Suchergebnisse

"The absence of war between democracies is regarded as one of the few law-like correlations in international relations. The causation of this empirical phenomenon, however, remains contested; and the democratic peace in search of its cause. The project tries to fill this theoretical gap by arguing that inter-democratic institutions are causally responsible for the remarkable stability between democracies. Furthermore, the project contributes to the ongoing debate on the effects of international institutions. While most scholars have recently agreed that some institutions, due to their specific form, are more effective than others, it remains contested which form characteristics contribute to the peace-building effects of institutions. By combining liberal theories on the democratic peace and research on the effects of international institutions, the project is able to identify trans-national and trans-governmental networks as crucial features of inter-democratic institutions. The main hypothesis of the project asserts that a) these characteristics distinguish inter-democratic from traditional institutions between non-democratic states or with a mixed membership, and b) explain their distinct peace-building effect. The project is designed as a controlled case comparison. We analyse the level of stability of five pairs of states. With regard to comparability, we restrict our cases to the group of strategic rivals, i.e. pairs of states which look back to a history of conflict and violence and hence, are more prone to military confrontation than average dyads. From the sample of strategic rivals, we select dyads of endangered states which a) are located in highly institutionalized regional settings, and b) differ with regard to their political regime. We explore the peace-building effect of relevant regional security institutions on the level of stability of the following five dyads: France - Germany; Greece - Turkey; Indonesia - Malaysia and Argentina - Brazil as well as Argentina - Chile. Concerning the South American cases, we also compare the level of stability before and after the wave of democratisation in this region. In addition, we incorporate the relationship between Japan and South Korea into our research. This odd case of a democratic dyad of rivals, whose security relationship is only minimally institutionalized, allows us to assess alternative explanations of the democratic peace. The results of our research confirm our main hypothesis. Firstly, our work demonstrates that inter-democratic institutions differ with regard to their embedment in trans-national and trans-governmental networks. Secondly, we show that these institutional differences are responsible for the observed differences in the level of stability of our dyads. Moreover, our case selection allows us to undermine alternative explanations. The surprisingly low level of stability of the Japanese - South Korean dyad reinforces theoretical doubts concerning the liberal assumption that the democratic peace is caused by state properties. The high level of tensions between Greece and Turkey, both NATO member states, invalidates realist as well as neo-institutional explanations which attribute the effectiveness of institutions to the presence of a hegemonic leader or to their level of institutionalisation." (author's abstract)

Introduction : into the margins : migration and exclusion in Southern Europe / Floya Anthias and Gabriella Lazaridis -- The production and reproduction of knowledge on international migration in Europe : the social embeddedness of social knowledge / Ann Singleton and Paolo Barbesino -- Economic migration and social exclusion : the case of Tunisians in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s / Faïçal Daly and Rohit Barot -- Recent immigration to Spain : the case of Moroccans in Catalonia / Russell King and Isabel Rodríguez-Melguizo -- British expatriates' experience of health and social services on the Costa del Sol / Charles Betty and Michael Cahill -- The helots of the new millennium : ethnic-Greek Albanians and 'other' Albanians in Greece / Gabriella Lazaridis -- The presence of the Polish undocumented in Greece in the perspective of European unification / Krystyna Romaniszyn -- Racism and new migration to Cyprus : the racialisation of migrant workers / Nicos Trimikliniotis -- European Union citizenship : exclusion, inclusion and the social dimension / Dora Kostakopoulou

A landscape is a medium that reflects material, spiritual, and cultural activities of communities in the past, present and future. Understanding landscapes in the context of space and time necessarily demands the conceptual approaches of different scientific and expert fields of study. Through a variety of case studies from Southeastern Europe, this volume explores the concept of landscape from multiple fields of study in order to gain insight into how disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology, ethnology, folklore, sociology, and history define and approach this concept.

For almost two centuries substantial research in Sociology, Political Science, History and Anthropology has focused on the state, the nation, nationalism, and national identity. Despite a very remarkable amount of knowledge and intelligent theorizing a number of questions need revisiting and more encompassing comparative work is needed. Here, I offer an argument that involves three areas seldom, if ever, compared: Western Europe, South America, and North America (particularly the United States). The period spans from the sixteenth century to the 1930s but I specially focus on the epoch that starts in the 1750s. The length of the period under scrutiny allows testing correlations among variables over long periods of time. First, I revisit the concept of 'nation' and stress that nations are intellectual constructs as much as they are cultural and imagined ones. Second, I emphasize the state's conceptualizing of the nation as a key independent variable connected to the construction of national identity. Third, I bring some findings of the philosophy of language to bear upon the ways states conceptualize nations and construct their public discourse in relation to national identity. Fourth, I argue that rather than other important factors such as the cultural, ethnic, and linguistic characteristics of the national community, the construction of national identity depends upon the modernization of bureaucracies (in Max Weber's sense) and the characteristics of the civil service. I am particularly interested in the way modern bureaucracies institutionalize meaning. Finally, I suggest that the terms nation-state and national-state have contributed more to a theory of the state than to a theory of the connections between states and nations. I therefore redefine these terms and add a third concept ('state-nation') in order to better capture the relations between states and nations in the regions compared. I identify the relation between states and nations as one of codependency and I claim that different types of codependency are connected to the consolidation of different types of political regimes. During the last two and a half centuries codependency between states and nations has progressively augmented, despite the ups and downs of globalization, different types of international conflict, and changes in the global economic cycle.

Uneven development I : capital restructuring and changes in the spatial division of labour before the Euro -- Uneven development II : capitalist transformation and the building of the Eurozone -- "It is your fault" : imagining and constructing the new "Southern Question" -- De-politicizing uneven development and socio-spatial justice -- "Nobody alone in the crisis" : struggles and solidarity -- Politics of hope or the time of monsters?