scholarly journals Migration and Hybrid Political Regimes: Navigating the Legal Landscape in Russia

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rustamjon Urinboyev

While migration has become a vital issue worldwide, mainstream literature on migrants’ legal adaptation and integration has focused on cases in Western-style democracies. We know relatively little about how migrants adapt in the ever-growing hybrid political regimes that are neither clearly democratic nor conventionally authoritarian. This book takes up the case of Russia—the third largest recipient of migrants worldwide—and investigates how Central Asian migrant workers produce new forms of informal governance and legal order. Migrants use the opportunities provided by a weak rule of law and a corrupt political system to navigate the repressive legal landscape and to negotiate, using informal channels, access to employment and other opportunities that are hard to obtain through the official legal framework of their host country. This lively ethnography presents new theoretical perspectives for studying legal incorporation of immigrants in similar political contexts.

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-56
Author(s):  
Paweł Skorut ◽  
◽  
Bartłomiej Stawarz ◽  

In 2020, the local government of the Third Polish Republic is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary within the legal framework of the democratic political system. This is a celebration of not only the success of the 1989 Autumn of Nations but of the citizens participating in the co-creation and development of their own local homelands. In contrast, the activities of the central authorities which, frequently governed by the reason of the state, attempt to bind local self-governments more closely, often straining their constitutional value of autonomy.


Author(s):  
Sarah Guzick ◽  
Nicholas Robinson

Recent increases in global demand for palm oil have resulted in rapid, widespread deforestation in Indonesia, making Indonesia the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. Although the Indonesian government has sought to pursue progressive environmental policies to curb deforestation, such as through REDD+, implementation has been hampered by legal loopholes, corruption and weak rule of law. This paper will examine two alternative carbon sequestration policies to REDD+: a drying up of the palm oil market and a buy-out of palm oil plantations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2, special issue) ◽  
pp. 309-317
Author(s):  
Williams C. Iheme

In most developing countries with weak rule of law and fledgling democratic institutions, theft of public assets by public office holders is rampant and has a strong correlation with the excruciating level of poverty and underdevelopment that besiege these countries (Ijewereme, 2013). While a myriad number of reasons may be responsible for this situation, the absence of a mature legal framework as well as the scant availability of sufficiently trained government personnel to trace and recover stolen assets, hidden domestically and abroad, arguably remain contributory factors. Granted that corrupt public office holders are typically enabled by porous (domestic) legal frameworks that provide them wide escape routes for their crimes, contestably however, the laws bordering on confiscation of assets in many foreign countries (safe havens) seem intentionally designed to frustrate any recovery of stolen assets by developing countries. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rate of stealing public assets by public office holders in developing countries is foreseen to rise astronomically and is likely to deepen their existing levels of poverty and hopelessness (Ayode, 2020). Using Nigeria as an example of a developing country, the paper critically examines the underlying defects in the cross-border legal framework on asset recovery and confiscation and proffers suggestions on how these defects could be remedied.


Author(s):  
James McDougall

This chapter surveys Algerian society and politics from 1999 to 2012, considering the country’s domestic and international situation in the context of the transition from the violence of the 1990s and the regional upheaval of the ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions of 2011. In an era of neoliberalism, generational change, new forms of regional and global connectivity and a renewed wave of popular protest, Algeria’s revolution and the once-imagined future of the Third World that it long stood for remained an inspiration and, at the same time, a long-unfulfilled aspiration. As Algeria celebrated fifty years of independence, the wave of protest and change engulfing the Arab world from Tunisia to Syria largely bypassed the region’s most iconically revolutionary nation. The chapter will consider the long- and short-term reasons for this, and explore how, after the war of the 1990s, Algeria’s political system has been able to maintain a status quo that, however structurally untenable in the longer term, seems capable of reproducing itself indefinitely for the present. Behind the successive revolutionary experiences of the 1960s-70s, 1988, and 2011, remain the unfulfilled promises of the insurrection of 1 November 1954, the unresolved question of establishing the rule of law and that of a state constituted by and for its people.


Author(s):  
Regine A. Spector

Over the past two decades, bazaars mushroomed in the new Central Asian states, where rule-of-law institutions are weak and corruption high. How did bazaars grow and thrive in such an inhospitable context? Order at the Bazaar answers this question through an analysis of bazaars in Kyrgyzstan. They are conceptualized as islands of order within a chaotic national context. The findings demonstrate that those at the bazaar, including traders, private land owners, and municipal officials, create order themselves in the absence of a coherent national government apparatus and bureaucratic state. Drawing on original interviews, archival sources, and participant observation, the book illuminates the changing meanings and practices of older traders at bazaars, including the ways in which they adapted Soviet and pre-Soviet institutions and organizational forms to a new market setting. In these settings, they deliberated and advocated for favorable policies and conditions, mediated disputes, channelled information, and served as role models for traders. The findings have relevance beyond the bazaars and borders of this small country; they illuminate how economic activity can operate in weak rule-of-law contexts, and more specifically how a variety of organizational forms come to constitute the order that underpins new market economies.


Author(s):  
Leonardo Morlino

Thinking over the empirical results, discussed in the previous chapters, we have to acknowledge that there is no direct intertwining between the freedoms and equalities when checking the domestic and external explanations. At the same time, the immediate and strong tension that also emerges in our analysis of freedoms concerns the contradictory demands of citizens about achieving security to cope with terrorism, with security that comes first. When reflecting on the data presented in the previous chapters, we can single out three patterns. The first is balanced democracy, characterized by the attempt of implementing both freedoms and equalities. The second is protest democracy, where the more substantial attention to equality is complemented by different possible types of protest, of a revendicative kind, a weak rule of law and inter-institutional accountability. The third is unaccountable democracy, where there may be relatively higher equality, complemented by weaker freedoms and above all the absence or the weakening of inter-institutional guardians who were relevant in establishing democracy. Corruption may be present along the lower side of the triangle to reinforce both patterns. The last part of the chapter proposes an overview of the literature about the questions addressed in the book. However, as in the published literature, there is no empirical work that addresses our questions, but works that address similar questions concerning equality only, freedom only or also the entire democratic regime.


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-168
Author(s):  
Bayram Unal

This study aims at understanding how the perceptions about migrants have been created and transferred into daily life as a stigmatization by means of public perception, media and state law implementations.  The focus would be briefly what kind of consequences these perceptions and stigmatization might lead. First section will examine the background of migration to Turkey briefly and make a summary of migration towards Turkey by 90s. Second section will briefly evaluate the preferential legal framework, which constitutes the base for official discourse differentiating the migrants and implementations of security forces that can be described as discriminatory. The third section deals with the impact of perceptions influential in both formation and reproduction of inclusive and exclusive practices towards migrant women. Additionally, impact of public perception in classifying the migrants and migratory processes would be dealt in this section.


Author(s):  
Richard Pomfret

This book analyzes the Central Asian economies of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, from their buffeting by the commodity boom of the early 2000s to its collapse in 2014. The book examines the countries' relations with external powers and the possibilities for development offered by infrastructure projects as well as rail links between China and Europe. The transition of these nations from centrally planned to market-based economic systems was essentially complete by the early 2000s, when the region experienced a massive increase in world prices for energy and mineral exports. This raised incomes in the main oil and gas exporters, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan; brought more benefits to the most populous country, Uzbekistan; and left the poorest countries, the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan, dependent on remittances from migrant workers in oil-rich Russia and Kazakhstan. The book considers the enhanced role of the Central Asian nations in the global economy and their varied ties to China, the European Union, Russia, and the United States. With improved infrastructure and connectivity between China and Europe (reflected in regular rail freight services since 2011 and China's announcement of its Belt and Road Initiative in 2013), relaxation of UN sanctions against Iran in 2016, and the change in Uzbekistan's presidency in late 2016, a window of opportunity appears to have opened for Central Asian countries to achieve more sustainable economic futures.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-141
Author(s):  
Tomasz Stępniewski

The present paper discusses the following research questions: to what extent did errors made by the previous presidents of Ukraine result in the country’s failure to introduce systemic reforms (e.g. combating corruption, the development of a foundation for a stable state under the rule of law and free-market economy)?; can it be ventured that the lack of radical reforms along with errors in the internal politics of Ukraine under Petro Poroshenko resulted in the president’s failure?; will the strong vote of confidence given to Volodymyr Zelensky and the Servant of the People party exact systemic reforms in Ukraine?; or will Volodymyr Zelensky merely become an element of the oligarchic political system in Ukraine?


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