Autocratización a fuego lento: el caso de Nicaragua (2000-2024)

This review addresses three questions surrounding authoritarian legality and state capitalism in China. First, what is legality, and does it exist in China's Leninist single-party state? Scholars who characterize the system as order maintenance find the absence of legality. Those employing dual-state and instrumentalist views of law find partial legality. Scholars promoting the notion of bare legality find complete legality. Second, does authoritarian legality strengthen regime legitimacy? Scholars agree that the state seeks legitimation through its embrace of authoritarian legality. Empirical research tests this claim. Third, is China in transition from plan to market, and what is the role of law in state capitalism? The teleology of the transition paradigm overlooks illiberal underpinnings of property rights and factor markets. Answers to these questions help explain regime resilience, economic growth, economic crisis, and inequality in China. Both the institution of the dual state and the perpetuation of plan elements reinforce state power.

"Grand corruption" and "state capture" are two intertwined concepts of corruption that have become systemic and institutionalized in many transitional countries around the world. "State capture" can simply be defined as "the payment of bribes at high levels of government in order to extract or plunder significant amounts of money from the state". The following paper will argue that when state capture occurs in transitional countries, it runs the risk of becoming socially embedded and institutionalized, which in turn makes it difficult to maintain the principles of democracy and threatens the overall stability of a country in transition. South Africa makes for a useful case study because it clearly represents how corruption in the form of state capture has infiltrated the political landscape of a country in transition, thereby rendering all state institutions redundant and threatening the principles of democracy. The paper will research what the dangers of state capture means for the countries in transition with the aim of proposing recommendations of minimizing state capture in order to reduce the negative consequences for security, peace and democracy. One corruption scandal that occurred in South Africa will be described which became known as "state capture". The paper was prepared based on the analysis of documents, academic and media articles that focus on state capture and the corruption in transitional countries. The paper will conclude that governmental corruption has become socially embedded in the "logics" of negotiation and interaction, thereby indicating that it has become institutionalized and culturally embedded within South Africa.

Ideally, states provide security for doing business by a legal-institutional framework enterprises can rely on. State institutions work in a legal-rational, predictable and effective manner. Relations between officials and private actors are formal and impersonal. In the OECD-area, this is a constellation often taken for granted. In many countries worldwide, however, the reality looks different. Private actors seize public institutions and processes to realise their particularistic interests of accumulating power and private wealth. For this purpose, they systematically “abuse, side-step, ignore or even tailor” formal institutions to their own needs in order to accumulate power and ever more wealth (Amundsen, 1999, p. 3). Such forms of “state capture” are associated with weak state institutions, legal uncertainty, rampant corruption and the detrimental behaviour of ruling elites, fostering their own business interests (“favouritism”) while harming independent enterprises. These are specific political risks international businesses are confronted with when operating in affected countries. Political risks comprise any occurrence in the international business context where public actions or non-state actors that are active in the host country of the international activities interfere with private international businesses and adversely impact the performance of the international operation. The results are a wide set of negative effects on businesses, ranging from opportunity losses to the total seizure of corporate assets in the worst case. This is the constellation this book focuses on. The first two chapters introduce political risk factors characteristic for state capture and discuss them in view of the current Political Science and International Business literature. Besides this theoretical perspective, the volume also offers empirical evidence, shedding light on state capture and international business in nine Black Sea Region countries. It additionally comprises three company case studies, depicting experiences made in this regard.

The origins of social trust have been much discussed in recent years. This attention is understandable, as social trust is perceived to be a mechanism for overcoming the pri mary social problem highlighted by rational choice theory: how actors without mutual trust logically would choose a suboptimal solution (the prisoner's dilemma problem). Social trust is thus believed to be very important in solving collective problems, mak ing democracy work, and generating economic growth.1 In brief, everyone agrees that social trust is nice to have. However, its origins, creation, and in some countries erosion are up for discussion. Table 1 shows the empirical results of the World Values Surveys (WVS) conducted in the beginning (1990-1993) and the end (1999-2001) of the 1990s. As argued by Inglehart, economic development and religion have a huge impact. Therefore, this study is limited to the rich capitalist countries that share Christianity as a common cultural background.2 Furthermore, the countries will be categorized accord ing to Esping-Andersen's renowned distinction among liberal (Anglo-Saxon), conserva tive (continental European), and social democratic (Scandinavian) welfare regimes.3 The standard question for social trust (also labeled interpersonal or horizontal trust) has been used: Generally speaking, would you say that people can be or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people?. Table 1 reveals two major puzzles. The first is the striking level of horizontal trust in the social democratic regimes. In 1990 the share responding that most people can be trusted averaged 61 percent in these countries. In the nine conservative regimes, the average was 31 percent, whereas the average was 48 percent in the four liberal regimes. The distinctiveness of the social democratic regimes is even more remarkable in the lat est wave, where the average was 63 percent in the social democratic regimes as com pared to 29 percent in the conservative regimes and 38 percent in the liberal regimes. Regime patterns are not clearly present. At first sight, the distinction between conserva tive and liberal regimes does not appear to be of much relevance. However, one can not deny that the countries that Esping-Andersen grouped as social democratic welfare regimes distinguish themselves. The second, rather striking finding is that the dramatic erosion of social trust appears only in the countries Esping-Andersen labeled liberal welfare state regimes. The

This theoretical exposition aims to add to existing theory on state design and the durability of the liberal democratic experiment. This paper is written on the case of South Africa and the rise of contending regime narratives on the interaction between the state and the economy. The notion of the state being ‘captured’ may well be a nomenclature typical of a great number of states in developing political economies. While the scholarly analysis of weak or fragile states is, to a significant extent, embedded in South African political theory, the notion of a captured state is often conflated with the conceptual confines of the corrupt or criminalized state. The research result – or theoretical contribution this article makes – is to substantiate the postulation that state capture as a feature of state formation also reflects the emergence of a contending or alternative regime preference with a distinct moral justification supplementing liberal democratic experiments. Experimental liberal democracies are more prone to such constitutional or regime challenges. While systemic patronage is a regime preference, which often co-exists with liberal regime imperatives within the constitutional domain of liberal regimes, this paper reviews the state capture as the manifestation of sectarian interests in the formal economy encroaching on the domain of the constitutional state to gain a competitive advantage within the market/economy.

When the government of a liberal constitutional democracy is confronted by some or other existential crisis that threatens a major institution of state or the very foundations of the democracy itself, it will often appoint a high-level judicial commission of inquiry as part of its response to the crisis. South Africa is no exception to this tendency, as is evidenced in recent years by the appointment of no fewer than four such commissions in response to a series of crises related to ongoing corruption within state institutions – commonly referred to by ordinary South Africans as “state capture”. This has raised questions as to the alleged benefits of such commissions when viewed in relation to their considerable costs. This article seeks to contribute to this general debate by focusing on one of the purported benefits of such commissions that may be somewhat under-appreciated. This is the creation of public awareness, during the life of the commission itself, about the nature and extent of the particular grave threat that confronts the society in question. It is contended that, mediated by a free and vibrant press, the public narrative that emerges during the operation of a commission of inquiry may serve to make a liberal democratic society more resilient in the face of threats to that society’s continued existence. This article seeks to support this contention by focusing on an important precursor to the more recent commissions of inquiry on corruption in South Africa – that is, the Jali Commission of Inquiry into corruption within the South African penal system, which sat in the early years of the new millennium. By analysing the many articles and reports that appeared in a range of South African newspapers during the initial hearings of the Jali Commission, this article documents the emergence of an important public narrative on corruption within South Africa’s prisons, and reflects upon the ultimate significance of this narrative. This article is divided into two parts: the first part deals with the initial hearings of the Jali Commission in KwaZulu-Natal, and the second part with subsequent hearings in the Free State.

When the government of a liberal constitutional democracy is confronted by some or other existential crisis that threatens a major institution of state or the very foundations of the democracy itself, it will often appoint a high-level judicial commission of inquiry as part of its response to the crisis. South Africa is no exception to this tendency, as is evidenced in recent years by the appointment of no fewer than four such commissions in response to a series of crises related to ongoing corruption within state institutions – commonly referred to by ordinary South Africans as “state capture”. This has raised questions as to the alleged benefits of such commissions when viewed in relation to their considerable costs. This article seeks to contribute to this general debate by focusing on one of the purported benefits of such commissions that may be somewhat under appreciated. This is the creation of public awareness, during the life of the commission itself, about the nature and extent of the particular grave threat that confronts the society in question. It is contended that, mediated by a free and vibrant press, the public narrative that emerges during the operation of a commission of inquiry may serve to make a liberal democratic society more resilient in the face of threats to that society’s continued existence. This article seeks to support this contention by focusing on an important precursor to the more recent commissions of inquiry on corruption in South Africa – that is, the Jali Commission of Inquiry into corruption within the South African penal system, which sat in the early years of the new millennium. By analysing the many articles and reports that appeared in a range of South African newspapers during the initial hearings of the Jali Commission, this article documents the emergence of an important public narrative on corruption within South Africa’s prisons, and reflects upon the ultimate significance. This article is divided into two parts: the first part deals with the initial hearings of the Jali Commission in KwaZulu-Natal, and the second part with subsequent hearings in the Free State.

Law has become increasingly important for authoritarian regimes. This article analyzes the dynamics of authoritarian legality by delineating two pure types of authoritarian politics, i.e. normal politics and exceptional politics. It explains the institutionalization of authoritarian legality – from law-making to final adjudication – through a politically controllable congress and court system. It further identifies three pure types of instantiations of legal instrumentalism, based on the variance of political ideologies: liberal, apolitical, and illiberal. Taking China as an example, the instantiation of legal instrumentalism in illiberal regimes has been different from those in liberal regimes. It further argues that legal instrumentalism as instantiated in an illiberal context provides a more explanatory framework than either Marxist or Confucian legal theories to reveal the law’s nature and function as a crucial instrument for developing the enterprise of legality grounded on illiberal principles in China.

ResumeNeurosurgery training in the countries of the European Union, America and Asia lasts from 5 to 7 years and involves acquiring knowledge not only in clinical, but also in scientific activities. Taking into account the need to use high-tech methods for the treatment of neurosurgical diseases, the duration of 3-year internship training, as is customary in Ukraine, is insufficient. The analysis of historical and modern approaches to teaching neurosurgery by professional communities in the USA and the European Union allows for the development of a modern training program in the specialty "neurosurgery" in terms of content and duration. The sample training program at the residency was reviewed after all comments and suggestions were received and approved at the meetings of the Department of Neurosurgery of the Shupyk National Healthcare University of Ukraine, the State Institution «Romodanov Neurosurgery Institute NAMS of Ukraine» and the Ukrainian Neurosurgical Association by a group of experts in the specialty «Neurosurgery».It is important to select candidates for residency ‒ successful study, knowledge of a foreign language, taking into account communication skills. The order for residency is determined by the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, no more than 10 residents can be applied per year, regardless of the form of payment. After completing the residency, 2 years of work experience in state or communal health care institutions, military hospitals is mandatory.It is to justify the need for quality training of neurosurgeons in accordance with the standards of the European Union. The introduction of a single standard for the training of neurosurgeons in Ukraine, which takes into account the best domestic and foreign experience, will make it possible to raise the level of domestic neurosurgery and integrate it into the world system of medical education. A significant increase in the length of training in a neurosurgery residency (up to 6 years) is necessary for the full-fledged development of a specialist neurosurgeon.

Introduction The rule of law in Singapore has been criticized by liberal democrats for its illiberal nature; yet it remains an attractive model for certain newly developing countries, including Cambodia, that aspire to achieve economic development without more liberal forms of democracy. Unlike some other countries in Southeast Asia, there is less evidence of meaningful constitutional contestation taking place – bargains and struggles among elites, opposition forces, and civil society – over state institutions, the broader political order, and the granting and enforcement of rights. To be sure, civil and political struggles over representation, human rights issues, and fair compensation have been rife in recent years. However, in these single-party-dominated regimes a lack of constitutional contestation is particularly evident in the area encompassing the rule of law, courts, and justice. This is not to say that the rule of law and justice mechanisms as understood by the countries’ elites are absent from these regimes. Rather, that understanding the rule of law as it is understood by the elites offers better insight into the trajectory of political development and the obstacles to Western ideals for legal reform. This chapter traces the recent convergence of the rule of law in Singapore and Cambodia in the face of each country’s political, historical, and social differences, and the obstacles confronting Cambodia’s judicial and legal reform program. Over the past decade Cambodia has seen a series of legal reforms and an increase in the use of legal proceedings, including defamation and disinformation lawsuits against opposition politicians and members of civil society. We argue that this is a product of a strategic calculation by the Cambodian ruling elites to utilize a more subtle and legitimate strategy of social control. The legal reforms already introduced, those soon coming into effect, and the role of the judiciary in relation to each may be better understood through insight into the rule of law in Cambodia and by placing it in the context of other exemplars in the region – in particular Singapore. However, differences will remain, as the judiciary’s role in society and public policy is intertwined with and impacted by each country’s understanding of the rule of law that has evolved through a series of historical, political, institutional, cultural, and economic factors. Therefore, this chapter undertakes a comparative analysis of the two countries’ legal traditions and political-historical trajectories in order to discern the development of the role of the courts and their power in judicial review. This approach is consistent with recent calls for more comparative research on the rule of law in order to better understand the nature of democracy and authoritarianism in Asia (Fukuyama 2010, 2012). While electoral gains by opposition movements in Singapore (2011) and Cambodia (2013) illustrate that the meaning of democracy and the rule of law is contested locally, we argue that understanding the rule of law as it is understood by the countries’ elites themselves offers more insight into the true nature of the regimes in question than comparing and classifying polities as examples of “competitive authoritarianism” or “electoral authoritarianism” on the basis of their democratic deficiencies (Levitsky and Way 2010; Schedler 2006). In addition, we analyze whether Singapore’s lessons may be applied in large, poor, and underdeveloped authoritarian regimes; and whether the Singapore model can be sustained or replicated in the case of Cambodia (Silverstein 2007).

Inside the municipality:locating debates on local government Mosa Phadi (bio) and Peter Vale (bio) The rise of African liberation parties to power in the 1960s brought to the fore 'questions about the role and position of the African state' (Doornbos 1990:179, also see Mamdani 1996, Amin 1972). Leaders of newly independent African states looked upon the state as the machinery to drive far-reaching social and economic transformation, following the sustained ravages of colonial rule. As the 'institutionalised expression of political power' (Doornbos 1990:180), the state was to be directed towards confronting the ills and contradictions of the colonial past and foster 'development'. Faith that the state would provide a path towards salvation emerged from both liberal and Marxist ideologies, but for antagonistic reasons. While the former viewed the state as a vehicle to advance capitalism, the latter saw it as means to dismantle it and engender a classless society (Doornbos 1990:182-3). But the enormous expectations about what can be achieved through the state since the heady days of the 1960s have undergone profound rethinking. Hopes in the African state proved, by many estimations, to be 'ill-founded' (Doornbos 1990:183). The African state has been the subject of acute concern 'about capacity and performance, about styles and orientations of leadership, and about the measure of representativeness and legitimacy which African governments enjoy within the society at large' (Doornbos 1990:179). The Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980s were in many senses fuelled by cynicism in the capacity of the African state to deliver change. By the time South Africa emerged as a democracy in the 1990s, doyens of international development and global finance insisted that belief in the [End Page 1] state as 'prime mover in all development efforts' was 'misplaced' and 'erroneous' (Doornbos 1990:182), and prevailing wisdom insisted on a minimal role of the state to facilitate the conditions for free-market capitalism. The reform and democratisation of state institutions in South Africa was thus undergirded by contradictory imperatives: to address expectations of dramatically expanded development and share the fruits of economic growth beyond the white minority, while at the same time sustaining a minimalist state. The path charted by the South African state since the end of apartheid has fallen somewhere between social democratic welfarism and hard-edged neoliberal reformism with profoundly ambiguous results. In 2005, Beall, Gelb and Hassim (2005:682) described the character of the South African state as one of 'fragile stability': a stable and sovereign state presided over by a Constitution and robust legal frameworks, yet one facing acute levels of inequality, unemployment and poverty. They described a 'tenuous equilibrium' rendered fragile by the fact that 'appropriate institutions and processes have not yet been established in state and society to resolve–manage and contain–the potentially destabilising impact of social fractures' (2005:683). Ten years later, it was argued that South Africa's 'political order remains standing, but the pressures it faces are significantly more acute' (Robinson, Steinberg and Simon 2016:1). Following the troubled tenure of the administration of Jacob Zuma, marked by growing revelations of 'state capture', renewed focus has been drawn to the nature of the South African state, and the functioning of government institutions has come to attract public interest on what is perhaps an unprecedented scale (see, for instance, Chipkin and Swilling 2018). This Focus Issue of Transformation considers what is often considered the weakest link in the chain of South Africa's intergovernmental system: local government. The post-apartheid regime positioned municipalities as the primary state organs to facilitate community-based decision-making. In a country plagued by the decades-long legacy of discrimination, municipalities were given an enormous developmental mandate to fulfil. As the most direct link between the state and community, this institution is tasked with the responsibility to deliver a range of basic services to communities: electricity, water and sanitation services, and refuse collection (Koelble and Siddle 2014:607, see also van Donk, Swilling, Pieterse and Parnell 2007). Twenty-six years later, South Africa has yet [End Page 2] to address most of these past and present realities of political, social and economic inequalities (see Desai 2017, Alexander...

This article addresses the problem of identifying the descendants from the Central Asian states in Siberia – the Bukharans – from the 17th to the 21st centuries, focusing on transition and transitional process, where the dynamics and statics are foundational. The main sources included scholarly works of the 18th and 19th centuries, archival data, and evidence from ethnographic expeditions from the last quarter of the 20th century to the early 21st century in the areas of compact settlement of the Bukharans’ descendants. Identification is discussed through the integration into the structure of Russian society and onomastics: Bukharans, Sarts, Bukharans and Tashkentis, Siberian Bukharans, Tatar-Bukharans, Bukharan Tatars, Tatars. Periodization of the emergence, development, and transformation of the identity of this population group in Western Siberia has been established with the following key milestones and four periods: 1) late 16th – late 17th century; 2) late 17th – 1810s; 3) 1820s – 1910s, and 4) 1920s to the present day. The periods of dynamics (first period – the emergence of the Bukharans as a group, their identification both internally and externally; fourth period – transformation of identity towards the Tatars) and statics (second period – the inclusion of the Bukharans into the fiscal and administrative systems of the Russian State with account of their foreign origin, consolidation in defending their privileges; third period – further consolidation and identification of the Siberian Bukharans as subjects of the Empire equal to others) have been identified. Although currently the descendants of the Bukharans consider themselves Tatars, they maintain the memory of their origins. The evidence from the expeditions includes both designations – “Bukharan” and “Bukharan Tatar.”

The chapter examines the mechanisms, actors, enablers, and institutional environment that have facilitated capital flight from South Africa and the attendant accumulation of offshore private wealth. It describes how capital flight has accelerated during the modern era of economic liberalization and rapid integration into the global economy. It highlights the systematic failure of the country’s regulatory system, which has been compromised by “state capture” orchestrated by an intricate network of private enablers with deep connections within the government and the global economy. It illustrates this phenomenon with the story of the Gupta family, which built its fortune by forging connections with key figures in government and parastatal companies in the mining and energy sectors and used a complex network of opaque transactions to move money out of the country. The chapter then discusses the adverse effects of capital flight on economic development, state institutions, and governance.

ABSTRACTPost-apartheid democratic South Africa experienced the pitfalls of one-party dominance when the country’s fifth democratically elected parliament (2014–2019) faced growing corruption, state capture, undermining of parliamentary oversight and the abuse of political power and state institutions. These events threatened the country’s constitutional democracy and its principles of an accountable government as the ruling party undermined parliamentary oversight structures through majoritarianism to evade accountability by the Legislature and Executive. This led to the growing coexistence and cooperation of opposition parties (despite their ideological differences) in parliamentary oversight as a means of challenging the African National Congress’ (ANC) one-party dominance. This process resulted in the establishment of formal and informal coalitions for governing key cities such as Johannesburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay. Against this backdrop, and building on a case study of these three metropolitan municipalities, this paper analyses the coexistence of the opposition parties in parliamentary oversight and in the governance of key cities as a means of challenging the ANC’s one-party dominance. The analysis delineates the prospects and challenges of using coexistence as a strategy for challenging the ANC’s one party-dominance post the 2019 general election.

Under the leadership of the governing African National Congress, the South African government has long touted the idea of becoming a developmental state as the country's ultimate response to rising unemployment, poverty and inequality. This idea aligns with the rapid economic growth and industrialization experienced by the East Asian developmental states through directing the state's administrative capacities, resources and policies towards attaining national developmental goals. Similarly, the National Development Plan pins South Africa's developmental state ambition on creating a capable developmental state and the formation of dynamic institutions capable of utilizing the state's administrative powers, resources and policies to pursue developmental goals. However, the country's state institutions, administrative capacities and resources have been challenged by the state capture debacle that shed light on the corrupt relationship between the political elite and the business elite. This article explores civil society's response to state capture and analyzes the impact of civil society's responses on South Africa's developmental state ambition. The article reveals that the state‐society relations had a significant effect on fighting the state‐business corrupt arrangement by mobilizing nationwide protests that solidified South Africa's emerging democratic developmental state framework embedded in state‐society relations.