The Chinese Communist Party has chosen to base the legitimacy of its rule on its performance as leading national power. Since national identity is based on shared imaginations of and directly tied to territory - hence place, this paper analyses both heterodox models for identification on the...

Natural resources in sub-Saharan Africa suffer from a bad reputation. Oil and diamonds, particularly, have been blamed for a number of Africa's illnesses such as poverty, corruption, dictatorship and war. This paper outlines the different areas and transmission channels of how this so-called...

The "Cuban safety-valve theory" explains sustained survival of Cuban socialism in part through the high levels of emigration, following Hirschman's model of "exit' undermining 'voice". The article argues that this remains insufficient in two important ways. Taking a closer look at the crisis...

This paper contributes to providing insights into the impact of decentralisation on poverty. It starts out with an overview of which role decentralisation plays in strategies and policies for poverty eradication and derives economic and political impact channels. It concentrates on the economic...

Current thinking on African conflicts suffers from misinterpretations (oversimplification, lack of focus, lack of conceptual clarity, state-centrism and lack of vision). The paper analyses a variety of the dominant explanations of major international actors and donors, showing how these...

In diesem Papier wird das sozialwissenschaftliche Analysefeld formaler und informeller Politik ausgeleuchtet und mit einer institutionellen Perspektive verknüpft. Dazu wird zunächst die bisherige Auseinandersetzung mit diesen beiden Formen der Politik im Rahmen der vergleichenden...

This paper analyses the impact of new institutional structures in global health governance on the realization of social rights in poor countries. Meanwhile, health is broadly seen as an import precondition for social and economic development. This leads to an integration of the "diseases of the...

Japan's ruling party is a prime example of a dominant party. While dominant parties in other democracies around the world have lost their grip on power or have even disappeared altogether, the LDP is still going strong. What explains the success of the party? How did the LDP acquire its dominant...

In order to provide a lens to the issue of international security cooperation after 11 September 2001, this paper will examine the question of how collective action in international relations becomes possible. The author maintains that it is possible to understand, if not explain, a fair amount...

Die Studie analysiert die Auswirkungen auf die politische Repräsentation, die sich aufgrund der Wahl zweier getrennter Kammern in den bikameralen Systemen Lateinamerikas ergeben. Die Analyse umfasst mechanische (quantitative) und qualitative (Perzeptionen) Effekte. Nachdem wir Verbreitung und...