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This article explores whether China's political and economic relations with African countries constitute a factor in undermining Africa's path to liberal democracy or not. It addresses the question of why democratic values like human rights could not be sustained in some African countries. Along this line, could China's economic influence harm the democratisation of the African continent? The argument of this article is that differing perceptions of democracy coupled with China's entry in Africa as an alternative to the West have provided a context for several African countries to elude the liberal democratic path. The article concludes that, in providing them with economic support, China has introduced concepts of an alternative model of government to several African countries that had initially embraced liberal democracy. China's close relations with Africa thus have been a game-changer for the post-Cold War liberal order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with missing persons in Azerbaijan. The issue of missing persons occurred because of the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno- Karabakh region. About 5,000 people from all sides were reported as having gone missing by 2020. This article firstly contextualises the democratic and human rights situation in Azerbaijan since independence to understand the backdrop to the issues and why little progress has been made. It then examines what has been done, what the institutional framework is, and what the various problems are. It provides details on the issues concerning the search for, recovery, and identification of the missing. A newly reconstituted domestic State Commission for Prisoners of War, Hostages and Missing Persons has begun operating in the country but is not fully functional and needs to be more open and transparent, its membership ought to include civil society and the families of the missing, and it needs to do more actual searching. Ultimately, if progress is to occur, a process involving all parties to the conflict must be established. The article also finds that there are problems with the law concerning missing persons and that law reform is needed as the law is incomplete, vague, and complicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the Special Section dealing with conflict related missing persons in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. It examines the context to the conflicts in the region and brings to the fore the fact that the breakup of the Soviet Union has had a massive legacy in terms of the conflicts it spawned, over identity matters and various territorial claims, and how that vestige lingers today. The article examines why the three countries are useful to analyse comparatively, what we can learn from them and how these issues are also reflective of the democratic and human rights status in each. This article ends by discussing the general problems relating to missing persons in the three countries, and why the law and the processes to deal with missing persons in these and many other countries around the world need to be reformed. The focus of each of the three country articles is then more inward-looking. They explore the situation in each country concerning missing persons, the institutions that have been established to deal with those matters, the laws that deal with missing persons, and what is needed to make progress on all the issues relating to missing persons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the issues associated with missing persons in Georgia, which are deeply interrelated with the conflicts over the disputed territories of Abkhazia since 1992 and South Ossetia from 1991. The article examines the historical, democratic, and human rights context of these issues in Georgia to understand the situation in the country and its effects on how the missing are dealt with. The article deals with the various processes that are working on the missing. The legislation concerning missing persons in Georgia is reviewed and found to be scattered, incomplete and in need of reform. The article also recommends that Georgia allocate more resources to its efforts and better assist the families of the missing. It is also recommended that a Families' Needs Assessment be carried out and that an Office of Missing Persons be established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Address terms are closely related to the conceptualisation of hierarchical relations in a speech community, so, since – at least in Western societies – tendencies towards a flattening of hierarchies have been noted (cf. Mair, 2006), we expect changes in this domain. Some evidence has been produced for German, American and British English, but empirical insights on address choice in Indian English are lacking to date. As it tends to be a conservative variety (cf. e.g. Collins, 2012), we might expect resistance to change. The study makes a novel use of discourse completion tasks to investigate ongoing change using an 'apparent-time' approach. Our findings support the view of Indian English as conservative and of American English as changing most clearly towards informalisation, visible in the increasing use of informal attention getters (hey!). However, evidence of recent change is otherwise not as pronounced as expected and actually absent regarding pronoun choice in German. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an empirical study of the causal factors of electoral violence in gubernatorial elections in Oyo state from 2007 to 2015 and its implications on the state's democratisation process. The methodology is qualitative, drawing data from primary and secondary sources. Data were analysed using content analysis. The article adopted political clientelism and patronage as the theoretical framework. Findings revealed that the nature of politics based on clientelism and patronage and the politicisation of leadership tussle of the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) were among the factors responsible for violence in the state during the period of the study. It is recommended that the establishment of a Joint Security Consultative Council can help in securing future elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the somewhat paradoxical situation that during the reform years in Myanmar, Western optimism about democratisation existed side-by-side with increasingly dire reports about the human rights abuses against the Rohingya. In order to understand this puzzle, the article analyses the Norwegian government's policy shift towards Myanmar, and its deepening engagement up until the landmark 2015 elections. The article argues that the widespread characterisation of the conflict in Rakhine as 'intercommunal', rooted in poverty and underdevelopment in Rakhine State, enabled the narrative of progress and democratisation to be upheld. This prevented actors from seeing the treatment of Rohingya through an 'atrocity prevention lens', and thereby from seeing Myanmar as a case where the responsibility to protect should be applied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy in Taiwan today appears consolidated and of high quality. Much writing on Taiwan's democratisation explains this outcome by pointing to aspects of its modernisation, but an underappreciated cause is its well-institutionalised party system, which in comparison to most other Third Wave democracies is a model of competitiveness, consistency, and stability. The sources of party system institutionalisation (PSI) in Taiwan can be traced back to two factors: the legacies of the martial-law-era KMT regime, and the emergence of the China question as a fundamental, polarising divide in Taiwanese politics. High PSI has ensured a credible alternative to incumbents in each election, enhanced the responsiveness of governments to citizen demands, and encouraged the greater provision of public goods and development of broad, programmatic policies rather than narrowly targeted, clientelist ones. Thus, Taiwan's democracy is consolidated because of, rather than despite, the legacies of the pre-democratic era and the China factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I present an account of mass atrocity prevention based on just war theory precepts. This account entails comparisons among policy options and requires selecting the politically feasible option that has the greatest chance of avoiding atrocities. Adopting such an account of atrocity prevention highlights problems in influential mass atrocity prevention policy reports in that they fail to seriously consider nonviolent civil resistance as a mass atrocity prevention tool. Given that sometimes actors may be unwilling to live under the status quo, and agitate for reform by violent or nonviolent means, nonviolence is generally the preferable policy option. This is because under realistic scenarios, the empirical evidence generally indicates that nonviolent means are more likely to achieve positive outcomes across a range of indicators than violent ones. I illustrate my argument by applying it to strategies for democratisation, and rebut objections. Yet, nonviolent civil resistance is risky, and so revolutionary leaders and their supporters should weigh carefully the chances of success and the trade-offs of nonviolent resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The perception of Turkey as a model of attractive country in the region has started to change in the recent years. In the first decade of the JDP rule Turkey was seen as an emerging power with its strong economy, improving democracy and inspiring foreign policy. However, the developments since the Arab Uprisings in the neighbourhood, Gezi movement at home, end of the Kurdish peace process, as well as coup attempt and subsequent de-democratisation harmed the soft power of Turkey. This study argues that the JDP’s understanding of democracy and democratisation has been full of flaws from the very beginning of its rule. The Turkish example shows that countries can experience subsequent processes of de-democratisation and de-democratisation if governing parties did not endogenise the basic norms of democracy. Therefore, it is argued that the reverse wave of de-democratisation characterises Turkey more than the “selective” processes of democratisation. It is also argued that JDP elite via its discourse has been constructing the West as the ‘Other’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is generally recognised that election management bodies (EMBs) constitute one of the most important institutions needed to sustain Africa's fledgling transition to demo - cratic and constitutional governance. They are needed to ensure that all political actors adhere to the rules of the electoral contest and that the outcome of elections are not predetermined and are based on free and fair processes that reflect the genuine will of the people. However, frequent incidents of post-election violence in which citizens question the role played by the EMBs in the last few years have raised many questions about their role, which has not been systematically and thoroughly investigated. This paper aims to take a critical look at the legal framework relating to the setting up and regulation of EMBs in a selected number of countries in the Eastern and Southern African region to see whether there is any possible connection between the manner in which they are structured and the effectiveness of their operations. Does the legal framework of an EMB have anything to do with the acceptance or non-acceptance of the electoral results of elections organised by the EMB? Are there any lessons that can be learnt by comparing the legal framework of the EMBs of countries where elec- tion results are generally accepted with that of countries where the announcement of election results have often provoked violence? The establishment of an EMB is sup - posed to be a clear sign of a firm commitment by a country to constitutionalism and constitutional democracy. This does not always turn out to be so. From the comparative analysis of the experiences of the selected countries, this study will highlight some of the major lessons that can be drawn in designing EMBs in order to enhance their per - formance and credibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ongoing democratisation process in Myanmar represents one of the most relevant ‘stress tests' for the democratic transition theory. This theory actually considers stateness as a prerequisite for democracy; and, consequently, concentrates mainly on the mode of progression of the state from dictatorship to representative government. We assume, on the contrary, that, particularly after 1989, the very idea of stateness is being questioned more and more (and not only in developing countries). This paper does not intend to add original data relative to Myanmar's recent history. It rather aims to shed some new light on Myanmar's democratisation process, approaching the issue as a specific case-study of democratic transition affected by clustered sovereignty. The introduction will attempt to explain the main methodological prerequisites of the paper. The article will then analyse the three main risk factors affecting the democratization process in Myanmar: (1) the (in)ability to neutralise the autonomous centres of power equipped with means of coercion and return them to a shared political sphere; (2) the (in)ability to integrate different intra-group networks in the shared political sphere; (3) the (in)ability to eliminate or at least reduce the social inequalities, detaching them from the shared political sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reassesses notions of‘electoral authoritarianism' as applied to the changed political terrain in Myanmar. It examines the various mechanisms through which the lingering influences of earlier political contestation are being integrated into transitional Myanmar's public and social life. While the evolving Myanmar system is inevitably informed by the dictatorial experience there is a new effort to embrace countercurrents in the shift away from long-term military rule. The argument is that the transitional system mobilises key elements and personnel from the dictatorial period alongside growing opportunities for those who most actively opposed the military dictatorship, including in the pivotal 1988 period. The paradox of political culture under these arrangements means that the notion of a stable electorally authoritarian model needs careful reappraisal. Such stability has been replaced by an appreciation that incremental liberalisation and gradually increasing participation can help to change an entrenched political order. The efforts of the transitional government (2011 to 2015) to implement changes to the economy, the political system and the wider social situation have ensured that creeping reform has become the new norm in a post-authoritarian system where compromise had previously been hard to find. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Myanmar has recently sought a new path for its development, one that includes a constitutional framework, new executive and legislative institutions, greater civil and political freedoms, and the gradual liberalisation of the economy. To help understand the recent history of Myanmar's transitions, this special issue of the European Journal of East Asian Studies offers six articles that analyse the changes from a variety of perspectives and different appropriate theoretical approaches. From democratization to the army's role, from new economic challenges to renewed peace efforts, from the complex interaction with China to historical tensions with India, this diverse set of articles helps clarify the extent to which Myanmar is enjoying a renaissance. The country has peculiar advantages but is also limited by geography, poverty and political history. To forge a new culture of consistent popular participation in democratic life will not be easy or cheap. However, with wise leadership, economic ambition and popular participation the country could become one of Asia's great democratic and social successes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Myanmar has recently sought a new path for its development, one that includes a constitutional framework, new executive and legislative institutions, greater civil and political freedoms, and the gradual liberalisation of the economy. To help understand the recent history of Myanmar's transitions, this special issue of the European Journal of East Asian Studies offers six articles that analyse the changes from a variety of perspectives and different appropriate theoretical approaches. From democratisation to the army's role, from new economic challenges to renewed peace efforts, from the complex interaction with China to historical tensions with India, this diverse set of articles helps clarify the extent to which Myanmar is enjoying a renaissance. The country has peculiar advantages but is also limited by geography, poverty and political history. To forge a new culture of consistent popular participation in democratic life will not be easy or cheap. However, with wise leadership, economic ambition and popular participation the country could become one of Asia's great democratic and social successes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kosovo is a good example of the successes and failures of international efforts to promote democratization. From 1999 to 2008, the territory was an UN-protectorate and democracy promotion was largely in the hands of the international community. Even today, five years after the self-declaration of independence and the acquisition of full sovereignty in September 2012, the influence of the international community is still tremendous. Hopes for the democratic development of the country are largely invested in the young generation. This paper, based on interviews with local and international experts, and a survey of students in Pristina, examines whether the criticisms of the international community also apply to the promotion of political participation by the young generation. It also considers the co-ordination of activities between international organisations and local organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on Frelimo's dominance over party politics and state institutions, this article analyses the issues pertaining to the role of electoral institutions in the consolidation of this dominant position. The authors argue that in order to understand party dominance in Mozambique, it is necessary that there should be an historical perspective linking the present (that is, the constitutional reforms since the 1990s) to the past. These reforms paved the way for ‘democratisation from above’, which has continued ever since. Rather than resolving differences over electoral processes through democratic governance norms and regulatory frameworks, Frelimo has intimidated existing and emerging political parties through its control of electoral governance institutions. Frelimo's electoral success in the first democracy-founding election became an intermittent strategy of choice facilitating its manoeuvring for winning subsequent elections, thus controlling and dominating political life. One outcome of this process is that political horse-trading has generated skewed ‘incentive structures’ that have compromised the role of opposition political parties and electoral governance institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The recent and increasingly prevalent phenomenon of power-sharing in Africa raises questions about its value for state legitimacy, especially as far as elections are concerned. While there are various circumstances that may give rise to power-sharing, comparative insights from the case studies in this article highlight two trends: first, power-sharing following protracted violent conflicts that have been resolved through negotiated settlement; and second, power-sharing following electoral contests that went awry. In both cases, power-sharing has been employed as an instrument for conflict management. The article explores power-sharing experiments in both scenarios, investigating its utility as an instrument of democratisation. However, the results of power-sharing experiments are not uniform: the record is a mixed bag. Also, the context of, and peculiar circumstances in, each country have determined power-sharing outcomes. In post-war situations such as in Burundi and South Africa, power-sharing experiments have bolstered prospects for consociational democracy, institutionalised politics, and nation-building. Conversely, in post-election crisis experiments such as in Kenya and Zimbabwe, power-sharing arrangements have not really served the ideal of consociational democracy but, rather, the interests of political elites, especially their appetite for state power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ideas of the rule of law and constitutionalism have become an intrinsic part of any process of democratisation around the world. This was equally the case in the radical changes that occurred in East-Central Europe (ECE) around the year of 1989. The adherence in the region to a form of "new constitutionalism" has been frequently seen as an indispensable contribution to the processes of democratisation. However, in this too little attention has been paid to the dilemmas, tensions and perverse effects that may emerge in the institutionalisation and practice of new constitutionalism, not least in terms of an enduring tension between constitutionalism as an ordering and stabilising device and democracy as an uncertain and indeterminate process of verification of public views on the common good. The experiences in ECE since 1989 with regard to new constitutionalism are ambiguous. It is undeniable that an emphasis on a higher law with entrenched rights and robust constitutional review has involved important "corrections" of certain outgrowths of democratic politics and in this prevented forms of "tyranny of the majority" or the endangering of the guarantee of universal rights. But it is equally true that new constitutionalism has been adopted at a price, not least with regard to the emergence of more widespread, publicly shared constitutional cultures as well as in terms of underexplored potentials of democratic constitutionalism and endorsement of civic engagement in the region. Democratic dilemmas and perverse effects have emerged in terms of domestic tensions, in particular regarding democratic debilitation, but also stem from tensions with legal orders beyond the national arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Arab Spring is one of the most complex and surprising political developments of the new century, especially after a decade of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab western propaganda. While is too early to properly evaluate the process and its various national apparitions, it is important to see it in a historical context. This article places the Arab Spring firmly within the history of pan Arabism, and the threat it posed to the west and Israel in its earlier, Nasserist phase. The work of Amin, Marfleet and others, is used to frame the current developments, and present the limited view offered from an Israeli perspective, where any democratisation of the Arab world is seen as a threat. This is so despite the obvious influence the Arab Spring had on protest in Israel in Summer 1011, a protest which has now seemingly spent itself; it is fascinating to note that the only protest movement in the Middle East not involving violent clashes with the regime it criticised, is also the one which has not achieved any of its aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an introduction into this EJEAS issue on democratisation and international migration. Third Wave democratisation and the recent unprecedented increase in international labour migration may have the same structural origins, but so far few attempts have been made to link the two research agendas. One explanation might be that existing research on democratisation has neglected the exogenous dimension, and that migration research was preoccupied with destination countries. By drawing from the contributions to this Issue and the literature on norm diffusion, we argue that migrants have the potential to act as norm entrepreneurs and as agents of democratisation. The article maps out three avenues of norm diffusion: Migration can be the cause for changes of political attitudes at the individual level, it can be an enabling factor for collective action and it may lead to institutional change at the national and global level. To further assess how precisely these pathways might support or impede democratisation, more theory-guided empirical studies on the subject are urgently needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution explores the implications of international migration on the research of democratisation processes. It focuses on the notion of democratic citizenship as a set of rights. Democratisation processes are thus conceptualised as processes in which rights are acquired, institutionalised and expanded. Expansion has two aspects: one is the inclusion of new groups of persons into the community of those entitled to rights, the other is the inclusion of new types of rights such as liberal, political, social, economic or cultural rights. Citizenship, which links the entitlement of rights to national belonging, must be rethought in the light of international migration. The repercussions of migration on citizenship rights and citizenship concepts have been explored in the context of labour immigrant incorporation within Western liberal democracies. For East Asia, however, these issues are largely unexplored. Labour migration in East Asia differs in several aspects from the Western template: labour-receiving countries in East Asia include authoritarian regimes as well as democracies in different states of consolidation. Furthermore, labour migration is predominantly temporary. Drawing on the theoretical insights of 'Western' debates, the article identifies the legitimate democratic representation as well as the conditions, the characteristics and the effects of struggles for migrants' rights as important fields of research on the nexus between labour migration and democratisation in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The link between development and migration has been termed the 'new development mantra'. Studies on the subject have so far mostly focused on economic remittances, and the potential consequences of return migration on democratisation have been rarely touched upon. This article attests the potential of the migration experience to affect migrants' attitudes towards democracy, thus playing an important role in the diffuse support needed for democracies in the stage of consolidation. Based on a survey among 1,000 Philippine return migrants from six destinations, the paper suggests that the migration experience may not only lead to a more critical stance towards the political system of the home country; there are also indicators of lesser support for the principles of democracy when compared to migrants about to leave the country for the first time. The political system of the destination as such seems to be a less decisive factor than the specific freedoms and restrictions experienced by migrants and a potential bias when selecting the destination. The article focuses on return migrants from Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong and Japan, which showed the most distinctive numbers in support of democracy or changes therein when compared to first-time migrants heading for that destination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European church-state relations are the result of a long democratisation process. The immigration of the Muslim population during the second part of the twentieth century to Western Europe and the democratic transition of the Eastern European political systems after 1990 raise questions on the importance of religious bodies in the public space and their influence on existing church-state relations. This article analyses whether these developments would continue the traditional separation of church and state or put the clocks back towards a new sacralisation of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perhaps the most notable feature of "democracy" today is its almost universal acceptance as the only legitimate form of government. Most examples of open dissent against this view are so patently self-interested as to command little respect. Yet however attractive it may be, the development of modern democracy has been largely an incremental product of Europe and its colonial diaspora, which embody quite specific cultural and social assumptions. Now these states have become dedicated to democracy's extension around the world. This paper examines the nature and success of these attempts to extend democracy. It asks, in particular, whether the culture of a robust civil society on which democracy relies can be successfully exported and what challenges it faces from more traditional social relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long term changes in the recruitment patterns of European representative elites can be described as the aggregate result of selectorates' responses to a sequence of fundamental problems challenging polities since the emergence of modern representative political institutions in the 19th century. Recent data show that some long-term trends of (Western) European parliamentary recruitment like the increase of MPs with a public sector background have reversed or plateaued since the late 1980s. At the same time a rise in turnover, a decrease of incumbency and a growing diversity of recruitment patterns can be seen in the same group of polities. This paper explores whether and to what extent these changes are linked to changes in the party systems of Western European polities and whether new trends of parliamentary recruitment are emerging. It introduces the proposition that after the 'consensus challenge' of the post Second World War era a 'legitimacy challenge' is now shaping European legislative recruitment, increasing the value of social and cultural assets of candidates that are related to their expert-status and favouring properties signalling their moral integrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]