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This paper compares two of history's largest producers of opium - Afghanistan (2000-11) and China (1917-35) - to suggest that in both cases production was facilitated by: (1) A lack of central control over the national territory; (2) The existence of local power-holders; (3) Internal violent conflict; (4) The existence of a significant domestic opium consuming population. The initial analysis is extended by introducing a successful opium production suppression intervention, The People's Republic of China (1950s/1960s), to suggest that the control of opium in contemporary Afghanistan requires the Government to: (1) Extend the state into isolated and hostile areas; (2) Facilitate a sense of selfinterest in the Afghan Government and political elite towards opium suppression; (3) Facilitate a perception that suppression benefits opium farmers; (4) Strengthen the capacity to monitor opium farmers and enforce the law.

The economic and political restructuring in Chile, carried out under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), had its urban expression in a series of measures associated with the liberalization of land markets and the dominance of a subsidiary policy of public housing. Since then, poorer households have been settling mostly at the peripheries of Santiago where public infrastructure and social services are deficient. However, the same market logic brought middle and upper-income families to some traditionally poor municipalities, by means of a specific kind of urbanization: gated communities. Some contemporary Chilean planners affirm that this spatial proximity between different social groups will promote social integration. Rejecting these claims of urban integration based exclusively on the objective dimensions of urban segregation, the author argues for the importance of symbolic dimensions in any analysis of socio-urban integration.

This paper articulates debates surrounding the concept of Continuous Assessment (CA) in South African schools. Although the research was focused on schools in this democratic country, it became evident from the findings that assessment is still a challenge besetting both General Education and Training (GET)and Further Education and Training Bands (FET) worldwide. One of the fundamental reasons for the previous national disenchantment with regard to summative assessment has been the gross inequities that have resulted from inferences based solely on final examinations. In the post apartheid era, the Department of Education made it compulsory that schools turned to CA that is backed by criterion-referenced standards. CA has been heralded as the solution to a host of education ills, including the apparent gap in performance between students of various political and religious backgrounds.

Abstract This article is focused on major issues surrounding the dynamic development of contemporary democracy in Africa. In particular, it reviews the post Cold-War era that has been characterized by a worldwide spread of liberal democracy models, and also scrutinizes the peculiarities of African nations as they adjust to the demanding tenets of democracy. Given the colonial legacy bedeviling Africa, the paper evaluates the impact of change resulting from the 'wind' of democracy that has swept the continent since 1989. It concludes that democracy has its merits but that it should be adopted and adapted to Africans' value systems to serve as a galvanizing instrument of development. It acknowledges that the process of democratization will evolve gradually overtime and its institutionalization will require a strong political will from all stakeholders within and outside the continent.

International audience ; The debate on the link between ethnicity and violence has been raging in the political science literature focusing on the causes and dynamics of the 'new wars' emerging after the end of the Cold War. Often, cross-country quantitative studies dismissed the importance of ethnic heterogeneity as a source of violent conflict. How the patterns of ethnic settlement within a country affect the severity of violence, though, has not yet been studied through similar techniques. In this essay, we build and analyze a dataset of major violence-related variables collected at the local level during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. What emerges is that the local distribution of the population, in terms of the number and relative size of the groups, in more than a hundred municipalities is a key factor in explaining the intensity of violence.

Nowadays enterprises face many economical challenges and problems. Demanding consumers, sustainability issues, and financial crises are just a few of the most important ones. Because of this, staying competitive in the market is becoming more difficult for companies. One of the solutions to this problem could be collaboration between corporations. This strategy is popular world-wide. However, Hungarian enterprises have only been implementing it since the early-mid nineties. In 1989 a political transformation took place in Hungary, and real market processes and strategies could only really develop after that. The aim of this paper is to describe the main elements of successful cooperation, mainly based on Hungarian competitiveness research. To ensure comparability, distinctions must be made regarding basic characteristics like company profile, number of employees, annual turnover, etc. Keywords: alliance, strategic, element, cooperation

Much of contemporary space-based science fiction tends to ignore nature completely, with food replicators and life support systems eliminating the need for plants as anything but decoration. In contrast, Earth-based science fiction stories often center on a conflict between man and nature. Yet though the primary themes in Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Gambler", Bruce Sterling's "We See Things Differently", and Harlan Ellison's "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" are political (with "The Gambler" being a critical portrayal of the fourth estate), each offers a small window into how man ought or ought not to relate to nature. While the latter two offer criticism of our preference for a 'fake' nature, "The Gambler" both glorifies the infinite diversity of nature and at the same time criticizes journalism's adoption of the fundamentally natural 'survival of the fittest' ethic.

This article seeks to further our understanding of how social structure affects the onset of civil war. Existing studies to date have been inconclusive, focusing only on single-cleavage characteristics of social structure, such as ethnic or religious fractionalization. This study argues that models that do not take into account the relationship between cleavages (or cleavage structure) are biased and thusreach faulty conclusions. With the focus on the cleavages of ethnicity and religion, the effects of two characteristics of cleavage structure on civil war onset (cross-cuttingness and cross-fragmentation) are defined and tested. A new index of ethno-religious cross-cuttingness (ERC), derived from national public opinion surveys, reveals that ERC is a significant determinant of civil war onset wheninteracted with ethnic fractionalization. (British Journal of Political Science/ FUB 2010)

After voluntarily entering into a political union with the United States, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands ("CNMI") administered its own immigration system and allowed thousands of guest workers to enter and remain indefinitely. Guest workers contributed to the exponential growth of the CNMI economy during the 1980s and 1990s. However, labor and human rights abuses under this system led to public outrage in the mainland United States, prompting numerous attempts to bring the CNMI within the jurisdiction of federal immigration law. Federalization occurred after Congress passed the Consolidated Natural Resources Act of 2008 ("CNRA"). Although well intentioned, the existing federalization program places thousands of legal guest workers in an extremely precarious situation. This comment argues that Congress should pass additional legislation granting permanent resident status to long-term CNMI guest workers.

The current East Asian strategic environment and US strategy toward the region reveal that the United States faces foreign policy problems that would diminish US influence in the long term. While establishing an East Asian regional security architecture would curtail such progression, its design needs to be considered due to political and military uncertainty caused by China's rise. In this context, the article compares the validity of five policy alternatives in terms of effectiveness, costs, risk, and uncertainty. The argument is that the United States, as the most pivotal player in East Asian security, needs to reconstruct its security strategy toward East Asia by establishing a "regional security nexus" that allows US allies to have more diplomatic autonomy in nurturing and building an open regional community while strengthening security ties with the United States. (Asian Perspect/GIGA)

As long as there has been democratic government, skeptics have worried that citizens would base their choices and their votes on superficial considerations. A series of recent studies seems to validate these fears, suggesting that candidates who merely look more capable or attractive perform better in elections. In this article, we examine the underlying process behind the appearance effect. Specifically, we test whether the effect of appearance is more pronounced among those who know little about politics but are exposed to visual images of candidates. To do so, we combine appearance-based assessments of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial candidates with individual-level survey data measuring vote intent, political knowledge, and television exposure. Confirming long-standing concerns about image and television, we find that appealing-looking politicians benefit disproportionately from television exposure, primarily among less knowledgeable individuals.

This paper examines some recent cases of spatial planning at the national level. Such planning may be comprehensive, in some rare cases, or sectoral and with a more fuzzy and complex character. The paper concentrates on how such planning at the national level relates to the planning of major infrastructure in three European states. This reveals the wide range of approaches to such national-level planning, with quite differing arrangements and recent trajectories. The political economic circumstances of recent decades are layered on top of more enduring constitutional and historical–geographical characteristics, to frame the paths taken in each case. It is suggested that current arrangements are not likely to be up to the challenges now facing planning at this level. More careful academic focus on this level could help to suggest improved approaches.

В статье исследуются взгляды российских либералов начала ХХ в. на проблему типологии конституционных государств. Автор показывает, что, критерием различия дуалистических и парламентарных конституционных государств для либералов являлась процедура назначения правительства и контроля над ним. Переход от дуализма к парламентаризму рассматривался либералами как показатель демократизации политической жизни и движения по пути наиболее полной реализации прав и свобод личности.This article investigates the views of Russian liberals, the early twentieth century, the problem of the typology of constitutional states. The author shows that the criterion of distinction dualistic and parliamentary constitutional states for liberals is the procedure of appointment of the government and control over it. The transition from dualism to parliamentarism considered liberals as an indicator of democratization of political life and movement towards the fullest realization of human rights and freedoms.

Based on the growing tension between the sustained commitment to universality and the apparent legitimacy crisis of the still dominant liberal-democratic paradigm in the world the article outlines in which way social inequality, respectively the lack of redistribution and of recognition has impact on the democratic participation of social majorities in post-colonial societies. Using the example of Bolivia's transformation process it will be demonstrated that the deepening of the Bolivian democracy cannot succeed by simply improving the inclusion of the previously excluded into the prevailing system. Following Nancy Fraser's conception of participatory parity it will be analyzed whether there could be observed a fundamental transformation of socio-political rules, which allows a variety of democratic practices and procedures in the future and, in a sense, the overcoming of the liberal-democratic paradigm. Adapted from the source document.

In spatial models of electoral competition, candidate quality is typically modeled as valence, a measure of general appeal assumed to be constant across voters. This paper introduces and formally models an alternative conception of candidate quality according to which candidates differ in their effectiveness, or likelihood of changing policy from the status quo. Although more effective candidates are electorally favored, voters' benefits from effectiveness are contingent on their policy preferences. The effectiveness model shares many qualitative features with the valence model, but adds several testable implications related to the position of the status quo and gives rise to non-monotonic voting. When valence and effectiveness are combined, valence dominates effectiveness in determining the winner if and only if the status quo policy is sufficiently close to the political center. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]