The transnational protest wave that engulfed most of the countries of the Middle East and North Africa had significantly different intensity, took different trajectories, and produced different ...outcomes in different states. Four North-African cases discussed in the article illustrate three typical outcomes – fall of regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, civil war in Libya, and authoritarian durability in Algeria. Using the literatures on political regimes and on contentious politics I show that these variation can be explained through combined effect of three factors: (a) different strategies of preserving cohesion within the authoritarian coalitions; (b) partially interconnected differences in the organizational strength of the regimes; (c) high levels of uncertainty typical for the periods of mass political mobilization. Although the last factor includes a degree of indeterminacy into the explanation, this should not be seen as an analytical weakness, but rather as an inevitable consequence of the fact that politics is an area of practical action not entirely reducible to retrospective theoretical deductions.
The debate about the relationship between the Copenhagen School’s securitisation theory and Carl Schmitt’s theory of political reveals that there is an insatiable need for the question about the ...concept of political to be answered and for widely accepted judgment criteria to be in place in this fragmented society of modern times. Through a short overview of most important stages in the development of the concept of political, it demonstrates the justifiability, but also the dangers, of Schmitt’s criticism of liberalism, and contributes to better understanding of the theoretical situation faced by the theoreticians of the Copenhagen School. Perceiving security as an intersubjective process creates, in the securitisation theory, a chance to understand the entire concept of political in a different light. However, for this chance to be brought to fruition, securitisation theory must eschew the dangers of profligate postmodernism, considering that, due to its undermining all the parameters, there is no justification for normative preference of the desecuritisation process over any securitisation process.
The debate about the relationship between the Copenhagen School’s securitisation theory and Carl Schmitt’s theory of political reveals that there is an insatiable need for the question about the ...concept of political to be answered and for widely accepted judgment criteria to be in place in this fragmented society of modern times. Through a short overview of most important stages in the development of the concept of political, it demonstrates the justifiability, but also the dangers, of Schmitt’s criticism of liberalism, and contributes to better understanding of the theoretical situation faced by the theoreticians of the Copenhagen School. Perceiving security as an intersubjective process creates, in the securitisation theory, a chance to understand the entire concept of political in a different light. However, for this chance to be brought to fruition, securitisation theory must eschew the dangers of profligate postmodernism, considering that, due to its undermining all the parameters, there is no justification for normative preference of the desecuritisation process over any securitisation process.
Prikazi Kovačević, Marko; Žilović, Marko; Mihajlović Babić, Suzana
Godišnjak (Univerzitet u Beogradu, Fakultet političkih nauka),
2014
11
Journal Article
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