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Using grid governance as an illustrative case, this article aims to understand how the current recentralisation process has been implemented in the grassroots community in urban China. We find that while grid governance is an innovative approach to community governance, it has in fact become a way to implement political and administrative recentralisation. We point out that grid governance is reflective of party corporatism—it resembles a specifically established association to unite various social forces to participate in community governance. However, the weight of the decision-making power over the operation of the association lies heavily on the CCP. The article further discusses that such mode of community governance is rendered inevitable in the context of a resurgent centralism and has reconfigured the bureaucratic system and state-society relation in urban China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Soochow University Law Edition is the property of Soochow University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Irish judges have tended to 'jealously guard' the judicial power, vested as it is by Article 34.1 of the Constitution in the courts alone. And they have jealously guarded their control over the articulation of public law norms. It is they who get to decide what counts as fair procedure in this or that non‐judicial body – not the non‐judicial actors operating at the coalface. But in Zalewski v Workplace Relations Commission a majority of the Supreme Court has signaled a shift away from the rigid judicial 'centralism' that has prevailed for a century in the Irish legal system. The judges have departed from the formulaic approach to assessing what counts as judicial power, preferring instead a purposive approach more in line with comparator countries. They have revived a 'saver' provision of the Constitution (Article 37.1) expressly providing for 'the exercise of limited functions and powers of a judicial nature' by bodies other than courts. And they have indicated that courts and lawyers do not have a monopoly on authority in respect of public law norms. Things remain in flux, however, because there are conflicting messages in the majority judgment in respect of this more 'pluralist' conception of public law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of Guattari's most important conceptual contributions is his notion of transversality. This complex notion responds to the very concrete problem that, when we oppose certain power formations, we tend to reproduce these same power formations. This article proposes an examination of Guattari's concept of transversality through five of its aspects, which will be related to the various problematics they respond to. The aim is to show how power formations operate and how transversality responds to them, and also to highlight the primordial importance of practical and political issues to Guattari's conceptual work. As we will see, Guattari conceived of transversality in relation to the Leninist cut; it thus is linked to democratic centralism and to the subject-group. Transversality is also linked to enunciation and autopoiesis; it is characterised by Guattari as transmonadic and transitive. The notion of transversality will also be put in relation to the war machine, on which it will thus shed light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore the evolutionary coordinates of the local power system in Romania during the socialist period, aiming to explain the institutional-administrative formulas that succeeded each other throughout the socialist era in relation to the determinants of their changes. For this purpose, we used the comparative-chronological analysis method, using documents issued by the party and state bodies from the analyzed period, relevant legislative acts, as well as a series of studies and specialized articles. The results of our study reveal a range of successive institutional changes in the local scaffolding of state power and administration that took place during the socialist era, changes determined mainly by the imperatives of the communist leadership to control the party and society as effectively as possible and to a lesser extent determined by sociostructural transformations in the country. Thus, following the institutional changes in question allows the penciling of different stage features of the establishment/consolidation of the socialist order, having the valences of a useful tool in the characterization of the different phases of the roadmap of Romanian communism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The constitutional revolution in 1906 was the beginning of a new era for Iran. A national parliament was established for making laws that established modern institutions such as city and village councils and mayors over the decades. Urban governance was renewed and the land reforms in the 1960s transformed rural governance, changed landlord– peasant relations and reduced the traditional authority of village headman (kadkhodas) in village administration. The 1979 revolution introduced a new kind of local governance, Islamic councils for governing cities and villages. This article discusses the main changes and challenges of local governance in Iran by using theoretical concepts of dependent development. The changing pattern of authority and penetration of state bureaucracy through the creation of several rural and urban organizations before and after the Revolution of 1979 is discussed. The article also explains how the establishments of these rural and urban institutions have helped to increase the domination of the state officials within both cities and villages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking document analysis as its method, this paper examines the Tibetans' response to the Chinese state nationalism. Due to the fear of political secession, the Chinese government has stayed silent about the Tibetans' right to self‐determination and subjected regional ethnic autonomy to the centralised political system. The Chinese authorities continue to dismiss the Tibetans' nationalist struggles as an imported foreign design and warn the international community not to sympathise with the Dalai Lama and his supporters. Amidst an adverse national and international political environment, the Tibetans have managed to sustain their nationalist wishes and obtain substantive international attention. Taking this background into account, this paper explores how the Tibetans have succeeded to resist China's state nationalism and position themselves as a champion of inclusion, justice, and minority rights. It argues that the Tibetans recognise the Chinese government's fear of secession and utilise that fear to forward their nationalist aspirations. The Tibetans shift their demand from independence to autonomy and highlight their own desire for recognition as a distinct community within the Chinese state. This strategy has helped them to claim that they are against the violations of autonomy but not against the Chinese state's territorial norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the research and reflections of Reynaldo Sordo on Mexican politics in the 19th century, focusing on the study of the Congress in the First Centralist Republic and the transition from a federal to a centralized regime. Sordo used little-studied sources to better understand the political groups of the time and defended centralism as a necessary political option given the circumstances of the era. Additionally, the article analyzes Sordo's contributions regarding centralism and the evolution of freedom of the press in Mexico during the 19th century. It emphasizes that the Cádiz Constitution in 1812 marked the beginning of the formation of public opinion and the confrontation between the Church and the State over censorship. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Journal of Contemporary History / Časopis za Suvremenu Povijest is the property of Croatia Institute for History and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In Polish People’s Republic, as in other socialist countries, the budget system and the organisational structure of the budget corresponded to the assumptions of the political and socio-economic system of the socialist State. This means that the principles of the management of the budget and budgetary law itself were significantly different from the principles and norms then in force in Western European countries. The aim of this article is to outline how the main stages of the Polish People’s Republic’s budget were forming, as well as to demonstrate the impact of changing tendencies to centralise and decentralise the economy on the structure of the State budget. The first part of the article is devoted to the presentation of the process of adaptation and adjustment of the inter-war fiscal legislation to the new political and economic situation. In the second part, the main phases of the reconstruction of the budgetary system have been analysed. The next two parts of the article refer to the issues of adjustment of the budget system to the decentralisation of the management of the national economy and to the crisis of the early 1980s. The implementation of the research objectives made it possible to formulate the thesis that, despite the changing tendencies towards centralisation and decentralisation, throughout the entire period of the Polish People’s Republic the budget system and the organisational structure of the budget itself corresponded in principle to the assumptions of the political and socio-economic system, at the basis of which lay the principle of democratic centralism and the political and economic unity of the State. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of legal pluralism has been used widely in legal scholarship to draw attention to the existence of multiple legal orders. Scholars have relied upon it to avoid the ideology of legal centralism, to counter colonialism, and to highlight the neglect of Indigenous laws. These are ameliorative approaches, which aim to expand the concept of law for particular purposes. But it is not clear that they help to explain what law is and does. In this article, I contrast these normative and critical projects with analytic and descriptive approaches to the concept of law. Descriptive conceptual analysis, using empirical examples to enhance the insights of legal theorists, can better shed light on what is distinctive about law as a social form. The article illustrates this approach with a number of historical and anthropological examples. This leads us, I suggest, to form rather than function, that is, to the quality of legalism. The creation and use of general rules and abstract categories, that is, usefully distinguishes law, as a category that encompasses both state and non-state forms, from the wider class of norms encompassed by the expansive theories of the legal pluralists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Muslim-based schools in South Africa, examining their historical motivations and their role in democratic engagement, particularly through interreligious dialogue. It explores the persistence of mistrust towards the state in providing education for Muslim children and considers how Muslim-based schools conceive of themselves and their relationships with the state and other communities in a democratic context.

This article explores the student strike which won Ethnic Studies and Black college student admissions. The San Francisco State Strike of 1968 which shut down the campus for five months was unique in its vision, its intensity, its class composition, its strategies, and its relationship to both the Black community and non-Black student organizations. The event is significant because the creation of Ethnic Studies as an academic field has vastly expanded humanity's knowledge of African-American history and the history of other people of color, and the percentage of Black students completing four years of college more than doubled in the period following this strike and subsequent similar college movements. One of the authors was a leader of the Black Student Union Central Committee. The authors use interviews with the leaders, personal reflection, and archival material to draw conclusions about the reasons for the strike's success and long-lasting impact. Its lessons may have importance for the racial and social justice movements of today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has always been a lack of democratic life in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Former CCP Secretary General Hu Jintao attempted in the first decade of the twenty-first century to promote reform, including a revision of the party constitution, aimed at enhancing "intra-party democracy" (党内民主, dangnei minzhu). However, Xi Jinping has put on hold this plan, fully restoring the verticality of the institution where it may have been weakened. This article has three objectives. First, it compares the successive versions or iterations of the CCP constitution in the last 100 years and analyses all the changes related to democratic centralism, elections, and democracy that have been introduced. Then, it assesses Hu's reforms and their failure. Finally, it explains why the CCP cannot reform and democratise as long as it remains a party-state and China remains a one-party system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research shows that after the global economic crisis of 1929, the fall in real wages of saltpetre workers was not as severe as previous literature suggests. In comparative terms, the nitrate sector did not lag behind and the true crisis, as far as wages are concerned, did not take place until the early 1960s. It is argued that previous literature has overlooked the importance of those who stayed in the nitrate industries after the economic crisis due to a historiographical attitude that could be termed as 'methodological centralism': the idea that regional realities are only relevant when they are connected to the state‐making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnic federalism in Ethiopia proved non-viable in practice because it came to be widely seen as a political tool used by the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF)-dominated Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), whose ideological foundation was inspired by Soviet system of 'democratic centralism': a benign façade that veneered an authoritarian vanguard party operating under a token parliament. This article examines the dynamics of statehood and nationhood: antithetical forces of integration and differentiation, which play out around the commonly shared albeit highly contested polity of the nation-state. The need to dialectically resolve these antagonistic though mutualistic stakes lies at the epicentre of political debate in contemporary Ethiopia, ultimately pointing to the constitutional reform dilemmas it now faces. By drawing on literature on political theory, the article argues that the federal constitution proved antagonistic to the inherited politico-cultural orientations that posited the nation-state as the principal supranational identity. By redefining narrow forms of collective identity that were anchored precisely on ethnic sentiments that grew largely in reaction to perceived injustices, the federal constitution appeared neither to embrace, as a system of legitimation, the characteristic and authoritative dimensions of 'Ethiopian' identity as a supra-national universal habitus of loyalty and identification. Nor did it provide integrative cohesion to an otherwise essentially differentiated primordial ethnic and linguistic identity features that now came to be diffused and indeed accentuated at sub-national regions as rigid and hermetic sites of conflict and strife, rather than discursive, reflexive, and interactive domains of cultural and social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the national congresses of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the period of the Communist International (1919– 43). Both in Britain and internationally, communist party congresses in this period lost any independent decision-making role and became a mechanism activated and controlled from above. Not surprisingly, they have attracted little serious scholarly notice in their own right, but this paper identifies three themes deserving consideration: first, that of the congress as a field of tension between inherited notions of delegatory democracy and the Comintern's top-down version of democratic centralism; second, that of its growing importance as a site of symbolic demonstration and ritualized group action; and third, that of bolshevization and Stalinization as processes that can be traced through these changing conceptions of the congress's role. Each theme is considered here in a separate section. These employ a three-party periodization that supports an argument of the CPGB's early but protracted bolshevization. Further watershed moments in the late 1920s and the mid-1930s can both in different ways be identified with Stalinization. These, however, did not so much resolve as displace the tensions with wider labour movement practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes the extent to which the Colombian centralization process, from 1886 to 1930, fulfilled Max Weber's criteria for successful State building: legitimate monopoly of force, territorial consolidation, and construction of a rational bureaucratic order. In the first part of the period, there were several civil wars, and religious and political strife that only ceased after the Thousand Days War (1899- 1902). The economy stagnated and had few links with the global market. Between 1905 and 1930 more tolerant governments were committed to the country's economic development and it accelerated. However, the balance is poor: the monopoly of force was late and incomplete, the State remained weak due to low taxation and the oligarchic political order continued. Bureaucratic development was incomplete, although it extended into areas of economic policy driven by the central Government. The cities prospered and became poles of power with which the political center had to negotiate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we consider the discursive production of status as it relates to democratic ideals of environmental equity and community responsibility, orienting specifically to food discourse and 'elite authenticity' (Mapes 2018), as well as to recent work concerning normativity and class inequality (e.g. Thurlow 2016; Hall, Levon, & Milani 2019). Utilizing a dataset comprised of 150 Instagram posts, drawn from three different acclaimed chefs' personal accounts, we examine the ways in which these celebrities emphasize local/sustainable food practices while simultaneously asserting their claims to privileged eating. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, we document three general discursive tactics: (i) plant-based emphasis, (ii) local/community terroir, and (iii) realities of meat consumption. Ultimately, we establish how the chefs' claims to egalitarian/environmental ideals paradoxically diminish their eliteness, while simultaneously elevating their social prestige, pointing to the often complicated and covert ways in which class inequality permeates the social landscape of contemporary eating. (Food discourse, elite authenticity, normativity, social class, locality/sustainability) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the Covid-19 crisis management in France through the prism of intergovernmental relations (IGR) between the central State, its deconcentrated services, and local governments (LGs). The period from January to October 2020 is studied through reports and analyses from various local and national actors. Three phases are identified in which two antagonistic types of IGR oppose each other, swinging between presidential hyper-centralism and more horizontal and informal action at the local level. We argue that the crisis revealed the challenges of decentralisation to the French government-centred model. We draw preliminary conclusions on how the failures of the State response during the 'first wave' gave voice to LGs, who often implemented reactive and innovative responses, and reinforced their demand for a greater territorialisation of public action. We also suggest that the crisis has enabled the development of horizontal network governance at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Republican moment of Mexico after dictatorship, foreign intervention and wars as a political philosophy. Topics include rebirth of laws and rights making effective the prerogatives that characterize democratic system of Mexico received by political and military authorities; and President Benito Juárez's work and firmness in the fight against foreign invader and speculated on the success of the future republic after the revolution which is concluded in the field of arms.

Faced with an overall crisis in China since the early 20th century, the Communist Party of China has pursued a Party-centric path to modernising the country, thus delivering its people out of an unorganised chaos. With democratic centralism at the core, China has developed a form of government distinct from Western representative democracy. Democratic centralism prevails throughout the organisational structure of power and the policy implementation process. This best shows the Party's affinity to its people. China's road to modernisation and success in governance, which are rooted in its own rich historical legacies, have meaningful implications for other developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the establishment of the Sasanian empire, Ardashir became the heir to the feudal and lenient legacy of the Parthians. He sought to establish political and religious centralism under his reign. At the same time, Manichaeism, much like the other existing religion in Iran, brought together pieces of the other religions and presented its teachings and tenets in any possible form. However, this religion presented severe ideological problems for the newly-established Sasanian empire, since it could undermine the religious and political centralism that the Sasanians desired, hence the first major ideological challenge. The present research seeks to answer the following question: What could justify the lenient behavior toward Manichaeism despite Shapur’s intention to officialize Mazdayasna? Since the Sasanians initially focused on unifying their entire territory, they showed more leniency and tolerance towards the Manicheans. However, against this backdrop, the research hypothesizes that Mani’s ideas gradually became an ideological threat to the Sasanians’ desired political and religious centralism. The Sasanians familiarized themselves with the Manichean discourse through meticulous analysis and then sought to dismantle it. This research resorts to description and analysis of the available related information. It seeks to answer the research question and confirm the hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the centrality of new media platforms in the everyday life of contemporary India. It claims that the representations of everyday life saturated with media technology in films and web series helps us to understand the ways new media has become central to the life experience in India over a rather short period. By engaging with philosophical and sociological theories, and by approaching the question and the theory through several cinematic examples, the article shall probe the ways in which we have become digital beings, and to which extent this has been mediated by neoliberal capitalism, as the platforms are lucrative business ventures of different global media corporations. The article claims that COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 resulted in many different attempts to articulate the centrality of technology to our everyday life. Various films and web series released during the pandemic and commenting on the effect of the pandemic on our everyday life, attempt to demonstrate, at least in part, the creative power of technology in India and shows ways how technology helps forge an alternative sociality under the regime of social distancing. However, the article takes a critical stance in demonstrating that media technologies, their impact on our everyday life and the logic that govern them are far more problematic than it seems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratic centralism was a way of organizing political parties that was introduced by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from Soviet Russia in the twentieth century. Its introduction and adaptation underwent a convoluted process, in which the early years of the Agrarian Revolutionary War (1927–1937) served as a pivot. This happened because the Jiangxi Fourth Red Army (Jiangxi hongsijun), the CCP's most important main force at that time, experienced a complex transformation in its leadership body and this sparked intense controversies within the Party. The present article reconstructs the process in which the Fourth Red Army gradually established and recognized the Front Committee (Qiandi weiyuanhui) appointed by the Central Committee of the CCP to hold centralized leadership over the army and its regional party organization in the revolutionary base areas. The article probes the different forms and operational characteristics of democratic centralism in the CCP's army and local Party organizations. It presents the intricate relationships between the main Red Army and the local Party organizations at all levels. During the Yan'an period, the CCP more fully absorbed the Fourth Red Army's historical experiences, and therefore facilitated the maturation of the practice of democratic centralism within the Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the current decentralization system in China, individual characteristics of the local political elites and collective characteristics of the standing committees of the local party have an impact on local education fiscal policy. Yet published research on the similarities and differences between the collective influence of the Standing committee and the individual influence of the political elite are lacking. To address this gap in the literature, our study discussed the impact of local political elites represented by the mayor and the secretary and the collective of standing committees of the local party on education fiscal expenditure. We construct multiple regression models and analyze the R2 Change of variables is based on the cross-sectional data from 2015 of 283 prefecture-level administrative units in China. We find that both political elites and the standing committees have significant impacts on fiscal expenditure in education, and that the influence of the latter is greater than that of the former. The effect of individual characteristics and collective characteristics on education fiscal expenditure is not completely consistent across prefectures. China's prefectural governments implement China's unique principle of democratic centralism when they make decisions on local spending for education and the collective decision-making under the leadership of the committee plays an important role in education fiscal expenditure. Based on this, we put forward policy suggestions to further develop the principle of democratic centralism and to optimize optimizing the local government education supply and evaluation mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia z Dziejów Panstwa i Prawa Polskiego is the property of Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski Krakow University, AFM Publishing Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Common features of the articles by Xueguang Zhou and Jiang Shigong include attention to governance rather than reform or regime change, to informal as well as formal rules, and to practice over texts. The articles differ mainly in their level of abstraction and the reach of their findings. But even here, Zhou's "organizational practices" are essentially micro-level variants of the broader, constitutional principles that Jiang explores. Both authors make a persuasive case that there are abiding rules that pattern behavior between Chinese political elites, though what these rules are, and what distinguishes constitutional principles from other institutions (and temporary political compromises), await further study. © 2010 SAGE Publications.

Democratic centralism was the Leninist-Bolshevik pyramidal model of internal organization in operation in all communist parties for most of the 20th century. Thus far, the question of whether it functioned consistently across the non-ruling parties has not been addressed explicitly or systematically. This article examines the implementation of this essential internal dynamic in a French and an Italian communist party federation in the early postwar period. Drawing on new personal testimonies from more than 50 informants, and inedita archival evidence, this analysis reveals not only similarities but also clear functional disparities between the two cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is plurality within state law a case of legal pluralism? The traditional canon on legal pluralism cannot come to a consensus on the matter. Those who do not consider plurality within state law a case of legal pluralism argue that it yet privileges an ideology of legal centralism. This formalist and positivist legal theory is anathema to a realist conception of the law that privileges law's complex social orderings beyond the state. This controversy has produced an analytical stalemate in the field and obscured our understanding of plural legal systems – a ubiquitous feature of legal administration across the world. Reviewing extant scholarship, this paper argues that literature on legal pluralism need to be more critical of the state and to develop an explicit legal theory of political process. This challenges the Austinian notion that state law is derived from an ultimate sovereign and to reveal how state law is a site of intense competition among multiple power brokers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The thrust of this article is to ascertain the conception of Justice Amilcar Cabral entertained as he fought for, and theorized about, the independence of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. In the course of my research, I considered many of his thoughts to be standalone loci of Justice, but none was expansive enough to generate a robust conception of justice for all. I then endeavoured to string together, as it were, some of the crucial concepts, explicated heretofore, to determine whether Cabral's conception of justice might emerge from this concatenation of prominent concepts in Cabral. These concepts include: mode of production as motive cause of history, here termed historical autochthony; citizenship arising from certain avowals and concessions; class suicide, comradeship, and so on. The conjunction of these concepts evidently creates a hub for justice known here as Rights Concessions among social Class interest Abnegators (RICOCAB), which, being a concentric conception of justice, is now the epicentre around which all the other rights, opportunities, and privileges articulate, requiring that any person in the new republic who wishes to enjoy these social goods, must first of all, trigger off RICOCAB in a society of democratic centralism and developmental nationalism. Even if run efficiently, the latter has potential on its low side to emasculate rights and justice in the lives of citizens. In conclusion this conception of Cabral's justice is still a work in progress in terms of critical defence vis-à-vis other conceptions of justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs about democratic centralism, a conductive approach in the Albanian lexicographic method, and how working methodology, of the hypothesis that extralinguistic developments lead to semantic changes. Topics include the lexicographical representation of the word democracy and its derivatives; and renewal semantics of the lexicon and offer the possibility of resorting to contexts extended employment.

Copyright of Historia 396 is the property of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, Instituto de Historia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)