Freedom of expression, accountability and development in the Arab region

Mechanisms for ensuring government transparency and accountability have yet to become established in the Arab region, where oil rents and security rents have traditionally enabled governments to provide jobs and services without having to rely heavily, if at all, on raising revenue through personal income tax on citizens. Yet various forms of resource mobilisation, which will be needed in future, are likely to require a greater degree of accountability from those responsible for such mobilisation. This paper considers whether a move in this direction is under way. It reviews government approaches to freedom of expression in the media and among non-governmental organisations. It notes changes that have taken place in this sphere since the start of the 1990s, not all of them positive, and concludes that many more steps remain to be taken if media organisations and NGOs are to exert pressure for accountability on behalf of citizens, and especially the disadvantaged

Do Associations Support Authoritarian Rule? Tentative Answers from Algeria, Mozambique, and Vietnam

Whether associations help to democratise authoritarian rule or support those in power is a contested issue that so far lacks a cross-regional perspective. Drawing on relational sociology, this paper explores the impact of state power in Algeria, Mozambique, and Vietnam on associations and vice versa. We focus on decision-making in associations and on three policy areas - welfare policy concerning HIV/AIDS, economic policy concerning small and mediumsized enterprises, policies concerning gender equality and the rights of women and sexual minorities - to assess the relations between associations and the state's infrastructural and discursive power. Most associations interviewed by us in the three countries accept or do not openly reject the state's and/or the state ruling party's various forms of interference in internal decision-making processes. Whereas associations in Algeria and Vietnam help to maintain the state's control through welfare provision, associations in Mozambique can weaken this form of infrastructural state power. Moreover, business and professionals' associations in all three countries help maintain the state's control through limited participation, i.e. another form of infrastructural state power. Finally, associations in all three countries support the state's discourse and policies in the area of gender equality and women's rights, though in all three countries at least some NGOs help weaken this form of state power

Social Movements and International Relations: A Relational Framework

Social movements are increasingly recognized as significant features of contemporary world politics, yet to date their treatment in international relations theory has tended to obfuscate the considerable diversity of these social formations, and the variegated interactions they may establish with state actors and different structures of world order. Highlighting the difficulties conventional liberal and critical approaches have in transcending conceptions of movements as moral entities, the article draws from two under-exploited literatures in the study of social movements in international relations, the English School and Social Systems Theory, to specify a wider range of analytical interactions between different categories of social movements and of world political structures. Moreover, by casting social movement phenomena as communications, the article opens international relations to consideration of the increasingly diverse trajectories and second-order effects produced by social movements as they interact with states, intergovernmental institutions, and transnational actors

Aktivisme islam : pendekatan teori gerakan sosial/ Edit.: Quintan Wiktorowicz

x, 389 hal.; 21 cm