Around the Bloc: Son of Prominent Tajik Lawyer Charged
Case follows a pattern set by previous trials of opposition figures and their legal advisers.
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Case follows a pattern set by previous trials of opposition figures and their legal advisers.
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The article is an attempt to analyze the relations between political trust and one of the greatest problems of the public domain: political corruption. It seems obvious that corrupt behaviors revealed in the public space are supposed to undermine citizens’ political trust. This thesis has been empirically verified many times. The author of the paper presents the cause and effect model with institutional trust as the independent variable. The article is an attempt to analyze the possible directions of its influence on political corrupt behaviors, assuming political trust to be the starting point, not the consequence, of the “social disease” occurring in the public domain.
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The paper presents results of the experimental study on the government’s remembrance policy, attitudes towards it, and the influence of remembrance narratives. It discusses individual differences of participants on three different grounds: (1) interest in history or politics, and level of historical knowledge, (2) features of cognitive motivation measured by the need for closure questionnaire: preference of order, desire for predictability, discomfort with ambiguity, closed mindedness and decisiveness, and (3) response to the presented narrative, including inspired emotions and an assessment of a story. Collected data and research observations offer an interesting and valuable insight into relationships between various factors and citizen’s support for the remembrance policy. They also lead the team to formulate three conclusions which may be used to develop theoretical understandings of this aspect of politics within political science and related disciplines.
More...Arguments about the need for an analysis regarding the Romanian participatory culture
For Romania, the 90’s have been the decade of transition to a democratic political system (with everything it implies: more parties, free elections, the separation of powers, rights and political freedoms etc.). But has taking this institutional model also lead to acquiring the underlying values that support it? How far has Romania come on the road to a participative democracy, to a society that has a strong civic culture, as defined by classical authors such as Almond and Verba? How many of the traits of social capital, as defined by Putnam, can be found in the post-revolutionary public space? We knew, from research, that this democratic system was desirable (there is no need to enumerate the many research papers, in particular Euro-barometer surveys, which referred to Romanians’ support for democracy, rule of law and economic freedom). But beyond the rhetoric, which was and is, in fact, the real situation?If we take the statements into account, Romanians are participative, want political pluralism and many parties and want support elements of liberal democracy – but do they take advantage of these rights? Are they active citizens, organized in a dynamic civil society? Do they engage with public decisions and policies even after the election period? Are we a society where politics matter only in election years or one in which political and civic participation is stimulated and active the rest of the time? Research helps us in this regard. In this article we present conclusions supported by surveys conducted in recent years by the InfoPolitic Center for Studies and Research (SITC), for the Multimedia Foundation for Local Democracy.The list of questions is extensive because it takes into account a huge dissonance noticed during the 90s by people in our generation – the great distance from words to actions! Romanians received rights and freedoms which, from our point of view, they have rarely used – and without impact. Political Romania has been active only in election years, which is why the profile of stimulated civic participation is extremely fragile.
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Die Schwierigkeit beginnt schon mit dem Begriff Populismus. Er besagt, dass der Rekurs auf das Volk nicht in Ordnung ist. Jedenfalls ist Populismus ein abwertender Begriff. Aber ist nicht das Volk der Souverän, der daher die Demokratie legitimiert? Der Verdacht ist nicht von der Hand zu weisen: des einen Populismus ist des anderen Demokratie, und umgekehrt.
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The article is an attempt to explain the phenomenon of hostility in the political culture since at least the early modern era. The author argues that the image of the enemy in western political culture is being dehumanized because of his axiological depreciation. This phenomenon is analysed by using the method of the history of ideas, resorting to examples of the Reformation, religious wars and the French Revolution. Formerly these events brought about the escalation of hostilities in the public life, and today they create the veiled ideological standards of tolerance, human rights and false humanitarianism.
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Friedrich Nietzsche, whose thought has had considerable influence on many thinkers over the last one hundred years, criticized nationalism and anti-Semitism. Nietzsche`s analysis of national identity was complex, nuanced and ambivalent. He claimed that identity was composite, hybrid, always in the process of being constructed by various experiences and encounters. In his opinion national identity is more an average level of culture, a cultural artefact, than biological identity. His fancied Polish ancestry was supposedly a part of his anti-German attitude, as he despised the German culture of his times, which advocated nationalism and racial hatred. The myth about Nietzsche's Polish roots has been rejected. Nietzsche maintained that Europe proceeds towards unification. The division into states will disappear, since both the individual and society have to overcome their national heritage. As a result of mixing different cultures a new European race will emerge. The main goal of his project of Great Politics is a superman (Übermensch), who is a cosmopolitan, because it is impossible to define him in terms of nationality. In the future, an elite of supermen will rule over the masses.
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This paper discusses the issue of collective memory as a phenomenon experienced by different human civilisations and nations. It attempts to explain the historical events that influenced the collective memory of different human populations over the course of history. It describes some of the examples of the deportation and exoduses of people, and the impacts they had on those people’s collective memories. Furthermore, the paper discusses the relationship between collective memory and globalisation. It then presents the Palestinian collective memory as a case study, and shows how the Palestinian culture and heritage has been affected by the 1948 Exodus. The paper attempts also to explain the channels and methods through which Palestinian collective memory is passed down the generations, and how this process is reinforced. Finally, it provides a number of recommendations and methods through which collective memory in general, and the Palestinian one in particular, can be protected and maintained across the various generations.
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The security and political context of Uganda’s 2016 general elections suggest that in his fifth term in office, President Yoweri Museveni will most likely face higher levels of civil unrest, political violence, and security volatility. Is Museveni’s Uganda, once given as an example of stability, drifting into a regime crisis that will inevitably lead to a political breakdown? Drawing upon the concept of ‘competitive authoritarianism’ developedby Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, this paper assesses the sources of durability of Museveni’s regime at the beginning of his fourth decade in power. By explaining the coercive (material) and ‘soft’ (non-material) sources of Museveni’s governance, it seeks to contribute to the current discussions about Uganda’s political future.
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A trend of growing authoritarianism continues in Central Asia with Kyrgyzstan’s new referendum.
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The paper deals with environmental education in the context of efforts to enhance democracy in schools. It presents main characteristics of environmental education which include in particular holistic view of the human as a member of broader community, concept of education as a socially critical learning and use of activating and participatory pedagogical methods. Environmental education thus promotes learning environments and situations in which pupil participation can materialize in a tangible and meaningful way. This argument is supported and illustrated by an example of one environmental education project - the Eco- Schools programme. Drawing on data from empirical research comparing selected primary schools the author asserts that the project contributes to participatory culture in schools and gives scope for activities that enable the involvement in school life of those pupils who are otherwise uninterested in participation in formal school self-government bodies and decision making.
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The article discusses the prerevolutionary history of reception of image of the “Russian bear” in Russia. The author points out that the image was negative in years the Crimean War and ambivalent in the revolution 1905 – 07, but during World War I (pre-February period) the figure of “Russian bear” served as a patriotic symbol.
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I am at the border crossing to Morocco, in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in the north of Africa, exactly where the Strait of Gibraltar separates it from the European continent. On both sides are metal goalposts, freshly painted blue on the Spanish side, rather battered on the Moroccan side. Behind me, a high fence, on a wide concrete base, extends into the shallows of the Mediterranean Sea. Looking inland, an even more menacing modern double fence winds its way through the hilly landscape. The part that faces Morocco reaches over six meters in height, additionally fortified at the top with cylindrical barbed wire to make it even more difficult to cross, and a sand belt too wide to jump over, another fence, video cameras and sensors. Here is the new European Iron Curtain.
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Corruption flourishes when governance structures are deficient, where impartiality in government is abused by powerful interests. We use a framework for measuring corruption, the TASP framework – referring to types, sectors, activities and places developed – to analyse the rule of prime minister Zoran Zaev (2017-2021) focusing on the issues of state capture and corruption. Our analysis builds upon public and media perceptions about corruption. We argue that SDSM’s rule in the mentioned period was not just detrimental to the faith North Macedonian citizens have in government and its institutions. The corruption of Zaev’s government violated international norms of transparency and standards compliance and corroded, weakened, and endangered the foundations upon which democracy rests. We reveal a high number of instances of illiberal and corrupt practices of SDSM government in the period 2017-2021. The magnitude of cases involving state capture and grand corruption indirectly reveals that, following the victory at the 2020 parliamentary elections and the formation of the second Zaev government, the ruling elite undertook systemic political corruption, manipulating policy formation and public institutions to their own advantage. Essentially, Zaev’s rule replicated previous illiberal practices of Nikola Gruevski leading to the monopolization of power in the pursuit of particularistic interests.
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In this paper I will approach the phenomenon of trust from two angles. The first part of the paper will deal with empirical research of trust. I will outline five ongoing debates regarding the pros and cons of different types of such research, and subsequently point out that each side in these debates requires a more precise definition of trust. In the second part of the paper, I will start with the currently prevalent debate between those who equate trust with behaviour and those who define it as an expectation. I will talk about the problems of both these approaches, and also about the thesis that trust is a character trait. Although each of these options has its own merits, I will try to show that trust is a phenomenon that is too complex for any simple or straightforward definition. I conclude the paper by providing a comprehensive definition of trust, which includes some of the mentioned elements, but also several other significant aspects of the phenomenon, and which I hope can serve as a starting point in formulating future empirical research.
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Aim. The aim of this study is to provide a selected theoretical-methodological analysis of the concept of negative freedom in relation to the political sphere of its application, to reveal and clarify the main political implications and normative claims that its recognition implies for political theory. Concept. From a methodological point of view, the study is based on three justified assumptions: (1) that in modern political philosophy the idea of individual freedom is the main normative basis for political theories, (2) that philosophical development has brought several competing concepts of this idea and (3) that from its own content the concept implies basic requirements for its social and political application. For the purposes of theoretical-methodological analysis, we distinguished two different moments in the concept of individual freedom (freedom as a question of will and freedom as a question of practice) and from their point of view we examined the selected concept of negative freedom in an attempt to reveal its implicit claims at the political level. Results. In the article, we have succeeded in formulating and arguing for the thesis that the concept of negative freedom in its applicability programmatically leads to a modus vivendi model of politics. We have shown that the concept of freedom and the model of politics are interrelated and normatively interdependent. Conclusion. The main conclusion of the study is that the above model of politics cannot be generalised and considered equally acceptable for all conceptions of freedom and the good life.
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Aim. The research aim is to present the most common games citizens play, a description of the main game theses and roles, psychological gains and rewards, paradigms of relations between the citizen and the state, which determine the emergence of the game, as well as opportunities to quit the game. Methods. To achieve the goal, a system of general scientific methods was used: analysis and generalisation of the main provisions of source studies regarding citizenship and the social role of the citizen, systematisation and generalisation of scientific provisions about games, as well as methodological provisions of Berne’s transactional analysis. Results. 43% of Ukrainian citizens engage in “game” interaction with the state. The most common games citizens play are: “Persecution” (“The state oppresses me”), “Offended” (“If it wasn’t for this state…”), “Parasite” (“The state owes me and should keep me”), “Patriot” (“Only I love Ukraine, all others are traitors”), “Exemplary citizen” (“I perform my civic duties better than anyone”). Conclusions. Implementation of the role of a Citizen can lead to both constructive relations with the state and surrogate relations, which lead to various psychological games-manipulations. The developed system of psychological consulting practices for the prevention of civic identity “game” deformations can be used in the process of psychological support of civic identity formation in the development of complex training, and corrective activities, as well as in the educational process when creating programs of civic education and the development of civic competencies.
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The present paper aims to discuss selected peculiarities of English and Geor gian political talk shows using the example of BBC | Vote 22 NI, WMUR-TV ‘Granite states Debate’, NBC News-MSNBC Democratic Debate, Choice, The stories of the day and Timely Questions. The analysis is conducted with a view to determining the similarities between the methods and techniques of manipulation in English and Georgian political speeches. It is undertaken to answer the following question: Are the politicians mostly criticizing the opponent’s speech and their ideas or are they simply insulting them? What kind of mood do the guests and the host create in the beginning and during the programme? What kind of similarities and differ ences can be seen in the structure of English and Georgian political talk shows? In English-language talk shows, political discourse is not as open and obvious as in Georgian ones. The host and the guests do not intend to abuse someone verbally or physically. As a rule, the English-language political discourse has a neutral ap proach in this regard, while in Georgian, there tends to be a sharp confrontation with the opponent.
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The upcoming presidential elections of November 2024 brought back into focus a phenomenon that has been manifesting in American society at least since the beginning of the XXIst century – societal polarization. Social scientists have measures. Campaign strategists have lore. The best measures have the indisputable virtues of being precise, objective, and portable – from place to place and election to election. Without pretending to be an exhaustive analysis, this article proposes a brief review of America’s national and religious identity, and of the causes derived from these two variables that have led to the current polarization of society. Participatory observation is the primary source of this parsimonious exposition, while specialized literature and surveys dedicated to the study of identity constitute the basis of secondary sources. The covenant, the creed and the crucible are the recurring symbols by which Americans have tried to make sense of their differences – and their similarities, and most of the arguments of this article are built around these variables.
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