Suchergebnisse

The ethnic conflict which erupted in the small South Pacific nation of Solomon Islands in late 1998 resulted in the loss of over 100 lives, the displacement of 30,000 people, the overthrow of an elected government, and severe damage to the country's economy and polity. Actual fighting took place only in and around the capital, Honiara, and in other parts of Guadalcanal between militant groups from Guadalcanal and from the neighbouring island of Malaita. Fighting was initiated by Guadalcanalese youth who believed that immigrant Malaitans had taken their land without proper compensation, were denying them job opportunities, and had been disrespectful of their culture. But the conflict impacted on Solomon Islands as a whole such that the country is now on the verge of bankruptcy, its government is unable to deliver services and relies on cash handouts as a proxy for governing, the police force is compromised and divided, the lack of reintegration of militarised and disaffected gangs of youth continues to threaten community relations already traumatised by the conflict, and most Provinces which make up the Solomons are demanding either separate statehood or independence. ; AusAID

For many years, the scholarship of urban politics has drifted away from political science, both theoretically and methodologically. In this article, we systematically examine the boundary between urban political studies and the broader discipline of political science through an analysis of journal citations. We find that the analogy of a "black hole" is apt: No ideas escape the event horizon surrounding urban politics; furthermore, ideas from outside rarely penetrate the subfield's borders. Our evidence suggests that this is mostly due to a stunted solipsism that has engulfed too much of urban politics, but some of the blame must rest with the increasing insularity of political science. We suggest a research agenda that highlights the inherent dynamism in urban politics, and conclude with an endorsement of framework-driven citation analysis as a method of examining the flow of ideas across scholarly boundaries.

This article offers an institutionalist assessment of the more recent chapters of political opposition in Erdoğan's Turkey. There is good reason to suppose that the institutional features of a given regime can explain the performance of opposition parties to a significant extent. That said, the case of Turkey provides impressive evidence that there are striking limits to institutionalizing political predominance, to undermining political oppositions by institutional means, and to explaining the performance of opposition parties with the prevailing institutional resources and constraints. Specifically, attempts at institutionalizing a predominant power status carry particular risks of generating inverse effects, including increased political vulnerability. However, there are no automatic effects. Rather, as the Turkish experience suggests, reasonably vigorous actors to become politically relevant must seize the particular (if usually limited) opportunities arising from advanced institutional autocratization. ; Version of record

Abstract The United Nations' multidimensional operations have recently been authorised to use force to protect civilians. Among their peacekeeping activities are initiatives to deal with conflict management/resolution at the local level. While contemporary peacekeeping tends to be highly concentrated at the national level, it has increasingly striven to implement initiatives at the local level. However, local level operations face certain difficulties. To address this, the UN tends to focus on the initiatives, approaches, and strategies it employs at the local level, one of which is the use of force to protect civilians during peace operations. The present analysis revolves around the argument that 'local peace' will not last long unless a peace agreement is achieved and sustained at the national level, and, consequently, that the connection between peace and conflict at both the local and national levels is key to tackling conflicts. This paper uses primary documents, secondary sources, and interviews, as well as specific examples from operations in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic, to inductively confirm this argument, and discuss the difficulties that peace operations face on the issue.

The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of the What's the Problem Represented to Be approach (WPR), a tool of policy analysis developed by the Australian political scientist Carol Bacchi to examine the discursive representations of council tenants' participation in connection with the inclusion of council housing tenants from the Jazdów Estate in the decision-making process relating to local housing policy in Warsaw. The article identifies two discursive representations of council tenants' participation: (1) council tenants as an expected passive audience in top-down policymaking and (2) the limited acceptance of the agency of council tenants in policymaking. It was found that in Warsaw - or at least in the case of Jazdów - the political and discursive interpretation of tenants' participation is primarily associated with the act of informing and less often with public consultation or the co-production of housing policy.