Hessische Stiftung für Friedens- und Konfliktforschung (HSFK)
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The article studies civil wars and trust dynamics from two perspectives. It looks, first, at rebel governance during ongoing armed conflict and, second, at mass mobilisation against the regime in post-conflict societies. Both contexts are marked by extraordinarily high degrees of uncertainty given continued, or collective memory of, violence and repression.
But what happens to trust relations under conditions of extreme uncertainty? Intuitively, one would assume that trust is shaken or even substantially eroded in such moments, as political and social orders are questioned on a fundamental level and threaten to collapse. However, while it is true that some forms of trust are under assault in situations of civil war and mass protests, we find empirical evidence which suggests that these situations also give rise to the formation of other kinds of trust. We argue that, in order to detect and explain these trust dynamics in contexts of extreme uncertainty, there should be more systematic studies of: (a) synchronous dynamics between different actors and institutions which imply trust dynamics happening simultaneously, (b) diachronous dynamics and the sequencing of trust dynamics over several phases of violent conflict or episodes of contention, as well as long-term structural legacies of the past. In both dimensions, microlevel relations, as well as their embeddedness in larger structures, help explain how episodes of (non-)violent contention become a critical juncture for political and social trust.
A growing number of defense-industrial 3D printing fairs, print-a-thons and the amount of defense dollars, particularly in the US, going into the technology of 3D printing speak to the fact that the defense industry and some countries’ armed forces recognize the great potential of the technology. 3D printing indeed allows the quicker, cheaper, and easier development of weapons, and even entirely new weapon designs. This applies to the full range of weapons categories: Small arms and light weapons (e.g. guns, guns, guns and grenade launchers), conventional weapon systems (drones, tanks, missiles, hypersonic scramjets) – and possibly even weapons of mass destruction.
Over the last three decades, countries across the Andean region have moved toward legal recognition of indigenous justice systems. This turn toward legal pluralism, however, has been and continues to be heavily contested. The working paper explores a theoretical perspective that aims at analyzing and making sense of this contentious process by assessing the interplay between conflict and (mis)trust. Based on a review of the existing scholarship on legal pluralism and indigenous justice in the Andean region, with a particular focus on the cases of Bolivia and Ecuador, it is argued that manifest conflict over the contested recognition of indigenous justice can be considered as helpful and even necessary for the deconstruction of mistrust of indigenous justice. Still, such conflict can also help reproduce and even reinforce mistrust, depending on the ways in which conflict is dealt with politically and socially. The exploratory paper suggests four proposition that specify the complex and contingent relationship between conflict and (mis)trust in the contested negotiation of pluralist justice systems in the Andean region.
Im Oktober war in der FAZ ein Mahnruf an das Fach Politikwissenschaft zu lesen: Zentrale Fragen der Politikwissenschaft und der politischen Theorie nach den normativen Grundlagen menschlichen Zusammenlebens würden zugunsten ökonomisch verwertbarer Ergebnisse verdrängt. Mit zunehmender Ökonomisierung und Mathematisierung verliere die Politikwissenschaft die Theorieentwicklung aus dem Blick, so der Vorwurf. Empirisch unterfütterte, gehaltvolle Theorien sind aber Voraussetzung für fundierte Politikberatung. Daher geht mit dieser Ökonomisierung der Politikwissenschaft auch ein Verlust zur normativen Bewertung des Erforschten einher. Haben wir der Gesellschaft also noch etwas Substantielles mitzuteilen, oder beschränken wir uns auf die empirische Analyse dessen was ist, ohne zu fragen was sein sollte?...
Die Intervention Russlands auf der Krim im März dieses Jahres und die derzeitige Situation in der Ostukraine haben zu einer Diskussion darüber geführt, ob es sich hierbei um einen „Fall für die Schutzverantwortung“ handelt. Als zentrales Argument für sein Eingreifen führt Russland schließlich den Schutz bedrohter russischer Zivilisten an. In einem Gastbeitrag erläutert Roland Harris, warum die Intervention nicht mit dem Schutz der Menschenrechte der ethnischen Russen rechtfertigt werden kann.
Repertoires of counter-contention: conceptualizing institutional responses to social movements
(2016)
The ways in which political authorities respond to societal challenges is a key element in the interaction between social movements and state institutions. Two conceptual distinctions are important when studying such repertoires of counter-contention: authorities’ responses may (1) aim at either including or excluding challengers, and they may (2) either respect their autonomy or try to control them.
Bereits heute werden bewaffnete Drohnen von vielen Armeen eingesetzt, um Gegner über tausende Kilometer hinweg per Joystick zu töten. Auch die Bundesregierung hat Anfang dieses Jahres vorgeschlagen, diese Systeme für die Bundeswehr anzuschaffen und ist sich offenbar auch schon mit den Amerikanern einig. Doch die Pläne stießen auf große öffentliche Kritik und offensichtlich sah man sich gezwungen, die Entscheidung über den Kauf bewaffneter unbemannter Kampfsysteme zumindest offiziell in die nächste Legislaturperiode zu verschieben...
In der Debatte über die internationale Schutzverantwortung, die Libyen-Intervention der NATO und auch über Syrien spiegelt sich die theoretische Debatte über die Existenz einer universellen Moral und einer Verpflichtung zur „Rettung Fremder“ wieder. Um die gesamte Thematik in ihrer Komplexität zu erfassen, muss die moralische Argumentation von Befürwortern und Gegner betrachtet werden, und zwar auch anhand der praktischen politischen Diskurse und nicht nur in den abstrakten Sphären der politischen Theorie. Auch muss anerkannt werden, dass Menschenrechtsschutz immer Einmischung bedeutet, allerdings nicht zwingend militärischer Art.
This article addresses concerns that the growth in global governance may be bringing with it a decline in the significance of democratic sources of political legitimacy. One approach in evaluating such concerns is to ask whether the respective patterns of legitimation for private and public authority differ or whether they refer to a similar set of normative standards. Private transnational governance regimes provide useful contexts in which to assess the presumed democratic erosion. They seem, almost of themselves, to make the case for such a decline: in them regulatory authority is exercised by non-state actors who, by their very nature, lack the kind of authorization afforded by the democratic procedures that legitimize state-based regulation; in addition, they are intrinsically linked to the notion of politics as a form of problem-solving rather than as the exercise of power. Given these characteristics, when governance arrangements of this kind are subjected to criticism, one would expect justificatory responses to relate primarily to performance, with normative criteria such as fundamental individual rights and the imperative for democratic procedure playing only a minor role. On the basis of a qualitative content analysis, the study tests three ideal-type patterns of legitimation for plausibility. The case selected for examination is the recent controversy surrounding the hybrid governance regime that operates to prevent the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport. The debate offers the possibility of a ‘nutshell’ comparison of the respective patterns of legitimation used in criticizing and justifying state and non-state regulatory authority. This comparison yields two findings. The first is that the values used to appraise the state-based components of the sporting world’s hybrid regulatory regime do not differ systematically from those used to appraise the private elements: contestation and justification in both cases are founded on normative criteria relating to fundamental individual rights and democratic procedure and not just on performance-related considerations. The second finding is that justificatory grounds of the first type do not appear to be diminishing in importance vis-à-vis those of the second.
In der diesjährigen Rede zur Lage der Nation hat Präsident Obama erneut einen relativ hohen Anteil seiner begrenzten Redezeit auf Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik verwendet – und damit den sich über seine zwei Amtszeiten abzeichnenden Trend bekräftigt. Exakt ein Viertel seiner knapp 6.500 Worte (für die er dieses Jahr 59 Minuten und 56 Sekunden benötigte) füllten Themen wie IS und Syrien/Irak, der Abzug aus Afghanistan, die Ukraine-Krise und russische Aggression, das Tauwetter in der Karibik, die Verhandlungen rund um das iranische Atomprogramm, Cybersicherheit, Ebola, Guantanamo und die „größte Gefahr für zukünftige Generationen“: Klimawandel....