and in-depth interviews with politicians, civil servants, activists, and voters across India, the book explores the long-term effects of electoral quotas for the political elite and the general population. It shows that the quotas for SCs have played an important role in improving social justice for SCs in some ways, primarily by weakening the status hierarchy associated with the caste system. The extent and nature of the gains in social justice have not, however, been what all advocates of these quotas had expected or hoped for. This is a study of India, but the findings and discussions have broader implications. Policies such as quotas are usually supported with arguments about various assumed positive long-term consequences. The nuanced discussions in this book shed light on the trade-offs inherent in how these policies are designed, and lays the groundwork for a comparative research agenda on the politics of inclusion.

The second edition of this popular and authoritative text provides a truly global assessment of democratization in theory and practice in the contemporary world. It has been systematically revised and updated throughout to cover recent developments, from the impact of 9/11 and EU enlargement to the war in Iraq.

"This… [new edition] is exemplary: it is very extensively updated and revised and the authors have not tried to cut corners by keeping outdated references or bits of text…. [A]n excellent textbook for undergraduate students both for its comprehensive overview of the literature and as a basis for discussion." – Anna Khakee, Democratization

Populism is one of the most dynamic fields of comparative political research. Although its study began in earnest only in the late 1960s, it has since developed through four distinct waves of scholarship, each pertaining to distinct empirical phenomena and with specific methodological and theoretical priorities. Today, the field is in urgent need of a comprehensive general theory that will be able to capture the phenomenon specifically within the context of our contemporary democracies. This requires our breaking away from recurring methodological pitfalls and, above all, rethinking about a truly minimal definition of populism.
This article has three goals. First, it offers an overview of the ways various scholars have treated, and advanced, over recent decades “populism” both empirically and theoretically. Second, it identifies a number of – mostly methodological – shortcomings that in many instances have beset the study of populism: (i) unspecified empirical universe, (ii) lack of historical and cultural context specificity, (iii) essentialism, (iv) conceptual stretching, (v) unclear negative pole, (vi) degreeism, (vii) defective observable-measurable indicators, (viii) a neglect of micro-mechanisms, (ix) poor data and inattention to crucial cases, and (x) normative indeterminacy. Third, in an explicit attempt to cure the foregoing shortcomings, this article proposes a minimal definition of modern populism as democratic illiberalism. This novel re-conceptualization of populism is expected to lead to a more conceptually sensitive and methodologically solid comparative study of the phenomenon at a time when the malfunctioning and pathologies of our modern-day representative democracies are all too visible and sorely felt.

There are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life.

Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place. Societies and states are the products of bordering, Nail argues, not the other way around. Applying his original movement-oriented theoretical framework "kinopolitics" to several major historical border regimes (fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints), Theory of the Border pioneers a new methodology of "critical limology," that provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary border politics.

Malgré le récent amendement de 2011 qu’a connu la Constitution haïtienne, il a été présenté au grand public le 29 mars 2017 une commission spéciale sur l’amendement de la constitution au niveau de la Chambre des députés. Le but principal de ladite commission est de produire un rapport devant servir à justifier un amendement dont la procédure sera entamée à la dernière session ordinaire de la 50ème législature, soit entre juin et septembre 2019, conformément à l’article 282-1 de la Constitution. Si Pour certains, un amendement est nécessaire pour corriger certaines lacunes, pour d’autres, il faut une nouvelle constitution et non simplement un amendement. Ce dernier parait plus réaliste et justifié qu’un changement de Constitution. En effet, les lacunes que l’on peut reprocher au texte constitutionnel ne sont pas assez graves pour justifier l’adoption d’une nouvelle Constitution. Il suffit de faire une grande réforme constitutionnelle par le biais d’un amendement. Cependant, dans la mesure où en Haïti il y a une propension des gouvernants à ne pas appliquer la Constitution dans toute sa teneur, les dispositions résultant de l’amendement à venir risque de rester lettre morte. Sur ces entrefaites, il y a une urgente nécessité de résoudre le problème de l’inapplication de la Constitution. Sinon, Ce sera un vain travail de l’amender.

This study analyzes controversies and public attitudes concerning the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)
and Stepan Bandera in Ukraine. The research question is: Which factors affect attitudes toward the OUN-B, the UPA and Bandera in contemporary Ukraine? This article employs comparative and regression analyses of surveys commissioned by the author and conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) in 2009 and 2013 to determine the effects of regional and other factors on attitudes toward these organizations and the OUN-B leader. The study shows that regional factors and perceptions of these organizations' involvement in mass murder were the strongest predictors of the views concerning the OUN-B, the UPA and Bandera. Their public support is strongest in Galicia and weakest in the East and the South, in particular, in Donbas and Crimea, two major conflict areas since the “Euromaidan.”

The Future we Chose: Emerging Perspectives on the Centenary of the ANC: This book foregrounds emerging and different perspectives on the centenary of the ANC which was celebrated in February 2012. Differing in tenor, methodology and style, we present nineteen chapters that tackle various epochs and events in the making of the centenary of the oldest political organisation in Africa. The book offers new angles to our understanding of what sustained the ANC over one hundred years in spite of all the internal and external contradictions.

There is arguably a view that part of what distinguishes the ANC from other revolutionary movements in the continent is that from the turn of the twentieth century its founders prioritised national unity across tribal, ethnic, linguistic, religious, gender and racial identities. This ideal of national unity informed their responses to the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 and the declaration of the South African Republic in 1961. In principle, the leadership was opposed not to these manifestations of concrete nation state formation but to the practice of excluding the majority of South African citizens according to racial markers.

As a contribution to the historiography of the ANC and that of South Africa which it was established to liberate, the book tackles the following critical questions: what traits in the ANC’s genetic code have kept it alive for one hundred years? Is the ANC on course to meeting its historical mission of building an equitable, non-racial, non-sexist and socially-democratic society as articulated in the Africans’ Claims, the Freedom Charter and the Strategy and Tactics documents? Finally, would the ANC continue to retain relevance for a bicentenary especially as it now contends with new internal and external contradictions in an increasingly unequally society and unipolar world order? This new hypothetical architecture, hopefully, will be employed by many others engaged in the study of the rise and fall of political organisations.

Opţiunea pentru analiza instituţiei primăriei, ca unitate de bază a administraţiei publice locale, a fost determinată de conştientizarea rolului important jucat de aceasta din urmă în bună funcţionare a sectorului public la nivel global, în condiţiile în care, indiferent de gradul de centralizare şi de uniformitatea statului, guvernul central trebuie să se sprijine pe anumite structuri locale pentru a-şi exercita autoritatea şi pentru a furniza diferite servicii.

This study examines the role of political factors in attitudes toward World War II in contemporary Ukraine. The question under examination is which factors determine public views of the principal warring sides and their leaders in Ukraine. This paper uses a representative national survey specifically designed for this research project and conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in 2012. It analyzes the roles of regionalism, political party preferences, ethnicity, language, age, and sex in attitudes toward the Red Army, Soviet partisans, the German Army (Wehrmacht), and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) during the war, as well as toward the wartime leaders of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the UPA. The analysis of the survey data shows that regional values, political party preferences, ethnicity, language, and age have significant effects on views of the Soviet Army and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army during the war and attitudes toward the wartime activities of Joseph Stalin and Roman Shukhevych. Public perceptions of the German Army and Adolf Hitler in Ukraine do not vary much across regions, political parties, and ethnic, language, age, and sex groups.

This paper examines the idea that commercial law has the capacity to evolve spontaneously in the absence of a clear state authority because of its unique nature. I argue that the manner of interaction implied by commerce plays a crucial role in this ability as it involves a high degree of overall engagement. This I term “high engagement,” which I divide into two elements: repetition and the creation of clear cycles of interaction. Together they produce identifiable legal norms and subsequent compliance. Game theorists have long recognized the importance of repeated interaction in inducing cooperation; however, how the manner of commercial interaction itself facilitates this process has been left largely unexamined. Part I presents a brief overview of the concept of reciprocity and spontaneous law theory. In Part II, a more detailed explanation of the notion of high engagement is offered. Here I set out exactly how high engagement is instrumental in the emergence of legal norms. Finally, the paper concludes that the element of high engagement indeed plays a decisive role in commercial law’s ability to evolve and function in a decentralized, spontaneous fashion—an important insight in terms of the future international development of the modern law merchant as it emerges in the absence of a single legislative authority.

This essay reviews Paolo Gerbaudo’s book (Tweets and the Streets) and is structured as follows: the first section discussed the background of the author of the book. Then, his perspective regarding the role of social media in social movements is compared to other scholars in the field. Next, a summary of the key points explained in the book is provided, and the final section presents some last thoughts on the book.

The issue of the political rehabilitation and glorification of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) became one of the central political issues in Ukraine after the Orange Revolution and the Euromaidan. It provoked major political and historical controversies and debates in Ukraine and other countries. Presidents Yushchenko and Poroshenko, their parties, far right organizations, and many Ukrainian historians attempted to recast the OUN-B and the UPA as parts of a popular national liberation movement that fought against Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and to present the OUN-B and UPA leaders as national heroes. They denied, minimized or justified the involvement of the OUN-B and the UPA leaders and members in the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians.

The analyses of biographic publications, historical studies, and archival documents show that the majority of the OUN-B and UPA leaders and very large proportions of their members collaborated with Nazi Germany, mainly in the beginning of the Second
World War. Nearly half of the top and middle-ranked leaders of these organizations and
at least until the end of 1943 the majority of UPA members served in various police formations. They assisted the German occupation authorities in implementing genocidal policies towards the Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles by helping to carry out mass shootings and create conditions intended for the physical annihilation of the entire Jewish population and large numbers of Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles, specifically in Volhynia. The fact that many police commanders and large numbers of policemen in various locations and formations followed orders from the OUN-B by deserting en masse from their service, in particular in Volhynia in the spring of 1943, and forming the basis of the UPA shows that these commanders and police members were de facto controlled by the OUN-B.

In his objective study of the texts, Maurice Bucaille clears' away many preconceived ideas about the Old Testament, the Gospels and the Quran. He tries, in this collection of Writings, to separate what belongs to Revelation from what is the product of error or human interpretation.

His study sheds new light on the Holy Scriptures. At the end of a gripping account, he places the Believer before a point of cardinal importance: the continuity of a Revelation emanating from the same God, with modes of expression that differ in the course of time. It leads us to meditate upon those factors which, in our day, should spiritually unite rather than divide-Jews, Christians and Muslims.

As a surgeon, Maurice Bucaille has often been in a situation where he was able to examine not only people's bodies, but their souls. This is how he was struck by the existence of Muslim piety and by aspects of Islam which remain unknown to the vast majority of non-Muslims. In his search for explanations which are otherwise difficult to obtain, he learnt Arabic and studied the Quran. In it, he was surprised to find statements on natural phenomena whose meaning can only be understood through modern scientific knowledge.

He then turned to the question of the authenticity of the writings that constitute the Holy Scriptures of the monotheistic religions. Finally, in the case of the Bible, he proceeded to a confrontation between these writings and scientific data.

The results of his research into the Judeo-Christian Revelation and the Quran are set out in this book.

Humans on Mars: Mars and Beyond

By HB Paksoy


The purpose of this collection is not to discuss the technologies required for the round trip.  Nor is it to discuss the "inevitability` of human quest to explore.  Instead, the focus is on "what will happen` when the humans reach Mars. 

When the "white men` arrived on the new (American) continent, they brought much of their own culture and world view with them.  Despite the existence of natives who were already living there, the newcomers began to establish the institutions they imported.  And those new institutions were to the detriment of the existing natives.  That did not stop the newcomers, nor, by-and-large, saddled them with moralistic issues. 

Mars, to our current knowledge, does not contain any native populations.  However, the Earthlings arriving there, once again, will bring their own institutions with them.  In this case, we may even surmise, more than one system, given the proliferation of space technology among nations of diverse backgrounds.  That also means there will be more than one culture, as well as Governance method.  Does that herald a clash of cultures and Governance modes?  At that point, it becomes necessary to spend some overview time, looking at the behavior on Earth.

This is not to suggest that there are inherent ideologies specific to certain lands.  On the other hand, there are the historical examples that keep repeating, because the humans living on those lands wish that circle of life.  That circle may be easily renewed, since there is air to breathe, and water to drink on Earth lands.  Those two elements are either scarce or as yet non-extant on Mars.    That means, if colonies are to be established on Mars, both must be generated artificially, safely and continuously.  Technological journals have been filled with articles showing how those aims could be accomplished, albeit expensively.  On the other hand, we do not yet know, if the different cultures that are preparing to colonize Mars have agreed to collaborate when they arrive on Mars.

Humans on Mars
by HB Paksoy, D.Phil.


Available for purchase from Amazon.com > books > HB Paksoy
or, Amazon Kindle

Patterns of Nationhood and Saving the State in Turkey tackles a  theoretical puzzle in understanding the state policy changes toward minorities and  nationhood, first by placing the state in the historical context of the international system and second by unpacking the state through analysis of intra-elite competition in relation to the counter-discourses by minority groups within the context of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey.
What explains the persistence and change in state policies toward  minorities and nationhood? Under what conditions do states change their policies toward minorities? Why do the state elites reconsider the state- minority relations and change government policies toward nationhood? Adopting a comparative-historical analysis, the book unpacks these  research questions and builds a theoretical framework by looking at three paradigmatic policy changes: Ottomanism in the mid-19th century, Turkish nationalism in the early 1920s, and multiculturalism in Turkey in the early 2000s. While the book reveals the role of international context, intrastate elite competition, and non-state actors in such policy changes, it argues that state elites adopt either exclusionary or inclusionary policies based on the idea of “survival of the state.”

The visual reconstruction of shooting at Maidan protesters and journalists demonstrates that Maidan protesters were shot by snipers in the Hotel Ukraina and other Maidan-controlled buildings during the Maidan massacre in Ukraine on February 20, 2014. The bullet holes identified in government forensic expert reports, videos, and photos from directions of the Maidan-controlled buildings are in the area, height, and directions that match the shooting of the protesters.  The forensic examination reports by government investigators, videos and photos by journalists suggest that journalists from ABC (Australia), ARD TV (Germany) twice, Associate Press, BBC, Sky News, and RT in the Hotel Ukraina rooms facing Maidan were shot at from the Maidan-controlled areas. The visual reconstruction and the same data along with videos and media reports by journalists from these media suggest that ABC News (US) and TVP (Poland) journalists in the Hotel Ukraina were most likely shot at by snipers from the Maidan-controlled Bank Arkada. They suggest that a Ruptly reporter in the Hotel Ukraina was hit by a ricochet from a direction of a Berkut barricade. Russian journalists in other three locations of the Hotel Ukraina were shot at by Maidan snipers and/or by Berkut and Omega, which shot at snipers at the Hotel Ukraina.               

The visual reconstruction based on similar data shows that the Berkut police and Omega were generally shooting above protesters at the second and higher floors of the Hotel Ukraina and in electric poles, a flower box, and trees. Synchronized videos show that Maidan protesters in the massacre zone were in a blind spot below the line of Berkut police fire from behind a truck.             

This is an online appendix H of papers presented at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Boston and the “Regimes and Societies in Conflict: Eastern Europe and Russia since 1956” conference by the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University and the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies in Uppsala in 2018.

The massacre of almost 50 Maidan protesters on February 20, 2014 was a turning point in Ukrainian politics and a tipping point in the conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine. This mass killing of the protesters and the mass shooting of the police that preceded it led to the overthrow of the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych and gave a start to a civil war in Donbas in Eastern Ukraine, Russian military intervention in Crimea and Donbas, and an international conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine. A conclusion promoted by the post-Yanukovych governments and the media in Ukraine that the massacre was perpetrated by government snipers and special police units on a Yanukovych order has been nearly universally accepted by the Western governments, the media, and many scholars. The Ukrainian government investigation identified members of the special company of Berkut as responsible for killings of the absolute majority of the protesters, but did not release any evidence in support, with the exception of videos of the massacre.
              The question is which side organized the “snipers’ massacre.” This paper is the first academic study of this crucial case of the mass killing. It uses a theory of rational choice and a Weberian theory of instrumental rationality to examine actions of major actors both from the Yanukovych government, specifically various police and security forces, and the Maidan opposition, specifically its far right and oligarchic elements, during the massacre.
          The paper analyzes a large amount of evidence from different publicly available sources concerning this massacre and killings of specifics protesters. Qualitative content analysis includes the following data: about 1,500 videos and recordings of live internet and TV broadcasts from mass media and social media in different countries(some 150 gigabytes), news reports and social media posts by more than 100 journalists covering the massacre from Kyiv, some 5,000 photos, and nearly 30 gigabytes of publicly available radio intercepts of snipers and commanders from the special Alfa unit of the Security Service of Ukraine and Internal Troops, and Maidan massacre trial recordings. This study also employs field research on site of the massacre, eyewitness reports by both Maidan protesters and government special units commanders, statements by both former and current government officials, estimates of approximate ballistic trajectories, bullets and weapons used, and types of wounds among both protesters and the police. This study establishes a precise timeline for various events of the massacre, the locations of both the shooters and the government snipers, and the specific timeline and locations of nearly 50 protesters’ deaths. It also briefly analyzes other major cases of violence during and after the “Euromaidan.” This study includes two video appendixes.
            This academic investigation concludes that the massacre was a false flag operation, which was rationally planned and carried out with a goal of the overthrow of the government and seizure of power. It found various evidence of the involvement of an alliance of the far right organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland. Concealed shooters and spotters were located in at least 20 Maidan-controlled buildings or areas. The various evidence that the protesters were killed from these locations include some 70 testimonies, primarily by Maidan protesters, several videos of “snipers” targeting protesters from these buildings, comparisons of positions of the specific protesters at the time of their killing and their entry wounds, and bullet impact signs. The study uncovered various videos and photos of armed Maidan “snipers” and spotters in many of these buildings. The paper presents implications of these findings for understanding the nature of the change of the government in Ukraine, the civil war in Donbas, Russian military intervention in Crimea and Donbas, and an international conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine.