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Brazil descended into a major political crisis after the 2013 mass demonstrations against electoral corruption and failure to fulfil constitutional obligations related to social and economic rights. This turmoil destabilized the political establishment and severely impacted the behaviour of legal institutions. The use of political mandates and institutional prerogatives, contrary to established social norms and traditional interpretations of the law, became unexceptional. In this article, Operation Car Wash, the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, and the process to save the mandate of her successor, President Michel Temer, are analysed as successive examples of ‘constitutional hardball’ that dominated Brazilian political and institutional life, leading the country to a period of ‘constitutional malaise’ or ‘constitutional regression.’ The main objective of the article is to understand the impact of this cycle of institutional retaliations, rooted in the clash between the political and legal establishments (represented by Operation Car Wash), on the stability of Brazilian constitutional democracy.

It has long been argued that federal countries, especially those with strong subnational taxing powers, might face difficulty in implementing a federal value-added tax (VAT) because of coordination issues involved, and therefore might be reluctant to adopt one. This article provides insights on how VAT structures are evolving in federal systems, where different tiers of government have separate (and sometimes overlapping) taxation powers. While the author focuses mainly on India's recently enacted goods and services tax (GST), he also offers a comparative perspective, with reference to the GST/VAT systems in Canada, Brazil, and the European Union, thus adding to the hitherto limited body of scholarly work on VAT coordination in federal jurisdictions. The GST is arguably India's biggest tax reform in several decades. Introduced primarily to create a unified national market and bring an end to tax wars and economic distortions, the tax reform's chief slogan was "GST—one-nation-one-tax-one-market." This article takes a closer look at a unique institutional design feature of the Indian GST—a centre-state body called the GST council. What makes this body unique is that it is envisaged as functioning on the principles of cooperative federalism. But can a concurrent tax system, whose very survival is based on cooperative federalism, guarantee a unified national market? If yes, for how long? The author highlights the role of the GST council in market integration and explains why the council has succeeded on several fronts while failing on others. He also addresses an unresolved constitutional issue that could affect the GST council's ability to function as the fulcrum for cooperative federalism—namely, the question of whether its decisions are binding. The uncertainty surrounding this issue could lead to a constitutional crisis if one or more states decide to opt out. The author discusses four possible ways to deal with this impending crisis.

Has Brexit triggered a constitutional crisis? Crisis is one of a family of concepts, including tipping points, catastrophic equilibrium and failure, identifying it as a decisive moment for overcomi...

This article describes the efforts made by the Israeli government to contain the spread of COVID-19, which were implemented amidst a constitutional crisis and a yearlong electoral impasse, under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was awaiting a trial for charges of fraud, bribery, and breach of trust. It thereafter draws on the disproportionate policy perspective to ascertain the ideas and sensitivities that placed key policy responses on trajectories which prioritized differential policy responses over general, nation-wide solutions (and vice versa), even though data in the public domain supported the selection of opposing policy solutions on epidemiological or social welfare grounds. The article also gauges the consequences and implications of the policy choices made in the fight against COVID-19 for the disproportionate policy perspective. It argues that Prime Minister Netanyahu employed disproportionate policy responses both at the rhetorical level and on the ground in the fight against COVID-19; that during the crisis, Netanyahu enjoyed wide political leeway to employ disproportionate policy responses, and the general public exhibited a willingness to tolerate this; and (iii) that ascertaining the occurrence of disproportionate policy responses is not solely a matter of perception.

Many developments, like greater domestic turmoil, economic dislocation, social immobility, and political gridlock, suggest "the public" and "the private" are different domains with the US than they were decades ago in 1969 when President Nixon entered office. The constitutional state, as a theory and set of practices in the USA in the Nixon era was put under tremendous strains, and it seems clear that those pressures fractured it. After Vietnam, stagflation, Watergate, and the transitional Ford Administration, has it ever been the same? The Reagan-Bush assault on the New Deal and Great Society as well as the essentially permanent mobilization for war in the Middle East since 1991 all should force us to conduct a radical check-up of the body politic, and ask if The Constitution is, in fact, the nation's benchmark for foundational law. This paper argues that major political and cultural shifts within the USA, as it has faced these new challenges since the 1970s that have been both domestic and global in nature, suggest that its 1787 Constitution no longer organically underpins the nation's dominant modes of the governance, principles of sovereignty, or notions of political legitimacy, as they have been expressed since 1969 or 2001 in the larger New World Order organized in Washington, D.C.

The EU succeeded many things by bringing and sustaining peace, stability and prosperity to the old and exhausted continent after the II. World War. The EU achieved this by first starting with economic collaboration but over time, it has enlarged and deepened by penetrating to political and social lives of the member countries. However, the presence of the EU has been tested since it was established and EU has overcome the crises. Since the beginning of the 2000s, the EU has experienced many crises such as constitutional crisis, economic crisis, migration crisis, Brexit and now coronavirus crisis. The concepts of “solidarity”, “unity in diversity” and “free movement” which are components of values and achievements have also been tested and questioned. In this research, it is questioned how the coronavirus crisis affects the values and achievements of the EU. This crisis can be a war of existence for the EU itself and its values. It is obvious that the states will take a major blow in this crisis but the EU will be facing with more. Even if it is not easy to see what will happen when the crisis is over it is clear that many things will change.

During the last four years the situation in Poland has been a matter of interest to the worldwide legal community mostly due to the constitutional crisis. Yet, the years 2015–2019 were also a time of a revival of transitional justice measures, such as cleansing the public sphere of communist symbols, remodelling of lustration law, and further reduction of pensions of communist secret service employees and officers. In this paper I argue that these spheres are interconnected and that Poland’s constitutional crisis has a transitional justice dimension. I start with an overview of retrospective instruments dealing with the communist past introduced in the last four years. Next, I turn to the constitutional crisis itself, discussing its possible explanations and transitional justice aspects. In the end I claim that the dramatic constitutional backsliding that Poland has recently experienced can be explained not only as a power grab, but also as a result of the tension between the rule of law and the principle of individual responsibility on one hand – and the resort to collective accountability in an attempt to get what the government sees as justice on the other.

This article analyses the 2019 local, regional, European and April general elections in Spain. The constitutional crisis in Catalonia in 2017, the motion of no-confidence leading to the new Socialist government and the emergence of a radical right-wing party, VOX, all led to Spanish politics becoming more polarised. This paper also discusses polarisation from both the left-right and the territorial perspectives, intimately linked in Spain both for historical reasons but also because of agency decisions during the period analysed. Finally, the article shows the electoral results, government formation processes and political implications of polarisation in a non-institutionalised party system

Global climate change, migration waves, Brexit, Trump’s presidency, the politics of Putin’s Russia, the narrow-minded technocratic executive leadership of the EU, and the constitutional crisis in Spain, present old, reborn, and new challenges to the integrative and cohesive forces of the diversity and openness of Europe. The current autocratic breakthroughs in Hungary and Poland are part of these phenomena. This introductory article focuses on the common preconditions of autocratic breakthroughs, especially on the uncertainties, anxieties and fears rooted in unprocessed traumatic experiences. They have created the possibility of pitting the case of the community against the case of liberty, producing powder-kegs of political hysteria in which the political language of national egotism and regimes of memory strongly connect with each other.

Resumen Este artículo analiza la crisis constitucional gatillada en Chile a partir de los eventos del 18 de octubre de 2019. El propósito es explicar el vínculo que existe entre la constitución y el malestar social que gatilló la crisis y explorar si un proceso constituyente, como el que se ha diseñado en Chile, tiene el potencial para superarla. Esto último se hace a partir de la fallida experiencia del proceso constituyente de Bachelet y de los procesos reformistas latinoamericanos de los últimos treinta años, los que sirven para ilustrar las amenazas y los desafíos del futuro constituyente chileno.

The current decade brought a neo-authoritarian wave to the countries in CEE. Thisprocess, which in certain respects runs parallel to the populist upsurge in Western countries, has itsown specificity. Firstly, by focusing on the clash between “elites” and “the people”, it rekindles – ina displaced, right-wing form – the class conflict which before 1989 was an ideological staple in CEEcountries. Secondly, insofar as neo-authoritarianism in CEE has often a distinctly neo-liberal agendashadowed by declarative anti-globalism and national chauvinism, it warps the field of politicalstruggle. Thirdly, in the neo-authoritarian turn law becomes the crucial field of ideological fight,principally in those countries where populists came to power. In this respect, new governments inCEE resort to a blend of old Fascist tools (such as dismantling of constitutional control and denyingthe primacy of international law) and new inventions (such as the effective state of exception insome areas of law in Poland introduced in 2015–18). The role of critical jurisprudence in CEE istherefore particularly significant and difficult. The paper argues that liberal jurisprudence, althoughactively engaged in analysing neo-authoritarianism, does not possess adequate conceptual toolsfor full success. Therefore critical jurisprudence should urgently take part in explaining neoauthoritarianismin the legal field.

The Catalan Crisis of 2017-2018 has shown significant misunderstandings in the internal legal system of Spain. Many issues of the legal system were differently understood by the central government and by the autonomous authorities in Barcelona. It concerned such as important issues like the institution of referendum, which was interpreted differently by politicians from Madrid and the Constitutional Court and otherwise by those from Barcelona. The genesis of the constitutional crisis itself is rooted in the global economic crisis that began in the second half of the last decade, as it was then that the Catalan nationalist movement radicalized.

In 2018, escalating political tensions in Sri Lanka resulted in a constitutional crisis centred on the authoritarian politician Mahinda Rajapaksa. It was a moment in which the not-so-distant memory...

A democracia representativa se baseia na renovação dos mandatos presidenciais. No entanto, o modelo presidencial de governo na América Latina é vitimizante das sociedades locais e propicia terreno fértil para a didatura e o enfraquecimento das instituições do Estado. A Constituição se apresenta como caminho para escapar da crise que desestabiliza os sistemas de governo e somente a partir dela se poderá vencer a crise do poder constituinte, diversa que é da crise constitucional.

Despite being a small and relatively secluded country, managing the COVID-19 pandemic has so far been quite a challenge for Israel. This contribution seeks to explain how Israel had managed migration and the pandemic amidst a constitutional crisis between February and July 2020.

Revolutionary actions and constitutional crises are closely linked. However, research mainly looks at the two phenomena as distinct from each other. While studies on revolutionary actions are interested in the agency and the impact of the actions on the country’s institutions, legal research focuses on the constitution itself. The separation of the two strands leads to a limited understanding of their dynamics and complexity. What do we know about the relationship between revolutionary actions and constitutional crisis, and vice versa? The first question is how revolutionary actions trigger constitutional crisis, defined as a moment in which decision makers are unwilling or unable to manage the societal conflicts within the confinement of the constitutionally provided boundaries. Different types of revolutionary behavior—such as elite-led military coups, civil wars, and nonviolent resistance movements—trigger constitutional crises in many cases. They can lead to a new constitution with diverse implications for the political system. Whether the opposition or the old regime prevails in the constitutional crisis is a question of the power resources of both parties to the conflict. In some cases, the opposition movements succeed in making the political system more democratic. However, there are also cases where the constitutional crisis ultimately leads to more power for the ruling class. The relationship also works vice versa: a constitutional crisis can trigger revolutionary actions. Constitutional coups, and processes of democratic backsliding and constitutional rot, can trigger violent and nonviolent revolutionary actions. Political elites can try to change constitutional norms for their own benefit, such as extending the presidential term of office. This often leads to a storm of public protest and can become a real threat to the regime’s survival. A constitution can enter a crisis phase for a long time if it no longer serves the needs of parts of society. The injustices that thus arise within society can be a strong motive for revolutions. The combination of agency and constitutional processes is a promising avenue for future research that could help analyze the complex relationship between constitutional crises and revolutionary actions. In addition to innovative theoretical approaches, new empirical data is needed to examine the process of constitutional negotiation in more detail.

The Catalan secessionist crisis represents the most serious threat to the Spanish constitutional order since Franco’s dictatorship ended. This chapter explores three dimensions of a possible response to the challenge of the Catalan secessionist movement: the discourse employed, the means used to deploy it and the envisaged result. All of these are articulated considering the relationship between the Catalan secessionist imaginary and constitutionalism. The chapter reveals the degree to which Catalan secessionist discourse employs anti-constitutionalism arguments, the ambiguity in the means used for achieving its goal of the independence and, finally, the commitment to constitutionalism in the post-independence scenario. Accordingly, the chapter traces possible inconsistencies in the Catalan secessionists’ approach to constitutionalism as well as the disorientation that these inconsistencies may produce, both within and outside the movement. The repercussions may even prove relevant to debates in other nations dealing with secession movements, such as Canada and the United Kingdom

Over 100 years since its amalgamation as a British colony and protectorate, and 61 years since its independence, the "Giant of Africa" - Nigeria, has fallen short of even the most pessimistic projections of its potential. In terms of development, economic advancement, standard of living and social welfare, Nigeria consistently ranks amongst the worst performing countries in the world, in spite of its being blessed with tremendous natural and human resources and being one of the world's largest producers of crude oil. Despite its longstanding claim to being an indissoluble federal republic, the country is rife with ethnic and religious conflict, agitations for "true federalism" and even secession. Following from the foregoing, this paper examines some of the foundational issues that have continually hindered Nigeria's development - its constitutional crisis of identity, its pseudo-federalism and the impotence of its constituent parts. The paper shall examine the features of a model federalist state, with a view to determining the veracity of Nigeria's claim to the practice of federalism, and shall propose a socio-political reorganisation towards designing an efficient governance model that reflects the heterogenous developmental needs of Nigeria's constituent parts.

Spain has developed into a quasi-federal state over the last four decades. After Spaniards initial reluctance when the regional governments (‘Estado de las autonomias’) were created, citizens have increasingly supported political decentralisation. However, the surge for Catalan independence and the subsequent constitutional crisis provoked by the secession attempt in 2017 may have changed the attitudes of many, who are now much more critical of Spain’s territorial structure. This chapter confirms that the parliamentary elites are significantly more supportive of regional autonomy than citizens, and the gap in congruence has increased from 2009 to 2018. However, there are differences among the political groups: new parties are more congruent with their voters than traditional mainstream formations, but there is not conclusive evidence that ideology makes a significant difference in this issue.

This chapter examines the link between sport, the media and politics during times of constitutional crisis. The case study looks at the position of Scotland within the UK in the run up to and since the 2014 Independence Referendum. The chapter outlines the historical relationship between sport and political and national cultures in the stateless nation of Scotland. It then investigates the position and impact of sports culture in the political and cultural debate in the run up to the 2014 Referendum that would decide if Scotland were to become a separate State or remain within the UK. In so doing, the chapter focuses on the role that key sporting figures, such as Andy Murray, played in the media discourses that surrounded the vote in 2014 and beyond. In particular, the role of social media is investigated as is the ongoing relationship between representations of sport and aspects of expressions of political and national identity. This chapter suggests that caution is needed in simply assuming expressions of national identity through sport get unproblematically translated into particular forms of political nationalism.

The impact of COVID-19 in Venezuela has merely compounded an already existing health crisis within the country. Like the rest of the Venezuelan economy and society, the breakdown of the healthcare system is largely due to the legacy of class conflict and the contradictions of Bolivarian oil-dependent development policy, which finally came to breaking point with the end of the commodity super-cycle. And yet, despite the domestic sources of the crisis, the current unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic in Venezuela is inherently geopolitical in nature. Central to this story is the manner in which Venezuela’s domestic and electoral dynamics have become inextricably embedded within the ‘imperialist chain’ centred on Washington. The conflict between chavista and opposition forces, the constitutional crisis of 2017, the unilateral declaration of Juan Guaidó as ‘interim president’ in 2019, and an intensified sanctions regime are all differentially conditioned by US imperial strategy. This paper will unpack the interconnections between the domestic and international dynamics of Venezuela’s socio-political crisis, explore the ways in which COVID-19 has been weaponised by the Trump administration, and attempt to understand the prospects for radical political renewal under conditions of increasing geopolitical conflict.

The highlight of Maithripala Sirisena’s presidency came in its very beginning when he ended a decade of autocracy by restoring democracy. And when rivalry with his own prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, devolved into a constitutional crisis, Sirisena was forced to abide by the democratic norms he had restored.

Lebanese consociationalism has been under stress due to serious internal and external pressures. Though Lebanese regional and global leaders continue to pay lip service to Lebanon’s unity and uphold putative commitments to its sovereignty and territorial integrity, partition to resolve internal crises remains on the table. After a long and still unsettled civil war, absolute internal discord among citizens and, increasingly, the uprisings throughout the region, partition was and is once again openly discussed by many even if most camouflage it under the decentralization, federalism, or con-federalism schemes. The article underlines the inherent vulnerabilities of the Lebanese state and analyzes its deep fault lines raising a serious question about the future integrity of Lebanon.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the typology of political crisis and its main characteristics. The novelty of the study is developed classification model of the political crisis, based on an analysis of key developments of researchers in political and economic sciences, branches of psychology and conflict science. The author analyzes the works of foreign authors concerning the classification of political crises. For the first time a detailed classification of political crises based on the investigated material is proposed. Classification of political crises is carried out depending on whether the crisis covers the whole political system or only one of its parts, leads to the improvement, strengthening, stabilization of the political system or its transformation and destruction. The duration of the political crisis is also, ultimately, determined by the nature of the political system, its ability to cope with destructive processes and modernize. The article highlights crises-revolutions, crises-shock, crises-destruction and crisis-perturbations, differing in terms of the spread of crisis processes in society and the depth of defeat of the institutional political system. Socio-communicative component identifies identity crises, crisis of legitimacy, crisis of political participation, crisis of penetration and distribution crisis. In addition, the crisis has been classified by scale, intensity, nature of origin, nature of consequences and duration. The need to understand the typology of crises is proved for improving the effectiveness of crisis management and crisis forecasting as well as for a deep analysis of the problem of the political crisis, for the search for solutions to the current political crisis in Ukraine. It is concluded that the diversity of political crises is due to the multifunctionality and diversity of the work of state power, and its dependence on the human resource, which is represented by a large number of groups of stakeholders.

The Iraqi Kurdistan independence referendum on September, 25, 2017, initiated by Masoud Barzani, former elected President of the Kurdistan Region Iraq (KRI) (in office: June 13, 2005 to August 19, 2015) was not intended as the basis for a declaration of an independent Kurdish state in Northern Iraq in the foreseeable future. It was, rather, aimed at strengthening his own domestic political position as well as that of other leading politicians of the Barzani family and of the Kurdistan Democratic Party Iraq, currently leading the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG). The referendum aggravated the persisting constitutional crisis in Iraq since 2005 over as-yet unresolved crucial questions, above all regarding the status of Kirkuk and other “disputed territories”. The Iraqi Kurds lost to a great extent their influence over Kirkuk and about 40% of other “disputed territories” they were controlling before. On the regional domestic front, it polarized antagonisms among rivalling Kurdish parties, threatened to split the KRI again into two separate administrations and also deepened the ongoing severe economic KRG crisis. In geostrategic terms, it enabled the Islamic Republic of Iran to further extend its influence on Iraq and beyond effectively towards the eastern Mediterranean via pro-Iranian Shia-proxy-militias and, last but not least, it also intensified various crises in the Middle East and Eurasia2.

Over the past year, a seemingly relentless barrage of Brexit-related challenges has besieged the British constitution, which together have called into question the legitimacy of the political system. Yet, although it is tempting to regard the decision to hold a referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union as precipitating an acute constitutional crisis, this article argues that political and democratic dilemmas arising from Brexit are symptomatic of a wider constitutional malaise, the roots of which extend far beyond 23 June 2016. Flowing out of this, the article contends that the current crisis is one of ‘constitutional myopia’, fuelled by decades of incoherent reforms and a failure to address adequately democratic disengagement; and that the EU referendum and its aftermath have merely exposed the extent to which the foundations of the constitution have been eviscerated.

The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees “freedom . . . of the press,” making an explicit textual recognition of what the founding generation, informed by their immediate historical experience, frequently hailed as the most important political liberty—the “bulwark” upon which all other freedoms relied. From this fertile intellectual and legal soil, cultivated by generous subsidies, a thriving and vibrant institutional press emerged as an undeniable asset to American civil society. Today, that press is dying. Industry revenues have declined by more than 70% in the last two decades, leaving tens of thousands of journalists without jobs and millions of Americans without meaningful access to quality journalism. The reason for this media apocalypse is simple: America has assigned to the free market the task of producing an adequate supply of a public good, with most of its value lying in externalities, that cannot be made profitable to the same extent that it is desirable. As a result, American journalism is in a market-induced death spiral. This Article argues that, given the Framers’ correct understanding that a sustainable, powerful institutional press is a precondition to representative government, the market-driven collapse of the press is a constitutional crisis.

This chapter discusses the 2018 constitutional crisis in Sri Lanka, and its implications for the future of constitutional democracy, when it is understood against the historical trajectory of Sri Lanka’s post-colonial political development. The office of Head of State is examined in the context of its relationship to the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and its relationship to Parliament. In both its dominion and republican incarnations, the horizontal political accountability of the Sri Lankan Head of State has depended on the Cabinet and Parliament. The way Governor General and President understood these two accountability relationships, and so stretched, and, on occasion, broke them, is thus central to explaining the office of the Sri Lankan Head of State. The 2018 crisis highlighted three features of the system. The first is that despite recent reforms to curtail the powers of the presidency, older patterns of political behaviour had survived. Nevertheless, secondly, the strengthening of the constitutional position of the Prime Minister and Parliament vis-a-vis the President did have an effect in controlling backsliding, and in this respect, there was a revival of Westminster traditions of parliamentary democracy, in particular the twin principles of confidence and responsibility. Finally, the fundamental tension between these authoritarian and democratic tendencies of the systemic culture was reflected in the breakdown of the semi-presidential executive in the aftermath of the 2018 crisis, and was revealed with tragic consequences in the governmental failures that led to the Easter Sunday 2019 terror attacks.

This chapter addresses the question of whether regional secessionism can be seen as a threat to European integration, with a particular focus on Scotland and Catalonia. This chapter reviews the political-science literature on regional secession and European integration and explores different ways of interpreting the effects of European integration on regional separatism. It discusses different interpretations of how the European Union (EU) law and policies can be applied and understood in the event that a region of an EU member state achieves independence through secession. It analyses current political developments (e.g. Brexit and the constitutional crisis in Catalonia) and highlights the political and normative challenges that regional secessionism poses for the EU and its member states. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the standing of the regions within the EU could be strengthened and how demands for secession might be managed within the framework of existing member states.

It is one of the paradoxes of Nigeria’s decolonization that the country’s most pre-eminent nationalist figure, Nnamdi Azikiwe, emerged at independence in the position of constitutional head of state, and that he had been put there at the behest of his new allies in the Northern Region. This chapter presents a first account of Azikiwe’s tenure as Governor-General (1960–63) and then President of Nigeria (1963–66), and his role in the nation-wide constitutional crisis of December 1964–January 1965, which pushed Nigeria towards military coup, civil war, and the shift towards ‘executive presidencies’ in the decades to follow.

Michael T. Oswald and John D. Robertson introduce the broader impact of partisan polarization in contemporary American politics and lay the foundation for the remaining chapters of this volume. They offer some contextual perspective on the important interactive effect of affective partisan polarization and the impact polarization has on constructing pathways to opening conflict between opposing partisan interests. The literature and empirical evidence reviewed in this chapter compel the conclusion that it is these pathways that fuel and propel not a constitutional crisis but rather the persistent and common strategy of norm derogation in the American political system.

This chapter investigates the causes of the hardening of Russia’s post-Soviet foreign policy. Russia has weighed in rhetorically on the side of the Serbs in the Balkan War and has exercised its veto power on the UN Security Council to back up its strong words. The pre-crackdown power struggle between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Parliament for control of Russia’s external policy turned, in part, on an underlying debate over first principles. Prior to October 1993, Andrey Kozyrev’s ministry saw reformist Russia’s national interests largely coinciding with the interests of the West. The Parliament sought to exploit the dispute between Japan and Russia over the status of the Kurile Islands to tip the balance of power in its favor. Kozyrev, minister of foreign affairs, and Boris Yeltsin’s principal opponents in the Supreme Soviet had very different understandings of both Russian national security and Russia’s rightful place in the international system.

The aim of the paper is to analyze the constitutional crisis, which occurred in Poland at the end of 2015, shortly after the parliamentary election. Our research is focused on showing the low transparency of the Polish government during this political turmoil. We argue that there are many indirect connections and feedbacks between the main political actors which have an effect in the non-transparent structure of a government, which changes during political turmoil and more stable period of time. In this context the network analysis was used as a main research method to emphasize some of the personal connections between the main politicians.

Since 2009, Honduras has been experiencing a serious constitutional crisis that has kept the country in a situation of permanent democratic normality, characterized, among other things, by an increasing deterioration of public institutions and by the prevalence of structural cynicism that translates into the fact that the State ratifies most international human rights treaties but adopt laws and practices contrary to them, particularly when it comes to imposing a development model based on extractivism whose origins date back to the 20th century and which has a significant impact on the lives and territories of native peoples. As the historian Marvin Barahona indicates, the background of this situation is the antagonism between the State and the indigenous peoples as a product of the exclusive exercise of power by the Creole elite that shaped the institutions and the national legal system in order to guarantee the imposition of such a model. In this unequal confrontation, the State and its institutions stand side by side with companies, and indigenous peoples resist using the claim of the discursive power of two political reports in the light of constitutional and inter-American standards: popular sovereignty and self-determination.

We saw in the previous chapter how resentment at the way in which the tribute issue had been handled contributed to the constitutional crisis and the subsequent spasm of revolt. The pall of Cypriot resentment lingered over the politically stagnant years that followed. By the end of the decade, with the resurgence of political activity in a growing economy and most dramatically, the outbreak of war, the issue became irrelevant. We will examine the efforts of the governors, in years of severe depression, to exploit the financial deficit—“the unfinished business”—of the 1920s, to bring about the return of the tribute surplus to the island and thus allow them to embellish their autocracy with a potential for economic growth. We will look at the extent to which the metropolitan response depended on the prospects of the island becoming a naval base. This tendency was symbolised in the equating of the return of the surplus with the extension of Famagusta port. How far removed were these concerns from the very different world inhabited by the Cypriots? The receding prospect of enosis intensified their need to preserve their cultural heritage. Politics found subliminal expression in culture and sports, while an embryonic socialism found refuge in the trade union movement. At the same time, the urban Turkish Cypriots absorbed the attitudes of the Kemalist republic. How did the developments of the Second World War bring enosis once more to the political forefront? How did this link up with, and what other factors were involved in a new British willingness to invest in the development and welfare of the island?

As Solzhenitsyn asserted, for Russia the twentieth century was time wasted in a dead-end communist experiment. Yet the period between 1985 and 2000 was one of great change and hope that the twenty-first century would be decidedly different. Gorbachev’s perestroika and the subsequent liberal reforms were meant to lead the country to a competitive market economy and a free political system, and to herald its acceptance within the community of democratic states. But these objectives were never achieved, and the transition period ended as unexpectedly as it had begun. The country’s development has thus assumed the shape of a parabolic curve: from the original, Soviet authoritarian political order towards more open, liberal government and then back to a new authoritarian system meet the challenges of modernity. In charting how and why this happened, this chapter addresses the following questions. Why have those forces that appeared so suddenly but initiated a clear and powerful reform movement yielded to authoritarian reaction? Why has Russia found itself severely isolated internationally? Why does the established authority appear to be (and probably is) a simple reflection of the enduring nature of Russian society? Why when this movement appeared so strong are their no remaining “signs of life”. Finally, despite the apparent stability of the current regime, how sustainable, in fact, is the current order?

Oliver Elliott examines how the press responded to Syngman Rhee’s arrest and violent repression of a large number of legislators during the 1952 constitutional crisis. It shows how the majority of American media outlets treated Rhee’s anti-democratic methods as, at worst, only a mild provocation and gave the story marginal attention, reflecting the widespread sympathy for Rhee amongst the highest levels of the American media elite, the logistical challenges of reporting on the political situation in South Korea and a belief that South Korean domestic affairs were largely beyond the purview of the international community. The Rhee regime also proved highly adept at presenting his move against the National Assembly as satisfying the popular will of the nation.