Why do some national movements use violent protest and others nonviolent protest? Wendy Pearlman shows that much of the answer lies inside movements themselves. Nonviolent protest requires ...coordination and restraint, which only a cohesive movement can provide. When, by contrast, a movement is fragmented, factional competition generates new incentives for violence and authority structures are too weak to constrain escalation. Pearlman reveals these patterns across one hundred years in the Palestinian national movement, with comparisons to South Africa and Northern Ireland. To those who ask why there is no Palestinian Gandhi, Pearlman demonstrates that nonviolence is not simply a matter of leadership. Nor is violence attributable only to religion, emotions or stark instrumentality. Instead, a movement's organizational structure mediates the strategies that it employs. By taking readers on a journey from civil disobedience to suicide bombings, this book offers fresh insight into the dynamics of conflict and mobilization.
This book investigates secessionist movements within the European Union, drawing on the author's in-depth research interviews with elected members of the major pro-independence political parties in ...Flanders, Scotland, and Catalonia. The book considers shifts within party platforms as well as why these regions are not yet independent.
Why are independent courts rarely found in emerging democracies? This book moves beyond familiar obstacles, such as an inhospitable legal legacy and formal institutions that expose judges to ...political pressure. It proposes a strategic pressure theory, which claims that in emerging democracies, political competition eggs on rather than restrains power-hungry politicians. Incumbents who are losing their grip on power try to use the courts to hang on, which leads to the politicization of justice. The analysis uses four original datasets, containing 1,000 decisions by Russian and Ukrainian lower courts from 1998 to 2004. The main finding is that justice is politicized in both countries, but in the more competitive regime (Ukraine) incumbents leaned more forcefully on the courts and obtained more favorable rulings.
Ensuring price stability is a dominant function of the central bank. Empirical studies on various statistical samples give conflicting results regarding the influence of central bank independence on ...the inflation rate. The study offers a methodology for assessing the role of the formation of a national pattern of central bank independence in ensuring price stability. Calculations were made for 53 countries of the world using a combination of cluster analysis tools and panel regression modeling. The cluster analysis carried out at different time intervals of the study allowed defining three patterns of the formation of central bank independence. The changes in the clusters characterizing the peculiarities of the national patterns of central bank independence shows that for a number of countries there is no stable national pattern. Modeling based on panel data showed that when forming a country pattern “Limited level of central bank independence”, an increase in the level of independence of the central bank by one unit on average leads to an increase in the inflation rate by 7.09%. On the other hand, in the countries with the national patterns of central bank independence “Dominance of the institutional and financial component of ensuring the independence of the central bank” and “Dominance of the personal and functional component of ensuring the independence of the central bank”, the expected consequence of increasing the level of independence of the central bank by one unit is to reduce the inflation rate by an average of 3.32% and 6.03%, respectively.
This book explains how state institutions affect ethnic mobilization. It focuses on how ethno-nationalist movements emerge on the political arena, develop organizational structures, frame demands, ...and attract followers. It does so in the context of examining the widespread surge of nationalist sentiment that occurred through the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It shows that even during this period of institutional upheaval, pre-existing ethnic institutions affected the tactics of the movement leaders. It challenges the widely held perception that governing elites can kindle latent ethnic grievances virtually at will to maintain power. It argues that nationalist leaders can't always mobilize widespread popular support and that their success in doing so depends on the extent to which ethnicity is institutionalized by state structures. It shifts the study of ethnic mobilization from the whys of its emergence to the hows of its development as a political force.
Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean is a collection of
essays that explores fundamental questions of equality and freedom
on the non-sovereign islands of the Dutch Caribbean. Drawing on
in-depth ...ethnographic research, historical and media analysis, the
study of popular culture, and autoethnographic accounts, the
various contributions challenge conventional assumptions about
political non/sovereignty. While the book recognizes the existence
of nationalist independence movements, it opens a critical space to
look at other forms of political articulation, autonomy, liberty,
and a good life. Focusing on all six different islands and through
a multitude of voices and stories, the volume engages with the
everyday projects, ordinary imaginaries, and dreams of equaliberty
alongside the work of independistas and traditional social
movements aiming for more or full self-determination. As such, it
offers a rich and powerful telling of the various ways of being in
and belonging to our contemporary postcolonial world.
Terror in chechnya Gilligan, Emma
2010., 20091109, 2009, 2010-01-01, 20100101, Volume:
21
eBook
Terror in Chechnya is the definitive account of Russian war crimes in Chechnya. Emma Gilligan provides a comprehensive history of the second Chechen conflict of 1999 to 2005, revealing one of the ...most appalling human rights catastrophes of the modern era--one that has yet to be fully acknowledged by the international community. Drawing upon eyewitness testimony and interviews with refugees and key political and humanitarian figures, Gilligan tells for the first time the full story of the Russian military's systematic use of torture, disappearances, executions, and other punitive tactics against the Chechen population.
