Search results

The continuing ramifications of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 have forced social scientists to raise fundamental questions about the relationship between capitalism, democracy and inequality. In particular, Thomas Piketty's Capital and Wolfgang Streeck's Buying Time focus on, respectively, the economic and the political contradictions of capitalistic societies. Piketty argues that capitalism naturally tends towards the exacerbation of rent-based wealth inequality, whereas Streeck suggests that capitalism and democracy are ultimately incompatible. A striking feature of these two contributions is that their authors are social democrats, not Marxists or radical anti-capitalist thinkers. In this review article, I illustrate how the combination of social democratic convictions and the acknowledgment that capitalism cannot be tamed generates interesting tensions between the diagnosis offered by the two monographs and the solutions that are proposed. I end the piece by raising two remarks on the implications that this tension might have for normative political theory. On the one hand, it is time for theory to do more work on political action and agency. On the other, liberal egalitarian theorists might have to acknowledge that they are in the same predicament as Piketty and Streeck: social democracy is their ideal, yet it is perhaps unattainable. If this is the case, liberal egalitarians might be committed to adopt a more confrontational attitude towards capitalism: they might have to become reluctant radicals.

Abstract
Before the Czech Republic joined the European Union in 2004, its constitution has been amended with objective to guarantee constitutional conformity of the EU accession. The Czech legal system has been opened to external legal provisions and a constitutional mechanism has been established for transfer of competencies to an external entity, all framed by the explicitly formulated constitutional principle of loyalty to the international obligations of the Czech Republic. However, the 'European amendment' of the Czech Constitution has left several important issues unanswered, such as the principle of supremacy of the EU law or relations between the Czech Constitutional Court and the Court of Justice of the EU.
This article analyses how the Czech Constitutional Court tackled with EU-related constitutional issues that emerged during the first decade of Czech membership in the EU. Focused on four key cases decided by the Czech Constitutional Court (sugar quotas, European Ar­rest Warrant, Lisbon Treaty, Slovak Pensions), the article will demonstrate how the Czech Constitutional Court combined a conservative and pragmatic approach in its EU law related case-law by formulating a constitutional doctrine of a 'EU-friendly' interpretation of Czech constitutional rules, while, at the same time, leaving the EU law formally outside the frontiers of Czech constitutional law and refusing EU law to be used as the ultimate argument in intra-judiciary disputes in the Czech Republic.

AbstractAs one of the various Islamic groups in Morocco, each of which defends its case and concretizes Islamic activism in its way and according to its own philosophies, beliefs, goals and political agendas, the movement of Atawhid w'Al‐Islah presents itself through its discursive formations as the most open, flexible, and tolerant group in the Moroccan religious scene, and affirms values of dialogue, cooperation, tolerance, moderation, and embracement of otherness to be its founding beliefs and ideologies, while, in empirical reality, it fails to keep the same positive image and prove a real belief in the claimed principles and values. The two concepts of "group" and "belonging" stand as the shaping motives of the movement's actions and reactions, suggesting the notion of "distance" which controls interaction within and outside the group according to calculations of proximity, formed and framed by the belonging factor itself which dictates taxonomies and polarizations, defining people in terms of "X" and "Y." This invigorates an intricate othering system that vacillates between the two extremes of simulation and stigmatization, and binary oppositions forged within a sphere of dissociativeness and inequality formulations. In this respect, this article aims to study the movement of Atawhid w'Al‐Islah's introversion and extroversion legacies, portraying the main features of its members and activities and scrutinizing its perception of "belonging" and "otherness" as two main concepts around which revolve its in‐group/out‐group taxonomies.

In this article, I explore a case of agrarian transformation in a Moroccan oasis to reflect on the role of customary land tenure and discourses of tradition in current movements for food sovereignty and land rights. A half-century of labor migration from Morocco to Europe enabled formerly subjugated groups to challenge indentured sharecropping as a regime of racialized domination in Morocco's pre-Saharan oases. By methodically refashioning the same customary institutions that had enforced their historical subjugation, the strategies of former sharecroppers shed light on the role of custom in movements for land and food sovereignty. Rather than using custom to return to traditional modes of farming, peasant farmers in the oasis valley invoked customary land tenure to challenge repressive traditions and forge a nascent commercial agricultural sector. I argue that one way custom works is through its performative and transactional qualities. Instead of challenging the relationship between political authority and land, former sharecroppers reworked status relationships by investing customary land tenure institutions with new meanings. They produced forms of communality that managed exclusions productively, eschewing rights talk for the language of custom and tradition. I extend recent scholarship on movements around land and agrofood systems, exploring how a politics rooted in the practice of agriculture can challenge repressive institutions not by dismantling the architecture of exclusion so much as reworking its boundaries.

Choosing a strategy that polarizes the rival's political center is often critical in determining the relative success of the weaker side in asymmetric conflict. This proposition is tested on two rounds of protracted confrontations between Palestinians and Israel in 1987 and 2000. In the first intifada, the Palestinians limited terrorism primarily to the West Bank and Gaza, polarized the Israeli political center and secured substantial political gains. In the second, the Palestinians employed much more violent means and focused it within Israel. This indiscriminate strategy (which included suicide bombings) united the Israeli public against the Palestinians, justified the Israeli onslaught on the Palestinian Authority, and divided the Palestinians themselves at considerable political, human, and economic cost. The comparison between Palestinian strategy and its consequences in two long rounds of conflict with the Israeli state suggests an important theoretical and empirical finding; it is not so much the strategy employed by the stronger side that determines outcomes as Ivan Arreguin-Toft suggests but the strategy employed by the weaker actor in conflict. Employing a strategy that polarizes the political center of the opponent and weakens its resolve is critical to the insurgent's ability to succeed against its stronger opponent. In the first intifada, the Palestinians were able to polarize the foe's political center. In the second intifada, the Palestinians failed to do the same at substantial human, material, and political costs, including a civil war in 2007 and the Hamas' takeover of Gaza.

APEC has been established since 1989 with 21 member countries. The crucial questions are what are major works of APEC from 1994 to present time? What are APEC's current challenges? And, how APEC manages its hopes and responds to the challenges in order to reach its goals? This article argues that APEC is on the right track to attain the Bogor goals by pursuing trade liberalization in its member countries. There are several works which have been achieved by APEC, for example: its achievements for trade liberalization in goods and its support for facilitating foreign investment in the Asia-Pacific region. However, there are several challenges for APEC, such as the complexity of regional cooperation in South-East and East Asia and the social implications for vulnerable groups in developing countries within APEC as negative impacts of trade liberalization. Consequently, APEC should manage its hopes and responds challenges in order to meet its goals. APEC must adjust its hopes to be matched with the latest political and economic developments in the Asia-Pacific region. At the same time, South-East and East Asia become more integrated economic regions and apply an open regionalism for other countries from outside of these regions to engage with the developments in these regions. Overall, APEC must respond to crucial challenges (e.g. geo-politics and geo-economics) in the Asia-Pacific region which have changed overtime.

In this article, I reflect on the sociopolitical impact and memory construction of the Ethiopian revolution of 1974. Decades have passed and a new political leadership has reshaped Ethiopian society after the demise of the Ethiopian revolutionary regime in May 1991, but the effects are still felt. The violent political drama of the 1970s and 1980s redefined the Ethiopian political tradition and the practices of (political) violence in the light of new revolutionary ideologies, mainly imported from abroad. The post-1991 regime has shown a particular way of handling the aftermath of the 1974 events, but evinces a number of continuities with the ideologies and practices of that era – if only because all participants and current rulers were part of the same revolutionary (student) generation. The regime presently in power is thus partly a successor regime to the "socialist" regime, having started with largely a similar socioeconomic and Marxist-ideological program. At least in one central aspect, the two regimes differ: in their practical response to the "nationalities question." The handling of this issue after 1991 by the current regime of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front – Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (EPRDF-TPLF) has confirmed that today we in fact may see "Plan B" of the 1974 revolution being consolidated. We analyze the two strains of the Ethiopian revolution and comment on the how and why of their different paths since 1974.

The liberalization and globalization process which India initiated in the 1990s have been carried on successfully and this has taken the economy to higher growth path of more than 8 per cent GDP growth post-2000. However, there is no substantial achievement on the income distributional front and there are no convincing studies to empirically demonstrate the impact of various domestic and global policies of India on income inequality. This study proposed to simulate alternative scenario of external shocks and counterbalancing trade policies on income accounts of different groups of households classified by consumption expenditure by rural and urban using computable general equilibrium (CGE) modelling. The data pertain to social accounting matrix (SAM) of 2006–2007 for India. Apart from policies, it is also looked at the income distributional impacts of various anticipated structural changes in the domestic economy that will influence the Indian trade. Alternative GDP growth scenarios give a clear picture that higher GDP growth does not favour agriculture sector. Rural income share has come down from 61 to 56 per cent. It has a structural bias towards urban rich. This is a challenge for planners as the real issue is how to make agriculture progress when the economy is moving towards higher growth path. Among the policy scenarios, it is found that reduction in foreign capital inflow renders biggest loss to rural areas.

AbstractNetworks are a powerful and useful tool for analysing complex systems. Three main types of networks have been proposed in the relative literature in order to interpret adequately evolving or stationary phenomena. In this research, two network structures are analysed; the first type is the random network, which was initially introduced by Erdos and Rényi. Random networks properties remain the same over time, and they do not exhibit high degree of clustering, whereas the second structure studied, the power‐law network that have been examined by Albert and Barabási, can incorporate attributes that are observed in natural networks (i.e. the World Wide Web and the authors' collaboration). In this study, an attempt is made to investigate the conditions under which random network and power law (or scale free) converge into one at a given time point. Three main metrics are used in order to examine the proximity between the studied structures: (i) clustering coefficient, (ii) average path length and (iii) degree distribution. Considering the difference of the corresponding metrics of each network type as an objective function, a multi‐objective discontinuous non‐linear programming model is employed using the weighted sum model as a solution approach. A statistical meta‐analysis is performed using a multivariate logit model in order to assess the effect of each network's specific variables on the objective function. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract
The deportation - in German: Verschleppung - was a 'taboo' for a long time. However, the works born since the change of regime provide an excellent and overall picture about this painful historical act. At the same time, it is desirable to get a more precise picture by examining the detailed history of the deportation in the case of the individual settlements. Merk and Valla), the Swabian settlements in the Szatmar region, in the eastern part of the country, lie on the periphery in several aspects. Still, considering the numerical proportion of their population, the most displaced persons were deported by the Soviets, as war criminals, from here in 1945 - a quarter of whom never saw their beloved ones and home country again. It is the particular tragedy of this fact that those deported were at least as much bound to their recipient country, the Hungarian nation, as to their German nationality. They are not criminals of war but victims of the war of racial discrimination. 'Who will be responsible for these people suffering innocently?' - puts the question Ferenc Juhasz, parish priest in Merk at that time. Giving an answer is the task of all of us. The paper seeks to explore a segment of the micro-texture of the country-wide, and even wider, regional trauma of this community, based on diary excerpts from the period as well as on individual, specialized literature research.

Abstract. Coastal lowlands and estuaries are subjected to increasing flood risks during storm surges due to global and regional changes. Tidal wetlands are increasingly valued as effective natural buffers for storm surges by dissipating wave energy and providing flood water storage. While previous studies focused on flood wave attenuation within and behind wetlands, this study focuses on the effects of estuarine wetland properties on the attenuation of a storm tide that propagates along the length of an estuary. Wetland properties including elevation, surface area, and location within the estuary were investigated using a numerical model of the Scheldt estuary (Belgium, SW Netherlands). For a spring tide lower wetland elevations result in more attenuation of high water levels along the estuary, while for a higher storm tide higher elevations provide more attenuation compared to lower wetland elevations. For spring and storm tide a larger wetland surface area results in a better attenuation along the estuary up to a threshold wetland size for which larger wetlands do not further contribute to more attenuation. Finally a wetland of the same size and elevation, but located more upstream in the estuary, can store a larger proportion of the local flood volume and therefore has a larger attenuating effect on upstream high water levels. With this paper we aim to contribute towards a better understanding and wider implementation of ecosystem-based adaptation to increasing estuarine flood risks associated with storms.

Throughout history, colonial and foreign legions have been a part of larger armies but rarely have they been as politically 'loaded' as the three proposed to the British government during the Great War. Cypriot, Armenian, and Jewish political elites proposed the formation of volunteer legions in the British army in late 1914 and early 1915. The primary sources show that they were initially rejected for political as well as military reasons. In 1916 the British agreed for the French to establish an Armenian legion, while in April 1917 the British agreed to establish a Jewish legion. When the French and British authorities accepted the Armenian Legion in the French army and the Jewish Legion in the British army respectively, the same political reasons for initially rejecting them were overcome or set aside. Imperialism was the key to understanding the initial rejecting of all three and the acceptance of those two: the Cyprus proposal threatened British rule in Cyprus and so was never accepted; the Armenian proposal did not play into British imperial interests, but once the British accepted French imperial interests in Cilicia in the Sykes–Picot Agreement the British accepted it; the Jewish Legion was accepted after the British embarked on their conquest of Palestine. Using British, French, and Cypriot archives, this article explores the official British reasoning for rejecting offers of Cypriot, Armenian, and Jewish legions and then accepting the latter two during the Great War.

Background: It has been widely recognized that social relationships and depressive symptoms predict suicidality. However, there are few empirical studies examining relationships among these three factors using an integrative approach. Aims: This study aimed to examine the effects of perceived quality of social relationships and depressive symptoms on suicidality and to analyze whether the effect of perceived quality of social relationships on suicidality is mediated by depressive symptoms or whether the perceived quality of social relationships has a moderating effect on the relationship between depressive symptoms and suicidality in men and women. Methods: The data were drawn from the 2012 Korean General Social Survey, a nationally representative survey. Multiple regression models and subsample analyses were conducted according to gender. Results: A higher perceived quality of social relationships decreased suicidality while depressive symptoms increased suicidality. The effect of perceived quality of social relationships was partially mediated by depressive symptoms. Perceived quality of social relationships also significantly interacted with depressive symptoms, suggesting that the harmful effect of depressive symptoms was ameliorated as perceived quality of social relationships increased. A subsample analysis according to gender, however, indicated a significant gender difference in that the perceived quality of social relationships moderated the effect of depressive symptoms only in women. Conclusion: The findings suggest that enhanced quality of social relationships can protect people from suicidal risk and are more effective for women with depressive symptoms than for men with the same symptoms.

The aim of this study is to examine the involvement of families in child protection cases in Iceland, as well as to shed light on the attitudes of child protection workers on the importance of including families while working on child protection cases. The study is part of an international comparative analysis called: Social Work with Families: Social Workers' Constructions of Family in Professional Practice. This article only addresses the Icelandic segment of the research. In the study, qualitative methods were used and three focus groups were conducted, in which the same three-step vignette about a child protection case was presented. The findings highlighted how difficult child protection workers found it to define the family. The main element is that family are those individuals closest to the child and connected to them through emotional ties, as Icelandic child protection workers seem to strive to involve family in child protection cases. However, there are signs which show that when working with more complicated cases the definition of a family becomes narrower, and involvement is restricted mostly to parents and grandparents. The findings also show that attitudes toward fathers differ from those toward mothers. The mother is expected to support and create security for the child, while the father is judged mostly on his violent behaviour and is not automatically regarded as providing support or actively taking responsibility for his child.

This article focuses on how the categories of 'normal' and 'extreme' in the context of work might be renegotiated through the development of human enhancement technologies which aim to enable the human body to be pushed beyond its biological limits. The ethical dimensions of human enhancement technologies have been widely considered, but there has been little debate about their role in the broader world of employment—nor, conversely, the recognition that prevailing employment relationships might shape the development and uptake of such technologies. Addressing the organisation of work within 'advanced' capitalist economies, this article considers the arguments for the potential use of cognitive enhancers, so-called 'smart drugs', in various domains of work such as surgery and transportation. We argue that the development of human enhancement technologies might foster the normalisation of 'working extremely'—enabling longer working hours, greater effort or increased concentration—and yet at the same time promote the conditions of possibility under which workers are able to work on themselves so as to go beyond the norm, becoming 'extreme workers'. Looking at human enhancement technologies not only enables us to see how they might facilitate ever greater possibilities for working extremely but also helps us to understand the conditions under which cultures of extreme work become the norm and how workers them/ourselves accept or even embrace such work.