scholarly journals MODERN POLITICAL SYSTEMS OF THE WORLD: SOME QUESTIONS OF SUSTAINABILITY

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 70-73
Author(s):  
A.P. Hirman ◽  
◽  
S.O. Makarova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-49
Author(s):  
Philip Harrison

Abstract The bulk of the scholarly literature on city-regions and their governance is drawn from contexts where economic and political systems have been stable over an extended period. However, many parts of the world, including all countries in the BRICS, have experienced far-reaching national transformations in the recent past in economic and/or political systems. The national transitions are complex, with a mix of continuity and rupture, while their translation into the scale of the city-region is often indirect. But, these transitions have been significant for the city-region, providing a period of opportunity and institutional fluidity. Studies of the BRICS show that outcomes of transitions are varied but that there are junctures of productive comparison including the ways in which the nature of the transitions create new path dependencies, and way in which interests across territorial scales soon consolidate, producing new rigidities in city-region governance.


Author(s):  
Chris G. Pope ◽  
Meng Ji ◽  
Xuemei Bai

The chapter argues that whether or not the world is successful in attaining sustainability, political systems are in a process of epoch-defining change as a result of the unsustainable demands of our social systems. This chapter theorizes a framework for analyzing the political “translation” of sustainability norms within national polities. Translation, in this sense, denotes the political reinterpretation of sustainable development as well as the national capacities and contexts which impact how sustainability agendas can be instrumentalized. This requires an examination into the political architecture of a national polity, the norms that inform a political process, socioecological contexts, the main communicative channels involved in the dissemination of political discourse and other key structures and agencies, and the kinds of approaches toward sustainability that inform the political process. This framework aims to draw attention to the ways in which global economic, political, and social systems are adapting and transforming as a result of unsustainability and to further understanding of the effectiveness of globally diffused sustainability norms in directing that change.


Author(s):  
Catherine E. De Vries ◽  
Sara B. Hobolt ◽  
Sven-Oliver Proksch ◽  
Jonathan B. Slapin

The Introduction argues that to understand European politics there are two premises that need to be accepted. Firstly, the interplay between European and national-level politics must be taken seriously. The two cannot be studied independently. Secondly, a theoretical model of politics is necessary to help us to make assumptions about politics explicit and to ensure that the arguments used are logically consistent. Models help us to zoom in on a particular aspect of politics and apply our analysis to real-life examples. It also helps us to spot the similarities and differences across political systems and governments so we can make comparisons. The Introduction answers the question: why focus on Europe? One of the most obvious reasons is that Europe is the home to the largest number and variety of democratic governments anywhere in the world.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Sutherland ◽  
Debra Roberts ◽  
Jo Douwes

Resilience is a ‘re-emerging concept’ which is being applied to deal with the shocks and stresses facing society and the environment as a result of both human induced and physical hazards. Resilience thinking is shaping policy and practice across the world through global programmes such as the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR)'s Making Cities Resilient Campaign; UN Habitat's City Resilience Profiling Programme; and Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities (100 RC). The global post-2015 sustainable development and climate change frameworks and related agreements all have resilience embedded in them. However, the concept of resilience remains contested, with resilience reflecting a continuum of approaches from those that are more deliberative, political, systemic, relational and transformational, to those that are more consultative, post-political, systems based, sectoral and instrumental. Questions of how resilience is being constructed, by whom and for whom therefore need to be explored. This paper focuses on the construction of resilience at three scales: The Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) programme (global), Phase 1 of Durban's 100RC journey (city), and the Palmiet Catchment Rehabilitation Project (sub-catchment within a city). It presents the different approaches adopted by global, city-scale and local programmes to build resilience using different framings, approaches and methodologies.


1997 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 462-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Blondel

ALTHOUGH THE CLASSICAL WORK ON POLITICAL OPPOSITION IN Western Democracies, edited by Robert Dahl, was published decades ago, in 1966, the analysis of the characteristics of opposition, in democracies or elsewhere, has advanced rather less than other aspects of comparative politics. The word ‘opposition’ is used daily to account for a variety of developments; but its many meanings have not been systematically related to the differences among the political systems of the world. A number of comparative studies did appear after the 1966 seminal work, admittedly, including one by Dahl himself in 1973, as well as those by Ionescu and Madariaga in 1968, by Schapiro in 1972, by Tokes in 1979, by Kolinsky in 1988 and by Rodan in 1996; these volumes explore aspects of the concept which could not have been even referred to in the original study, since that study was confined to Western democracies and to the part played by political parties in the context of opposition. Yet the problem has still not been tackled truly comprehensively, as, with the exception of the 1973 Dahl volume, the works on the subject are comparative only in the sense that they deal with more than one country; but their scope remains limited to a region or to a particular type of political system. Meanwhile, many country analyses examine the nature of political opposition in each particular case, but the information which they provide has to be brought within a common framework before we can hope to obtain a general picture of the characteristics of opposition across the world.


1993 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Selim Deringil

The nineteenth century, a time when world history seemed to accelerate, was the epoch of the Risorgimento and the Unification of Germany. It was also an epoch which saw the last efforts of dynastic ancien régime empires (Habsburg, Romanov, Ottoman) to shore up their political systems with methods often borrowed from their adversaries, the nationalist liberals. Eric Hobsbawm's inspiring recent study has pointed out that, in the world after the French Revolution, it was no longer enough for monarchies to claim divine right; additional ideological reinforcement was required: “The need to provide a new, or at least a supplementary, ‘national’ foundation for this institution was felt in states as secure from revolution as George III's Britain and Nicholas I's Russia.”


2010 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Krupa

Recent ethnographic work on the state has exposed a crack in one of the founding myths of modern political power. Despite the state's transcendental claim to wielding absolute, exclusive authority within national territory, scholars have shown that in much of the world there are, in fact, “too many actors competing to perform as state,” sites where various power blocs “are acting as the state and producing the same powerful effects” (Aretxaga 2003: 396, 398) Achille Mbembe (2001: 74), writing of the external fiscal controls imposed upon African countries during the late 1980s, has termed this a condition of “fractionated sovereignty”—the dispersal of official state functions among various non-state actors. There is, as Mbembe suggests, “nothing particularly African” about this situation (ibid.). Around the world, the power of various “shadow” organizations like arms dealers and paramilitary groups seems increasingly to depend upon their ability to out-perform the state in many of its definitive functions, from the provision of security and welfare to the collection of taxes and administration of justice (Nugent 1999; Nordstrom 2004; Hansen 2005). These observations present a serious challenge to conventional state theory. They force us to consider whether such conditions of fragmented, competitive statecraft might be better understood not as deviant exceptions to otherwise centralized political systems but, rather, as the way that government is actually experienced in much of the world today.


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