In Search of Régime Security: Zimbabwe Since Independence

1984 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 529-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Weitzer

The relatively peaceful decolonisation of British and French Africa in the 1950s and led, for the most part, to the capturing of state power by a new political élite rather than a throughgoing transformation of the state structures inherited at independence. Instead of refashioning institution in ways that might increase political participation and social justice, existing state capacities tended to be marshalled for exclusionary and, in many cases, authoritarian purposes.

Author(s):  
Albert O. Hirschman

This chapter contains Hirschman's reflections on how citizens' exit and voice affect state power and expands his thinking to include a range of political possibilities, from stateless societies and small states to the ones that behave like global hegemons. The arguments in this chapter build upon those set forth in a previously published work, which had argued that economists, with their emphasis on the virtues of competition (i.e., exit), had disregarded the possible contributions of voice just as political scientists, with their interest in political participation and protest, had neglected the possible role of exit in the analysis of political behavior. This chapter is a more extensive survey on these previous arguments. In particular, it explores the importance of exit in relation to the state.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 462-473
Author(s):  
Piotr Koprowski

[The loyalty of Polish society and the consolidation of state power in 1956–1980] The article introduces several comments and reflections on the tensions between the state power and society in People’s Poland in 1956–1980, in the context of the consolidation of power and loyalty of society. During this period, the party and state authorities, wishing to maximally consolidate their power, did everything to achieve the ability and readiness to use all means necessary to control social behavior, to maintain the loyalty of society. It required total ideological unity of the party political elite and iron discipline in the functioning of its institutions. Such a strategy did not prevent social outbreaks. The emerging protests meant above all a real loss of control over society, social disorganization. Wishing to enjoy the loyalty of a society devoid of political alternatives, in other words its tacit consent, it would have to provide it with a certain level of living conditions. However, this task was very difficult, if at all possible, to be implemented in the realities of the centrally planned economy.


Author(s):  
Anthony Gorman

This chapter traces the development of the radical secular press in Egypt from its first brief emergence in the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I. First active in the 1860s, the anarchist movement gradually expanded its membership and influence over subsequent decades to articulate a general social emancipation and syndicalism for all workers in the country. In the decade and a half before 1914, its press collectively propagated a critique of state power and capitalism, called for social justice and the organisation of labour, and promoted the values of science and public education in both a local context and as part of an international movement. In seeking to promote a programme at odds with both nationalism and colonial rule, it incurred the hostility of the authorities in addition to facing the practical problems of managing and financing an oppositional newspaper.


Author(s):  
Оlena Fedorіvna Caracasidi

The article deals with the fundamental, inherent in most of the countries of the world transformation of state power, its formation, functioning and division between the main branches as a result of the decentralization of such power, its subsidiarity. Attention is drawn to the specifics of state power, its func- tional features in the conditions of sovereignty of the states, their interconnec- tion. It is emphasized that the nature of the state power is connected with the nature of the political system of the state, with the form of government and many other aspects of a fundamental nature.It is analyzed that in the middle of national states the questions of legitima- cy, sovereignty of transparency of state power, its formation are acutely raised. Concerning the practical functioning of state power, a deeper study now needs a problem of separation of powers and the distribution of power. The use of this principle, which ensures the real subsidiarity of the authorities, the formation of more effective, responsible democratic relations between state power and civil society, is the first priority of the transformation of state power in the conditions of modern transformations of countries and societies. It is substantiated that the research of these problems will open up much wider opportunities for the provi- sion of state power not as a center authority, but also as a leading political structure but as a power of the people and the community. In the context of global democratization processes, such processes are crucial for a more humanistic and civilized arrangement of human life. It is noted that local self-government, as a specific form of public power, is also characterized by an expressive feature of a special subject of power (territorial community) as a set of large numbers of people; joint communal property; tax system, etc.


2019 ◽  
pp. 27-37
Author(s):  
V.A. Morozov

The article analyzes the state of public health on the example of domestic and foreign statistics, as well as prospects for its development and improvement. The state of relations and forms of interaction of budgetary medical institutions (state, municipal) with private clinics, as well as directly private clinics with the structures of municipal and state power are considered. The directions and ways of interaction of power and business structures for improvement of methods and forms of service of patients on the basis of indicators of values and innovations are offered.


Author(s):  
Arjun Chowdhury

This chapter offers an alternative view of the incidence and duration of insurgencies in the postcolonial world. Insurgencies and civil wars are seen as the primary symptom of state weakness, the inability of the central government to monopolize violence. Challenging extant explanations that identify poverty and low state capacity as the cause of insurgencies, the chapter shows that colonial insurgencies, also occurring in the context of poverty and state weakness, were shorter and ended in regime victories, while contemporary insurgencies are longer and states are less successful at subduing them. The reason for this is the development of exclusive identities—based on ethnicity, religion, tribe—in the colonial period. These identities serve as bases for mobilization to challenge state power and demand services from the state. Either way, such mobilization means that popular demands for services exceed the willingness to disarm and/or pay taxes, that is, to supply the state.


Author(s):  
Rachel Condry

This chapter explores the wide-ranging impact of imprisonment upon the lives of the families of prisoners and the entrenched social inequalities that this both generates and reinforces. It considers the concept of social justice and whether it is useful to this enterprise. The chapter furthermore questions why the families of prisoners are faced with many difficulties. It applies theories of social justice to the consequences experienced by families of prisoners and asks whether or not those consequences are consistent with the principles of these theories. In a democratic society that claims to be organised around principles of equal citizenship, the chapter argues that there is a need to fully consider how and why families of prisoners (as innocent citizens) are affected by punishment inflicted by the state.


Author(s):  
Esteban Torres ◽  
Carina Borrastero

This article analyzes how the research on the relation between capitalism and the state in Latin America has developed from the 1950s up to the present. It starts from the premise that knowledge of this relation in sociology and other social sciences in Latin America has been taking shape through the disputes that have opposed three intellectual standpoints: autonomist, denialist, and North-centric. It analyzes how these standpoints envision the relationship between economy and politics and how they conceptualize three regionally and globally growing trends: the concentration of power, social inequality, and environmental depletion. It concludes with a series of challenges aimed at restoring the theoretical and political potency of the autonomist program in Latin American sociology.


2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110338
Author(s):  
David Jenkins ◽  
Lipin Ram

Public space is often understood as an important ‘node’ of the public sphere. Typically, theorists of public space argue that it is through the trust, civility and openness to others which citizens cultivate within a democracy’s public spaces, that they learn how to relate to one another as fellow members of a shared polity. However, such theorizing fails to articulate how these democratic comportments learned within public spaces relate to the public sphere’s purported role in holding state power to account. In this paper, we examine the ways in which what we call ‘partisan interventions’ into public space can correct for this gap. Using the example of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM), we argue that the ways in which CPIM partisans actively cultivate sites of historical regional importance – such as in the village of Kayyur – should be understood as an aspect of the party’s more general concern to present itself to citizens as an agent both capable and worthy of wielding state power. Drawing on histories of supreme partisan contribution and sacrifice, the party influences the ideational background – in competition with other parties – against which it stakes its claims to democratic legitimacy. In contrast to those theorizations of public space that celebrate its separateness from the institutions of formal democratic politics and the state more broadly, the CPIM’s partisan interventions demonstrate how parties’ locations at the intersections of the state and civil society can connect the public sphere to its task of holding state power to account, thereby bringing the explicitly political questions of democratic legitimacy into the everyday spaces of a political community.


Pólemos ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Paolo Coen

Abstract This article revolves in essence around the contributions made by the architect Moshe Safdie to the Yad Vashem memorial and museum in Jerusalem. Both probably need at least a brief introduction, if for no other reason than the nature of the present publication, which has a somewhat different scope than the type of art-historical or architectural-historical journals to which reflections of this kind are usually consigned. The first part draws a profile of Safdie, who enjoys a well-established international reputation, even if he has not yet been fully acknowledged in Italy. In order to better understand who he is, we shall focus on the initial phase of his career, up to 1967, and his multiple ties to Israel. The range of projects discussed includes the Habitat 67 complex in Montreal and a significant number of works devised for various contexts within the Jewish state. The second part focuses on the memorial and museum complex in Jerusalem that is usually referred to as Yad Vashem. We will trace Yad Vashem from its conception, to its developments between the 1950s and 1970s, up until the interventions of Safdie himself. Safdie has in fact been deeply and extensively involved with Yad Vashem. It is exactly to this architect that a good share of the current appearance of this important institute is due. Through the analysis of three specific contributions – the Children’s Memorial, the Cattle Car Memorial and the Holocaust History Museum – and a consideration of the broader context, this article shows that Yad Vashem is today, also and especially thanks to Safdie, a key element in the formation of the identity of the state of Israel from 1967 up until our present time.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document