Around the bloc: 200,000 Kosovans Sign Petition Against Serbia Deals
Kosovo's constitution obliges the authorities to consider an initiative against giving ethnic Serb population greater autonomy.
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Kosovo's constitution obliges the authorities to consider an initiative against giving ethnic Serb population greater autonomy.
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Police reportedly seize grenades, ammunition, and suspicious pamphlets in Baku and Ganja.
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Uzbekistan is one of the few Muslim countries where female Islamic teachers, known as otins, play an important religious role.
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Amnesty hails government move as a victory for human rights, urges other countries to follow suit.
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Central Europeans will not be treated ‘like second-class citizens’ of the bloc, Czech official says.
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Premier of Russian-controlled territory rules out future energy cooperation with Kyiv.
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Law and Justice set to return to power in a Poland divided on social issues such as gay rights.
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Leaders of Bulgaria and neighbors say they will not allow their countries to become buffer zones for stranded asylum seekers.
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This article explores the role of students as actors during protests in Ukraine. It focuses primarily on the 2013-2014 Euromaidan revolution, but uses a broader historical context and comparison with the so-called Revolution on Granite in 1990 and the Orange Revolution in 2004. While it demonstrates that students were on the forefront of all three major upheavals, the article underlines the key differences between the three ‘revolutions’. The Euromaidan protests and the ensuing Revolution of Dignity are chronicled and subsequently analysed from the point of view of students’ actions. The article examines why students were not able to leave their mark, even though they had in fact spearheaded the protests. It points to the absence of a clear set of demands, the ambiguous role played by new social media, and the lack of organizational structures within the student movement. More so, the article concludes that though there were certainly similarities between Euromaidan and the other protest movements in the so-called global protest wave since 2008, it was foremost the experience of previous maidans that framed the protests in Ukraine.
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This article aims to analyze the Bulgarian student occupations in 2013 in terms of two different rationalities - instrumental rationality and value rationality - which were referred to respectively by the opponents and the supporters of the protests in order to justify their account of them. The analysis elaborates a typology of the anti-protest rhetoric, distinguishing three main types: the fi rst insisted on the opposition between ‘moral’ and ‘social’, and criticized the protests as being based on an ‘abstract’ and ‘hazy’ moralism; the second treated the protests as a direct or indirect expression of private interests; the third claimed the protests were just a means to a particular end, be it that of the oligarchy or of the protesters themselves. The final part of the article argues against these instrumentalist approaches to the protests of Bulgarian students and introduces another perspective, suggested by Albert Hirschman in his analysis of the meaning of collective public action. According to Hirschman, public action should not be evaluated on the basis of its immediate results, because its value consists in the very act of protesting which educates and constitutes citizens as a critical civic community.
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This article examines the uprisings since 2011 through a global lens. It focuses on a form that has become common to all: the continuous occupation of public space. Beginning in 2011, people from all walks of life came to the central squares of the world’s cities and formed various semi-permanent sites of protest. The article assesses the historical lineage and signifi cance of these public occupations and discusses their impact for our understandings of revolution, democracy, and their interrelation. What happened during these uprisings, how the people who were present took part in them, offers a radically different version of democracy, in theory and practice, from the liberal representative one that has become hegemonic today. This article will underscore how this alternate vision of a democratic society is intimately tied to a new form of contentious politics, one predicated on occupation and arrest rather than movement and dispersal. To do so, it highlights how these prisings have called into question two assumptions common to the liberal understanding of contemporary politics: the association between democracy and representative government; and the association betweensocial struggle and the category of movement. In this context, the article challenges the continued use of the term social movement to defi ne contentious political struggle in the 21st century and makes the case for a theory and practice of social arrest. It argues that a politics of social arrest has come to defi ne the global occupations of public space since 2011, a politics that has turned these spaces into immanent sites of democratic self-institution.
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This article concentrates on the phenomenon of Russophilia in Greece and situates it within the context of national populism. Numerous political analysts and journalists have not examined Russophilia in Greece as a component of a national populism which cuts across the traditional ‘left-right’ spectrum. This research is very topical at a time when Russia is emerging as a competitor to the EU and the Kremlin is searching for political allies throughout Central and Southeast Europe. This study demonstrates that the foundations of public russophilia in Greece are feebler than many external commentators tend to estimate. A rather ahistorical and almost ‘Messianic’ notion of Russophilia interweaves with national populism in the light of the dispute with the EU and Germany over the management of the economic crisis.
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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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The court upheld the conviction of a blogger for a social media post describing Soviet-Nazi collaboration during World War II.
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Democratic procedures are characterized by the equal status of all citizens participating in the decision-making process. This procedural fairness represents one of the central aspects of democracy's legitimacy-generating potential and should not be rejected or weakened. However, citizens specialize in different areas and inevitably some citizens become more competent (i.e. become experts) regarding some political issues. Democratic procedure would loose much of its appeal if it would be unable to take advantage of the experts' knowledge. In this paper I follow Kitcher and Christiano in embracing a form of division of epistemic (and political) labour - citizens and their political representatives should deliberate and set aims the political community is to pursue, while experts and policy-makers should devise means (laws, public policies and political decisions) needed to achieve the aims set by citizens. However, citizens should not blindly trust the experts - their epistemic authority is derivative and social and academic networks and structures should be employed in order to enable citizens to assess and evaluate experts' competence, but experts' impartiality regarding the issue at hand as well. Consequently, the process should not be unidirectional: experts should be able to help citizens select feasible and coherent aims, while citizens should be able to help experts in creating policies and decisions. Deliberative democracy is an appropriate political setting for this kind of bidirectional communication.
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Pojam ekološkog ili okolišnog pokrata u ovom radu koristi se u najširem smislu. Razlikuju se »građanski« i »društveni« aktivizam, povezano s pojmovnim razlikovanjem »građanskog« i »civilnog« društva. »Ekologistički pokret« razmatra se kao uži segment. Može se govoriti i o raznim ekološkim pokretima, vezanim uz posebne teme ili uvjerenja. U radu se posebno razmatra pokret za ekološku poljoprivredu.Ekološki pokret u Hrvatskoj 1990-ih nastavlja se na aktivnosti iz druge polovice 1980-ih, kada jeostvario relativno masovnu mobilizaciju javnosti. Nakon razdoblja intenzivnih ratnih operacija 1991., već od početka 1992. neke udruge obnavljaju i šire aktivnost, a javljaju se i nove. Do kraja 1996. razvijaju se brojne lokalne, nacionalne i međunarodne aktivnosti, razvijaju vještine društvenog aktivizma i jačaju organizacijske sposobnosti. Mogu se razlikovati »lokalističke« i »progresističke« udruge. Idološki, pojavljuju se tri struje: konzervativna, socijalno-ekološka i dubinsko-ekološka. Konfuzija i svjetonazorski raskoli doveli su do raspada Hrvatskog saveza zelenih. Nasuprot tome, afirimirala se grupa udruga oko »Zelenog foruma«, osobito zagrebačka Zelena akcija, koja u široj javnosti postaje paradigma za ekološki pokret u cjelini. Razdoblje 1997.-1999. donosi uspjehe u masovnoj mobilizaciji. Organizirane su nacionalne kampanje protiv termoelektrana na ugljen i protiv GMO. Pokret za ekološku poljoprivredu lobiranjem postiže prve uspjehe. Vrlo je značajno sudjelovanje ekoloških udruga u kampanji »Glas ‘99«. U završnom dijelu rada obrađuje se situacija početkom 2000-ih godina. Koalicijska vlada bitno mijenja odnos prema civilnome društvu. To međutim ima i negativne učinke, jer se dinamika društvenih pokreta ukrućuje u statiku »trećeg sektora«. Mnogo je manje sadržajnih promjena bilo u odnosu prema okolišu, prirodi i načelu ekološke održivosti.
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Bulgarian government nominates EU Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva as its candidate for UN chief, drops support for UNESCO chief Irina Bokova.
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Central African Republic (CAR) is one of the poorest and most unstable countries in the world and has occupied the top place in all possible rankings of failed states, instability, poverty, corruption etc. for many years. However, although the CAR has experienced almost constant instability for the last few decades it was only in recent years that it has received the media attention which was unseen before. Such an unusual interest has resulted from two successive internal conflicts: first, in 2012 the anti‑ government rebellion drawing together the alliance of rebel militia factions, the Séléka, and a year later the insurrection of the opposing Anti‑Balaka forces. The article is an attempt to analyse the causes of the instability of the CAR and the current political and security situation in the country, taking into account, among other things, the results of the fieldwork conducted by the author in the Central African Republic, as well as his long‑time research on the phenomenon of dysfunctional states.
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The article is based on the analysis of qualitative interviews with the leaders of ethnic voluntary organizations in Southeast Lithuanian cities. The article discusses the main objectives and activities of Polish ethnic voluntary organizations and the motives of involvement in the activities of such organizations. The self-organization of the ethnic group at the civic level is analyzed from the several theoretical perspectives which highlight the importance of cultural, political and economic factors. The research findings showed that the motivation of the Polish ethnic group for self-organization at the civic level is based on the factors mentioned above.
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This is a theoretical article in which the change of social movement’s concept is analyzed. In scientific literature there is no single definition of social movements. Interpretation of social movements depends on social movement theories as well as on political and social circumstances. In this article different concepts of social movements are discussed and compared. Four main theories and how they see the role of social movements are analyzed – Collective Behavior, Resource Mobilization, Political Process and New Social Movement theories. After analyzing different authors, the main conclusion is drawn. It became apparent that understanding of social movements could be divided into European and American schools. The European school might be also divided into the old one (Marxism) and the new one (New Social Movement Theory). The same should be applied to the American school which is divided between Collective Behavior and Resource Mobilization as well as Political Process theories.
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