Legal Features of Migration Processes in Unrecognized Territories: Ukraine’s Eastern Donbas Region

2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-248
Author(s):  
Tetiana Drakokhrust
Keyword(s):  
Legal Status ◽  
The State ◽  
Entire Population ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Legal Questions ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
And Migration

Migration processes revolving around the unsolved situation of Ukraine’s Eastern Donbas Region raise various legal questions and difficulties in the context regulation and recognition as well. This article sheds light on the political and legal status and the process of formation of unrecognized quasi-governmental entities, the issuance of passport and official documents, and migration instability. The article concludes that by seeking a forced secession of a separate territory from the mother country, separatism takes the entire population of the state as hostages, causing a critical migration situation within the sovereign state

Act of State Doctrine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfonso Iglesias
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
General Rule ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
National Courts ◽  
Foreign State ◽  
Political Question

According to the act of state doctrine, national courts must refrain from prosecuting the validity of official acts carried out by a foreign state within its own territory, except if it commits violations of international norms with broad consensus of international society, such as, for example, a case of genocide. Both its judicial self-restraint character and its reflection in the judicial deference to the executive branch would justify the ex officio application of the act of state doctrine by the courts. This doctrine is neither a rule nor a legal obligation required by international law, although it arises from the relevance of the international rule of territorial sovereignty of the state. It was not introduced by a constitutional or legislative provision, but is a common law principle developed mainly by Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions on the basis of considerations of international comity, respect for the principles of sovereign equality and non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states, separation of powers, and the choice of law freedom. To some extent, the legal basis of the doctrine of immunity for acts of state was analogous to the basis of immunity granted to the foreign sovereign state and its agents. The underlying rationale of this doctrine consists in preventing domestic courts from issuing adverse judgments against foreign governments that could embarrass international relations and interfere with the conduct of foreign affairs by the executive branch power. The doctrine of the act of state (and that of the political question) has important differences with the immunity of the foreign state: (1) This immunity is per se a general rule of public international law of a customary nature accepted and applied universally—in addition to being regulated in various international conventions, one of them of universal vocation—unlike the doctrines cited, which are not regulated by national legislations or by international codification efforts. (2) The moment of operation is also different, since the immunity of the foreign state functions ex ante as a procedural exception to the exercise of jurisdiction by the court of the territorial state (or court of the forum), which for that reason is obliged to recognize its lack of competence to try the case before it, while the doctrines of the state act and the political question act later—only if the defendant does not enjoy immunity—when the court is already exercising its competence and knowing the merits of the case. (3) The application of the immunity of the foreign state requires that the foreign state be sued before the courts of the forum, whereas the act of state doctrine does not require that the foreign state itself be a party to the proceedings, but it is sufficient to question the validity of an internal act of the foreign state during the judicial proceedings.

Networks of Resilience: Legal Precarity and Transborder Citizenship among the Karen from Myanmar in Thailand

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-89
Author(s):  
Indrė Balčaitė
Keyword(s):  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
The Political ◽  
Critical Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Karen Refugees ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Precarious Legal Status

AbstractThis study probes the relationship between legal precarity and transborder citizenship through the case of the Karen from Myanmar in Thailand. Collected through ethnographic multi-sited fieldwork between 2012 and 2016, interconnected individual life stories evolving across the Myanmar-Thailand border allow the critical interrogation of the political and legal categories of ‘migrancy’, ‘refugeeness’, and ‘citizenship’, teasing out their blurry boundaries in migrants’ experience. Following the recent critical research in legal ethnography, this study demonstrates that legal precarity is not simply an antithesis to citizenship. The social and legal dimensions of citizenship may diverge, creating in-between areas of not-yet-full-citizenship with varying levels of heft (Macklin 2007). The article consists of three parts. First, it offers a theoretical framework to reconcile the Karen legal precarity (even de facto statelessness) and citizenship, even on both sides of the border (legally impossible). Second, it presents the three groups of Karen in Thailand, produced by the interaction of three major waves of Karen eastward migration and tightening Thai citizenship and migration regulations: Thai Karen, refugees, and migrant workers. All three face varying levels of legal precarity of temporary status without full citizenship. However, the last part demonstrates the intertwined nature of those groups. A grassroots transborder perspective reveals the resilience of the Karen networks when pooling together resources of the hubs established on Thai soil by the three waves. Even the most recent arrivals in Thailand use those resources to move from one precarious legal status to another and even to clandestinely obtain citizenship.

scholarly journals The Story of Yaser Abdulla

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mya Guarnieri Jaradat
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seeker ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
The State ◽  
Entire Population

The 33,000 African asylum seekers currently residing in Israel face a lack of legal status and receive no services from the state. The entire population is under pressure but those who have faced torture in the Sinai desert en route to Israel struggle with additional problems and have nowhere to turn for help. The story of Yaser Abdulla – an asylum seeker from Darfur who was tortured by Bedouin traffickers in the Sinai – illuminates the circumstances that pushed asylum seekers from their home, what they encounter on their way, and the situation they grapple with inside of Israel.

scholarly journals Political ideology in the legislation of the UkrSSR 1950–1960: anthropological aspect

2020 ◽  
pp. 128-137
Author(s):  
Muzyka Iryna
Keyword(s):  
Political Ideology ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Central Committee ◽  
The State ◽  
Entire Population ◽  
The Status ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Masses

In modern legal science, the anthropological approach that makes it possible to investigate, in particular, the orientation of the right to the human problem in law becomes of great relevance. In the perspective of legal anthropology, an important issue is the status of a person in the state mechanism (the place of the person in the hierarchy of values, the scope and guarantees of his rights and freedoms, the duties of the person) within the relation of state-centrism and anthropocentrism in the normative acts of the UkrSSR authorities of the post-war period. The draft Constitution of the UkrSSR in 1964 provided for a change in the legal status of the inpidual in the UkrSSR. For the first time in the history of "Soviet constitutional law" the concept of "freedom of the inpidual" was introduced, the whole complex of citizens' rights was revised, some new categories of rights were introduced, such as the supreme and fundamental human rights, the mechanism of their guarantees by society and the state was first laid. It was envisaged to consolidate various forms of direct exercise of political power by citizens, to create new forms of influence of citizens on the state power in general. Thus, in the early 1960s, the Soviet state had the potential to change qualitatively if the new UkrSSR Constitution was adopted. Therefore, the dismissal of MS Khrushchev from the duties of the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee and the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR appears to be conditioned, including, by the radical significance of the Constitutional project, which has never been adopted. It is possible to draw the following conclusion: in the period under study in the UkrSSR (as well as the USSR), the center of legal reality was not the person, but the norms of legal prescriptions of the state, formulated on the basis of political and ideological doctrine developed by the leadership of the CPSU – Communist Party. It is possible to characterize the status of a person under the legislation of 1950–1960 as a result of the implementation in the normative acts of political and ideological guidelines of the leadership of the CPSU – CPU. According to the communist ideology of that time, the life of society was regarded as the existence of the entire population of inpiduals, masses of people, and therefore the decisive role in the life of society belongs not to inpidual inpiduals, but to their entire population. This meant a significant overriding of the "necessary" relative to the "freedom" of man, that is, the interests of party-state leadership, collective interests over the interests of the inpidual; the non-recognition of the inpidual sovereignty of a person who was largely considered part of the collective subject – the "masses"; lack of reconciliation of interests of inpiduals and the state, which in many cases gave rise to conflict situations.

Britain’s Authoritarian Ascendancy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin du Rivage
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
British Government ◽  
Political Evolution ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Vision ◽  
Landed Elite ◽  
Low Wages

This chapter examines the political evolution of the mother country as authoritarian reformers exploited the social, political, and economic concerns of the landed elite to seize control of the state. Even as Grenville angrily exited the political stage, authoritarian reformers continued to argue for debt reduction, low wages, and a refurbished empire. Unsurprisingly, establishment and radical Whigs remained sharply critical of this new vision of politics. Despite the continuing opposition of radicals and establishment Whigs, however, authoritarian reformers used their power, not only to pass the Townshend Duties and Massachusetts Government Act, but also to reform British government in India.

Beyond Autonomy? The Politics of Corporations

1974 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-60
Author(s):  
Dennis Kavanagh
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The State ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Democratic Control ◽  
National Boundaries

IN RECENT YEARS THERE HAS BEEN A FORMIDABLE GROWTH OF literature on the political and other implications of business corporations. Much of the writing on the corporations has been of an alarmist nature. We are usually referred to the growth of an impressive economic (and, by implication, political) power of the corporations, the lack of effective democratic control on their activities, and the consequent need to establish a more effective set of constraints. It is suggested that internally the corporations are tending to by-pass the legislatures and other representative institutions, while externally the multinationals are integrating sectors of economies across states, and employing a management which may owe primary loyalty to the corporation and not the state in which managers are based. The emergence of the multinationals therefore not only seriously challenges many of our cherished political institutions and procedures, it also confronts our patterns of thinking about the sovereign state which have been inherited from the 16th century. In that they escape from the constraints of national boundaries and representative institutions it is alleged that the corporations are rendering obsolescent our traditional concepts of both state and sovereignty. Much of this argument is neatly encapsulated in the evocative titles of such scholarly works as Beyond the Nation State and Sovereignty at Bay.

scholarly journals Afterword: Interrogating naturalisation, naturalised uncertainty and anxious states

Ethnicities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 395-407
Author(s):  
Anne-Marie Fortier
Keyword(s):  
Political Ideology ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Neoliberal Governance ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
And Migration ◽  
The One

This afterword addresses four broad questions raised by this special issue: uncertainty as a mode of governance, the ontological politics of naturalisation, the citizen-noncitizen distinction, and performative (anxious) states. First, taking uncertainty as a mode of neoliberal governance as the starting point of analysis, this afterword invites the scrutiny of the ways in which the artifice and uncertainty of citizenship are concealed or rendered irrelevant in naturalisation processes. Second, the contributions to this special issue consider naturalisation as a social and political process, rather than solely as a legal status. Pushing this conception further, this afterword considers naturalisation as transactional in two ways: on the one hand, migrants navigate a number of formal and informal requirements and ‘tests’, where some transactions are needed along the way, be they financial, practical, or symbolic. On the other hand, transactions will also occur in the translation of political ideology into policy. Third, naturalisation regimes both blur and reify the citizen-noncitizen and the citizen-migrant distinctions. Distinctions which this afterword unpacks by unravelling the assumed separation between citizenship and migration. How are citizens and migrants migratised? How are migrants and citizens citizenised? Fourth, a further element of the analysis concerns how state-citizen relations are enacted and by extension, how the state itself is ‘made up’ and ‘anxious’. The affective politics of ‘anxious states’ are telling of the frames of desire of naturalisation, which are founded on a threefold principle: the desirability of citizenship, the desire for desirable citizens, and the desirability of the state itself.

scholarly journals Justifying Secession in Catalonia: Resolving Grievances or a Means to a Better Future?

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 453-464
Author(s):  
Anwen Elias ◽  
Núria Franco-Guillén
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Data ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
The Creation

This article advances understandings of secessionist strategies by examining how and why secessionist movements make the case for creating a new sovereign state. It draws on new empirical data to examine the ways in which pro-independence parties in Catalonia have justified their calls for the creation of an independent Catalan Republic between 2008 and 2018. The findings challenge the widespread scholarly assumption that secessionist mobilisation is underpinned by grievances—cultural, economic, and political—against the state. We find that arguments for an independent Catalonia rarely include cultural claims. Instead, independence is advocated as a way of resolving political and economic grievances and of creating a better, more democratic, and just Catalan society. Such justifications are highly influenced by the political context in which pro-independence parties try to advance towards secession. These insights advance on extant explanations of secessionist mobilisation by highlighting the distinctive nature of, and the motives for, secessionist claims.

Orthodox Churches and the ‘Othering’ of Islam and Muslims in Today’s Balkans

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-401
Author(s):  
Egdūnas Račius
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Church

Abstract The article focuses on the relation between the socio-legal status of national Orthodox Churches and their role in the legal, institutional and social ‘othering’ of Islam and ethnic groups of Muslims in three Balkans countries, namely, Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Serbia. The research reveals that the state-pursued construction of national identity and politics of belonging are expressly permeated by ethno-confessional nationalism, which is at the core of the deep-running tensions between the dominant ethnic group and the marginalized Muslims. There is an alliance between the political and the Church elites to keep ethnic groups of Muslim background either altogether outside the ‘national Us’ or at least at its outer margins.

Normative Initiatives and Demilitarization: A Third System Approach

1980 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 339-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Falk
Keyword(s):  
System Approach ◽  
The State ◽  
State System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
The Third ◽  
Creative Space ◽  
Political Structures

This paper explores and identifies “creative space” in the struggle against militarization. Taking into account the political structures and restraints of different polities, the author examines normative initiatives that challenge the root assumptions of militarization and that can be linked to actual social forces working for principled demilitarization. The author points to the primacy of the Third System in this effort. He argues that, at the present time, the First System (the state system and its support infrastructure) is supportive of the underlying logic of militarization, that the Second System (the UN and regional international institutes) being a dependency of the First System is unable to implement demilitarization initiatives, and that only the Third System (represented by people acting individually and collectively through voluntary institutions) is able to sustain normative initiatives of consequence to demilitarization. Normative initiatives relevant to demilitarization undertaken in the Third System can aid in mobilizing effective opposition to militarization in all three systems by altering the normative climate, thereby producing new “creative space” for political innovation. Finally, the author provides examples of the most promising Third System normative initiatives at the global, regional; sovereign state and individual levels.

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