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Romanian environmental activists have been subjected to violent attacks for protecting their forests from illegal logging. This article traces the drivers of this conflict, revealing complex relationships between corrupted institutions, economic dependence, and cultural beliefs entrenched in Romania's religion and recent history. Examining the drivers of environmental conflict in new democracies and new EU members – like Romania – may help reveal weaknesses and opportunities in EU structures in the context of nature conservation and environmental protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental disasters generate uncertainty, which is a crucial element of post-disaster political dynamics. Does communication of uncertainty affect public willingness to participate in political activism? This article first provides a content analysis of news coverage to show that uncertainty framing is prevalent in the aftermath of environmental disasters. The article then examines the effect of such uncertainty on public willingness to protest, presenting a survey experiment of over 3,600 Americans recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. In theory, uncertainty framing may trigger emotions like anxiety, which reduce people's willingness to engage in protest. Since in environmental communication uncertainty frames are often used to reify the status quo, which is more easily compatible with conservative beliefs, the dampening effect should be stronger among those who are ideologically conservative. Our experiment confirms the latter expectation but does not find support for the former. These results help explain why some protest coalitions may have more breadth than others after environmental disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Central Europeans are past their transitions and have well-functioning economies. Yet, judging by their lingering communist nostalgia, they have failed to notice. Neo-liberal economists argue that transition results in higher inequality, and that economic liberalization widens the gap between the losers and the winners. Through a comparative analysis of Czechoslovakia and Slovakia, this article suggests that it is not inequality per se but a perception of inequality - whether accurate or skewed - that may aggravate domestic tensions in post-communist Central Europe. I propose two factors through which such perception may arise: 1) the nature of domestic political institutions, and 2) the growth of information and communication technology associated with globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How could the cases of successful state separation contribute to our understanding of partition in post-conflict peacebuilding? Can they tell us anything new that prevailing partition theories may have missed? In an attempt to address such questions, this paper focuses on the break-up of Czechoslovakia, perhaps the most frequently cited case of successful partition. The case expands the existing partition theories' account of elite's motivations and their role in successful partition. While some of the factors revealed by the Czechoslovak break-up are consistent with the logic of prevailing partition theories, some have not been fully recognized by partition scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]