The Anti-Bureaucratic Ghost in China's Bureaucratic Machine

The Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) ideology, rooted in its foundational struggles, explicitly denounces “bureaucratism” (guanliaozhuyi) as an intrinsic ailment of bureaucracy. Yet while the revolutionary Party has blasted bureaucratism, its revolutionary regime has had to find a way to coexist with bureaucracy, which is a requisite for effective governance. An anti-bureaucratic ghost thus dwells in the machinery of China's bureaucratic state. We analyse the CCP's anti-bureaucratism through two steps. First, we perform a historical analysis of the Party's anti-bureaucratic ideology, teasing out its substance and emphasizing its roots in and departures from European Marxism and Leninism. Second, we trace both the continuity and evolution in the Party's anti-bureaucratic rhetoric, taking an interactive approach that combines close reading with computational analysis of the entire corpus of the People's Daily (1947–2020). We find striking endurance as well as subtle shifts in the substance of the CCP's anti-bureaucratic ideology. We show that bureaucratism is an umbrella term that expresses the revolutionary Party's anxiety about losing its popular legitimacy. Yet the substance of the Party's concern evolved from commandism and revisionism under Mao, to corruption and formalism during reform. The Party's ongoing critiques of bureaucratism and formalism unfold in parallel fashion with its efforts to standardize, regularize and institutionalize the state.

Social Development and Revolution in Iran

The scholarship about the consequences of social revolutions contends that social revolutions boost state capacity and strengthen the state’s developmental projects. Social justice and addressing the needs of ordinary citizens also were central themes in the discourse of the Iranian revolution and the Islamic Republic that emerged as the post-revolutionary regime with the fall of the monarchy in Iran. In this essay, I assess the performance of the post-revolutionary state in Iran according to different development indicators. Specifically, I compare the record of the post-revolutionary regime with the pre-revolutionary regime. My examination of various indicators relating to health, education, poverty, income inequality, and housing presents more of a mixed result than the overall improvement that previous scholarship anticipated and that the post-revolutionary regime had promised. Furthermore, the evidence points to declines in some important areas of development and welfare provision. Based on this analysis, I propose directions for future research about the developmental outcome of revolutions.

Revolutionary legality and the Burkinabè insurrection

ABSTRACTCoup leaders often purport to restore constitutional order. During Burkina Faso's 2014 ‘insurrection', however, Blaise Compaoré's opponents advanced detailed (international) legal arguments that significantly constrained their subsequent conduct. Theirs was to be a legal revolution. This article situates this stance within Burkina Faso's distinctive history of urban protest, whilst emphasising under-analysed international sources for the insurrection. ‘Insurgent’ lawyers, it argues, used international instruments to reinvigorate longstanding activist attempts to reconcile constitutional rights with a language of popular justice promoted by the revolutionary regime of Thomas Sankara (1983–7). After the insurrection, however, their emphasis on legality was used by Compaoré's supporters to expose the transitional authorities’ double-standards. Meanwhile, insurgent lawyers working for the transition had to work hard to reconcile (international) legal justifications for the insurrection with the expedient politics needed to defend the new dispensation.

After the Revolution: State, Civil Society, and Democratization in Armenia and Georgia

In 2003 and 2018, mass protests triggered the collapse of authoritarian regimes in Georgia and Armenia, respectively. In both cases, civil society organizations (CSOs) played an important role in laying the groundwork and organizing the protests. Following the toppling of semi-autocratic leaders, reform-oriented governments took over in both countries. Yet, the way civil society engaged the new rulers differed considerably. Whereas in Georgia, former civil society leaders were often absorbed into the new government, Armenian civil society has kept its distance from the new political leadership. In this paper, we attempt to explain why state-civil society relations after the revolutions have developed in different directions in these two Soviet successor states. We argue that three conditions explain differences in engagement with the new governments: CSOs pre-revolutionary cooperation with the political opposition, Western governments support for civil society before and after the political transitions, and the degree to which CSOs represent and are rooted in the general public. As a consequence, Georgia’s post-revolutionary regime lacked the checks and balances that CSOs usually provide, allowing it to sacrifice democratization on the altar of modernization. In Armenia, in contrast, CSOs have maintained a critical stance and continued to hold the government accountable.

Nancy Morejón, Nicolás Guillén y el cimarronaje aún necesario en Cuba contemporánea

This intersectional and epistemological study of Nancy Morejón’s 1982 Nación y mestizaje en Nicolás Guillén resolves the tension, which intrigued most of her critics, between her political commitment and sophisticated lyricism. The author examines Morejón’s unquestionable revolutionary support and adhesion to Guillén’s conceptualization of la nación mestiza—instrumental for the cohesiveness promoted by the revolutionary regime—through the comprehensive analysis of her family socioeconomic background, the coincidence of her arrival to adolescence with the revolutionary triumph in 1959, and her affiliation to the editorial group El Puente (1961–65). Intersectionality allows an understanding of how Morejón’s self-identification and self-representation as a black revolutionary female writer condition her elaboration of counternarratives that thwart the Eurocentric and patriarchally constructed national history. The essay reveals rarely examined contradictions between Morejón’s and Guillén’s poetry and discusses how the writers’ shared essentialist views on nationhood fail to ultimately deconstruct the hegemonic Eurocentric epistemology they vowed to upend. (In Spanish; an English translation is available online)

La Guardia de la Revolución Islámica Iraní: análisis de su naturaleza, poder y cometidos

Founded after the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, the Corps of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard of Iran has evolved far beyond its original foundations as an ideological guardian of the nascent revolutionary regime. Today, it functions as a socio-political-economic conglomerate, whose influence extends to all areas of Iranian life. Its members have articulated a vision of the Islamic Republic that they feel committed to defending, becoming guarantors of the ideological purity of the regime whose supreme leader rests on its support, while increasingly depending on it to survive.

Research on the importance of monetary work to the political development of the Western Hunan and Hubei base areas

during the seven years revolution in the Western Hunan Hubei revolutionary base, currency experienced four stages of construction and development, and became the economic tool of revolutionary regime, and made considerable contribution; however, the importance of politics to financial work is obvious here. Due to the mistakes caused by the left leaning in the revolutionary work, the monetary work in the revolutionary base area in Western Hunan and Hubei has been seriously affected The final result of the influence is to withdraw from the circulation field with the transfer of the main body of the revolutionary team.

Revolutionary Upheaval

Chapter six examines revolutionary upheaval in the last years of Eduardo Frei’s presidency and Beatriz’s role in it while remaining committed to the ELN’s Bolivian project and Cuba’s revolutionary regime. It describes the fragmentation of the Left and the growing specter of violence in Chile, characterized by the government’s reliance on force and a growing propensity on the left to confront it. It asks how Beatriz responded, noting the role she played as a confidant of Chile’s revolutionary left leaders, her father, and Cuba’s intelligence apparatus through her love affair with one of its principal officials. Beatriz’s internationalist preoccupations and her age separated her from local developments and youth movements. Yet, as a lecturer at a new public health department, recruiter for the ELN and collaborator of the MIR, she was involved and complicit in political and societal upheaval – serving as a mediator, facilitator, and bridge between different factions. She was nevertheless pessimistic and depressed about the pace of change. When the ELN ran into trouble in Bolivia and was progressively abandoned by Cuba, her romanticization of guerrilla insurgencies diminished. Like many others on the radicalized left, she was also sceptical about electoral strategies for bringing about radical change.