Search results for "Political Science and International Relation"
showing 10 items of 557 documents
The triumph of partisanship: political scientists in the public debate about Catalonia's independence crisis (2010-2018)
2021
Participation in the public debate constitutes one of the most evident avenues for political scientists to demonstrate the social relevance of the discipline. This article focuses on two questions: the types of roles political scientists adopt in their public interventions and the potential tensions between their public engagement and the epistemic norms regulating academic and research activities. We investigate these questions in the context of very salient political debates, involving a high degree of political confrontation, where basic political beliefs, values, identities, and interests are at stake. Focusing on the case of the public debate surrounding the Catalan inde pendence crisi…
Disentangling Law and Religion in the Rohingya Case at the International Criminal Court
2021
The Rohingya are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world. Military campaigns conducted by Myanmar against the Rohingya have led to numerous deaths, widespread cases of sexual violence, the destruction of hundreds of villages, and the deportation of more than 700,000 people to Bangladesh. These events have triggered proceedings at the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC has arguably failed to address the religious dimensions of crimes and facts in some of its previous jurisprudence appropriately. The entanglement of law and religion at the ICC may lead to an impoverished ratio decidendi and disregard for the victims’ claims. We hence argue that, by disentangling law and re…
How representative are referendums? Evidence from 20 years of Swiss referendums
2017
Direct democracy allows citizens to reverse decisions made by legislatures and even initiate new laws which parliaments are unwilling to pass, thereby, as its proponents argue, leading to more representative policies than would have obtained under a purely representative democracy. Yet, turnout in referendums is usually lower than in parliamentary elections and tends to be skewed towards citizens of high socio-economic status. Consequently, critics of direct democracy argue that referendum outcomes may not be representative of the preferences of the population at large. We test this assertion using a compilation of post-referendum surveys encompassing 148 national referendums held in Switze…
Human Duties and Rights in an Intercultural Perspective
2022
This paper reflects on the possibility of opening new ways of revaluing the role of human responsibilities and duties by establishing a relationship with rights that goes further than a simple correspondence between correlative terms. Approaching the interdependence between the language of rights and the language of duties from an intercultural perspective helps achieve an increasingly broader, but necessarily more complex, consensus. This analysis goes back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which left duties in the background but showed the incipient presence of an intercultural purpose thanks to the work of UNESCO. The final part of the paper is devoted to those international …
The need for change in the approach to insolvency of sport clubs in the regulations of the European Football Federation
2020
This study concerns the issues of league regulations related to the legal problem of insolvency of football clubs in the context of licenses to participate in competitions. The study presents a brief description of modern European football, including the phenomenon of financial oligarchization of sport, and uneven redistribution of the benefits of sport. The following section presents the relation between lex sportiva and state law; the legal position and importance of UEFA; licensing system rules for participating in games. Particular attention was paid to regulating the impact of participation in proceedings giving protection against creditors on obtaining and maintaining a license. Attri…
Do social networks bridge political divides? The analysis of VKontakte social network communication in Ukraine
2014
New electronic forms of political communication have become increasingly popular in countries with weak democratic institutions. The effectiveness of these new forms of association in altering political behavior, however, remains uncertain even in developed democratic regimes. This paper investigates connections between regional variation in electoral behavior and regional distribution of electronic social networks in the case of Ukraine's polarized and institutionally unstable democracy. Our analysis of online networks shows that, somewhat contrary to conventional wisdom, electronic communication does not bridge political divides. This finding casts doubt on the effectiveness of online for…
‘The will to not be empowered (according to your rules)’: Resistance in Finnish participatory social policy
2018
Participation has increasingly become a means and an end for successful and ‘empowering’ social policy. Building on previous governmentality critiques of participatory initiatives, this article investigates practices of resistance in the context of Finnish participatory social policy. I adopt a Foucauldian counter-conducts approach as my lens to study critical speech as a form of resistance in initiatives that invite marginalised people as ‘experts-by-experience’ in social welfare organisations. I illustrate how practices of governing and resistance are intertwined and mutually dependent in a much subtler and more practical manner than allows the often-used analytical dichotomy between domi…
Behind screens : challenges and opportunities of participatory online peace education in Finland
2022
This article discusses the challenges and opportunities of participatory online teaching and learning in higher education. It analyses an online peace education course taught during the Covid-19 pandemic in three Finnish universities between 2020–2021. The course explored fundamental mediation skills and practices of positive peace through participatory methods and applied drama. We show how the online setting affected students and teachers, by focusing on the challenges and opportunities for participatory pedagogy in an online environment. The course feedback from students (N = 23) was studied by content analysis and conjoined with the ethnographic observations of the authors. Our findings…
Government policy failure in public support for research and development
2014
peer-reviewed Promoting Research and Development (R&D) and innovative activity is a key element of the EU Lisbon Agenda and is seen as playing a central part in stimulating economic development. In this paper we argue that, even allowing for benevolent policy-makers, informational asymmetries can lead to a misallocation of public support for R&D, hence government policy failure, with the potential to exacerbate preexisting market failures. Initially, we explore alternative allocation mechanisms for public support, which can help to minimize the scale of these government policy failures. Of these mechanisms (grants, tax credits, or allocation rules based on past performance), our results sug…
Innovators and innovated: Newspapers and the postdigital future beyond the “death of print”
2017
Along with other cultural organizations, newspapers, through waves of digital disruption, have become subject to a dominant narrative of crisis. But newspapers have long participated in change. A constructivist approach, qualified by consideration of media materiality, draws attention to diverse but essential processes of innovation around them. We see a contraflow of migration from digital to print, opening up a shared media space; bonding strategies are bringing multimedia to ink on paper, while bridging via boundary objects such as QR (Quick Response) codes are connecting the two. Among other initiatives, development of automation of news production and experiments with transparency are …