Role of China in Rohingya Crisis

The research paper focuses investigates the geo-political moves from the Chinese perspective whether there is a possibility for China to succeed in their negotiating acts between Bangladesh and Myanmar, which chronologically provides: a background to find the origin of the problem, clarifies reasons so important as a negotiator in this issue, the possible outcomes of the negotiation process and how it may affect China’s political standing with a series of research questions and problem statement. The researcher primarily denounces the conventional ideas that China only prefers to look after Myanmar’s interest or Sino-Myanmar relationship. Methodology section briefly analyzes the nature of the research and the type of data are used to justify researcher’s alternative views. The researcher demonstrates a comparative picture between Bangladesh and Myanmar in terms of their economic, political and military relationship with China both nations equally from their geo-political standing. Finally, the researcher describes to predict the possible outcomes of the current negotiation process considering Chinese involvement in Humanitarian aspects, steps taken by the Myanmar Military regime in repatriating the Rohingyas, Why does the democratic reform process so necessary for China as a negotiator, What Myanmar must do to regain the trust Rohingya citizens and how the current situation is endangering the Chinese diplomacy or why a worsening scenario between China and Myanmar may arise. All the findings and analysis inherently support the author’s alternative view and duly answer the research questions. Finally, the researcher discussed about the common lessons learned so far from international relations perspective. 

The Relationship between Foreign Aid and Democratization in Myanmar in respect to Civil Society

<p>Since 2010, Myanmar has been making a transition to a democratic country after 40 years under successive military regimes. The semi-civilian government led by President U TheinSein has been in charge of Myanmar since the democratic reform is carried out. After Myanmar's new government has carried out its democratic reform for 2 years, international assistance has come in Myanmar to assist Myanmar's democratization in 2012 unlike before 2010. Western donors who were not active in providing aid in Myanmar became enthusiastic to help Myanmar's democratization in various ways. Civil society in Myanmar is still small and informally organized to participate as a strong actor in Myanmar's democratization. Democratic aid to nurture civil society in Myanmar, which has been repressed for long time, became an important aid to strengthen democracy in Myanmar. This thesis will analyse the relation between democratic aid through civil society and democratization in Myanmar. It is based on recently completed in-country research involving document analysis and semi-structured interviews. The paper investigates what is the impact of democratic aid through civil society on Myanmar's democratization process. The findings of this thesis indicate that democratic aid was not delivered in Myanmar under the successive military regimes to impose democratization. Democratic aid has started to be delivered again after the Myanmar government started its process of democratization mostly due to domestic factors, such as people's dissatisfaction with the military governments. When western donors started supporting the democratization process in Myanmar, they provided democratic assistance to sustain local civil society organisations in Myanmar in order to act as a check and balance to the Myanmar government and to make it more accountable to the citizens. Democratic assistance towards civil society has been promoting the role of civil society organisations in politics, creating a platform for communication between the government and local civil society organisations to increase the all-inclusiveness in Myanmar's democratization process. With the democratic assistance from western donors, local civil society organisations became more developed and started working as one of the check and balance actors in Myanmar's politics. Thus, democratic assistance to civil society has increased the sustainability of local civil society organisations in Myanmar to participate in the democratization process. However, democratic assistance to civil society has only started recently, in 2012, and there are challenges in providing assistance to civil society to promote democratization. If those challenges can be avoided in delivering aid to civil society, the assistance towards civil society can have a better impact on democratization in Myanmar.</p>

The Relationship between Foreign Aid and Democratization in Myanmar in respect to Civil Society

<p>Since 2010, Myanmar has been making a transition to a democratic country after 40 years under successive military regimes. The semi-civilian government led by President U TheinSein has been in charge of Myanmar since the democratic reform is carried out. After Myanmar's new government has carried out its democratic reform for 2 years, international assistance has come in Myanmar to assist Myanmar's democratization in 2012 unlike before 2010. Western donors who were not active in providing aid in Myanmar became enthusiastic to help Myanmar's democratization in various ways. Civil society in Myanmar is still small and informally organized to participate as a strong actor in Myanmar's democratization. Democratic aid to nurture civil society in Myanmar, which has been repressed for long time, became an important aid to strengthen democracy in Myanmar. This thesis will analyse the relation between democratic aid through civil society and democratization in Myanmar. It is based on recently completed in-country research involving document analysis and semi-structured interviews. The paper investigates what is the impact of democratic aid through civil society on Myanmar's democratization process. The findings of this thesis indicate that democratic aid was not delivered in Myanmar under the successive military regimes to impose democratization. Democratic aid has started to be delivered again after the Myanmar government started its process of democratization mostly due to domestic factors, such as people's dissatisfaction with the military governments. When western donors started supporting the democratization process in Myanmar, they provided democratic assistance to sustain local civil society organisations in Myanmar in order to act as a check and balance to the Myanmar government and to make it more accountable to the citizens. Democratic assistance towards civil society has been promoting the role of civil society organisations in politics, creating a platform for communication between the government and local civil society organisations to increase the all-inclusiveness in Myanmar's democratization process. With the democratic assistance from western donors, local civil society organisations became more developed and started working as one of the check and balance actors in Myanmar's politics. Thus, democratic assistance to civil society has increased the sustainability of local civil society organisations in Myanmar to participate in the democratization process. However, democratic assistance to civil society has only started recently, in 2012, and there are challenges in providing assistance to civil society to promote democratization. If those challenges can be avoided in delivering aid to civil society, the assistance towards civil society can have a better impact on democratization in Myanmar.</p>

Signaling Democratic Progress through Electoral System Reform in Post-Communist States

The international community invests heavily in democracy promotion, but these efforts sometimes embolden leaders not interested in true democratic reform. We develop and test a formal model explaining why this occurs in the context of electoral system reform—one of the most important signals of democratic quality. Our formal model characterizes leaders as either truly reform minded or pseudo-reformers, those who increase electoral system proportionality in order to receive international community benefits while engaging in electoral fraud. We hypothesize that the international community will be more (less) likely to detect fraud when leaders decrease (increase) proportionality, regardless of whether there is evidence of numerical fraud. Using a mixed-methods approach with cross-national and case study data from post-Communist states, we find that the international community is generally less likely to detect fraud following an increase in proportionality and vice versa. We suggest that democracy promoters over-reward perceived democratic progress such that pseudo-reformers often benefit.

Why Non-Democracy Engages with Western Democracy-Promotion Programs

ABSTRACT Between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s, the Chinese government was distinctly open to the Western offer of democracy-assistance programs. It cooperated with a number of Western organizations to improve the rule of law, village elections, administrative capacity, and civil society in China. Why did the Chinese government engage with democracy promoters who tried to develop these democratic attributes within China? The author argues that the government intended to use Western aid to its advantage. The Chinese Communist Party had launched governance reforms to strengthen its regime legitimacy, and Chinese officials found that Western democracy assistance could be used to facilitate their own governance-reform programs. The article traces the process of how the government’s strategic intention translated into policies of selective openness, and includes evidence from firsthand interviews, propaganda materials, and research by Chinese experts. The findings show how democracy promoters and authoritarian leaders have different expectations of the effects of limited democratic reform within nondemocratic systems. Empirically, reflecting on the so-called golden years of China’s engagement with the West sheds new light on the Chinese Communist Party’s survival strategy through authoritarian legitimation.

Perestroika in the USSR: Between the ideological concept and reality

The article presents the result of reflection on the contradictions between the ideological and theoretical substantiation of the concepts “acceleration” and “perestroika” and their real results, which became one of the most important reasons of collapse of the socialist system and the USSR. The conclusion is drawn that these contradictions were caused by the desire of the initiators of democratic transformations to resolve the accumulated problems in the political, social, and economic spheres of the country through ideological motivation and agitation and propaganda stimulation of the organizational potential of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the active part of Soviet society. However, the appeal to the subjective factor as the determining prerequisite for the success of “perestroika” was not supported by its holistic ideological justification. Attempts to fit theory into the processes of democratic reform of the USSR through conceptual de-Stalinization, appeal to Lenin’s legacy and use of the potential of “glasnost” led to the loss of ideological continuity and ideological split between the party and society. As a result, the subjective potential that was supposed to become the main driving force behind the construction of socialism “with a human face” was undermined and neutralized.

Measuring Epistemic Deliberation on Polarized Issues: The Case of Abortion Provision in Ireland

This paper compares the debate quality in the plenary sessions of an Irish Citizens’ Assembly and an Irish parliamentary committee to assess the epistemic effects of public deliberation on a contentious subject: abortion. The unusual occurrence of a similar process of detailed discussion on the same topic in different institutions at around the same time (in 2016–2017) allows us to compare the deliberative capacities of these institutions and thus contribute to discussions on the appropriateness of an increasingly debated democratic reform: assigning political offices by lot. We suggest that the epistemic effect of deliberation on abortion should facilitate nuanced multi-layered discussion that is both ‘deeper’ in being based on multi-faceted arguments and ‘wider’ in terms of a more accommodative view. We anticipate that these effects should be more pronounced in the more deliberative, less polarized, environment of a citizens’ assembly rather than in a parliamentary committee. The analysis deploys the psychological concept of ‘cognitive complexity’. We find that members of the Citizens’ Assembly demonstrate a deeper cognitively complex grasp of the subject matter. In contrast, experts and parliamentarians tend to adjust their mode of delivery at a parliamentary committee reflecting the conflictual and strategic aspects of political debates in such a forum.