Party Change and Identity Transformation: The Case of Tunisia’s Ennahda

How do established TV journalists engage with the possibilities offered by a new technology of newsmaking? Pondering this issue amidst the media boom in India, this chapter examines the journalistic practice of leading TV news anchors on Twitter. Two specific aspects of their practice on Twitter are examined here: variations in their messaging behaviour, and shifts in their opinions towards political actors. We draw on a corpus of over 2000 tweets generated by three leading TV news anchors—the most followed Indian journalists on Twitter that year—over a period of 13 months leading to the national elections of May 2014. National elections, the biggest news spectacle in India offer an exciting moment to examine journalistic practices, especially changes in journalists’ opinions towards key political and electoral actors. The corpus of tweets is investigated into at two levels. At the enumerative level, we profile the volume and frequency of tweets, the people and issues drawn attention to, and the kinds of media content circulated by these leading journalists. Such a comparative mapping reveals the messaging behaviour of TV journalists on the mobile “broadcasting” platform of Twitter. At the interpretive level, we decipher the opinion of these journalists towards key political actors as reflected in their tweets, including shifts in their opinion in tandem with changes in electoral dynamics. This dual traction ensures our study is as much about how established actors from the legacy media engage with a novel platform of news circulation, as about how journalists respond to changing political currents.

With a focus on governmental institutions, this book explores the ways in which EU membership has altered the balance of power among key political actors. The authors discuss cultural adaptation to integration, as well as examining the views of the elite and voters. The transformation in national identity, sovereignty and neutrality are also examined.

In this paper, I investigate why a bureaucratic-authoritarian (hereafter BA) regime emerged in South Korea during the early 1970s. The regime transition was the outcome of conflict among key political actors who were constrained, although not in a deterministic way, by the change in the Korean economic structure. It can be understood as the outcome of strategic choices made by key political actors among alternatives that satisfied structural constraints.

Online social network platforms have been, since their rise to prominence, considered as relevant gateways to study individual behaviors. One of those realms is politics, from massive movements and demonstrations to institutionalized events like general elections or referendums in democratic countries. In this paper, we are interested in the behavior of professional politicians in the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum of June 2016, colloquially known as the “Brexit referendum”. We ask how, during the final weeks of the campaign, four key political actors (Jeremy Corbyn, David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and Nigel Farage) used Twitter through their official accounts regarding this popular consultation and how that action was received by their followers. To be more precise, we ask if they predominantly appealed to emotions or to rational arguments (Usage Axis), and what was, in each case, the impact of the tweets (Impact Axis). We conclude that, regardless of the way each actor used Twitter during the campaign, the appeal to emotions and the debasement of the opposing views tended to have more relevance, which may be a distressing hypothesis for democracy.

Reviewed by: To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hissène Habré by Reed Brody Naomi Roht-Arriaza (bio) Reed Brody, To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hissène Habré (Columbia University Press 2022), ISBN 9780231202589, 296 pages. When the verdict was announced in a Dakar courtroom in May 2016, it marked the culmination of a decades-long effort to bring Chad’s former dictator, Hissène Habré, to justice for crimes against humanity. It was also the first time that domestic courts located outside the country where the crimes took place brought a former head of state to justice for international crimes. The remarkable saga of the Habré case is told in a recent book by Reed Brody, former counsel at Human Rights Watch (HRW) and a key actor in supporting, guiding, and backing the case over many years. The book is required reading for anyone interested in international justice or human rights, but it’s also a moving meditation on the effect of North-South power dynamics on activists, the personal toll on those involved of continuing to fight, and all the ways in which the stars must align for justice to prevail. Habré ruled Chad from 1982 to 1990. According to one of the first truth commissions, established after his overthrow, he killed at least 40,000 people, tortured thousands, razed villages, and attacked ethnic groups he perceived as potential opponents. He was supported in this by the US Reagan administration, which saw him as a bulwark against Libyan leader Mohamar Qaddafi, and by the French. Eventually, he was removed in a coup, and took up a gilded exile in Senegal, helped by the millions he stole from the Chadian treasury. Brody tells the story of Habré’s misrule succinctly, but most of the book focuses on his victims and their almost forty-year struggle for justice. He writes chronologically about the investigation and trial, focusing on major incidents, twists and turns, and the strategic decisions (good and bad) that drove the process. I. EVERYTHINGEVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE One of the takeaways from the book involves the need for those seeking justice to look everywhere, and to play multilevel chess. Dictators and war criminals have huge advantages of money, contacts, and powerful networks to protect them. To fight back, advocates and victims must use all the avenues they can simultaneously and sequentially. This insight isn’t unique to the team pursuing Habré: the efforts to bring Augusto Pinochet to justice in the 1990s spanned not only Spain and the United Kingdom (as well as Chile, of course), but also Belgium, Argentina, France, and other possible forums.1 As both Brody and Chadian lawyer for the victims Jacqueline Moudeïna (in a foreword) note, the precedent of Pinochet’s arrest in London, and its positive impact on both prosecutions in Chile and on efforts to use universal [End Page 335] jurisdiction against despots elsewhere, were important to the Chadians as they considered their strategy. But more than any previous efforts, the Habré case drew on a wealth of international and regional forums and strategically combined them. When it looked like the Senegalese government would expel Habré, putting him beyond the reach of justice, lawyers for the victims went to the UN Committee on Torture to pressure Senegal to honor its “extradite or prosecute” commitments under the Convention Against Torture.2 When Senegal refused to act on a Belgian request to extradite Habré for trial in Belgium or to try him in Senegal, they convinced the Belgian government to complain to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The ICJ’s subsequent decision was a huge win for human rights advocates, establishing that the extradite or prosecute provisions of the Torture Convention (and other human rights, anti-terrorist act, and anti-corruption treaties) could not be indefinitely ignored or delayed.3 The African Union (AU) eventually became a key political actor in creating the Extraordinary African Chambers (EAC) that convicted Habré. Brody’s book, written for a general audience, doesn’t detail the legal background, structure, and operations of the court that eventually tried and convicted Habré. But it’s worth pausing a moment to...

Throughout the last three years, the Euro-zone has been facing a severe crisis jeopardising its very existence. The research question this article seeks to address is two-fold: how is the Euro crisis framed by Germany and its Euro-zone partners and why in this way? The importance of successfully addressing this research question rests upon the idea that the Euro crisis provides a very useful opportunity to explore the way framing unfolds and if, then, it can offer practical policy solutions. Thus, the question is not how policy problems are formally and objectively defined, but how these problems are defined by key political actors.

A ‘politics of recognition’– a process of political reform intended to recognise formally cultural diversity and indigenous peoples’ rights – has developed in Mexico, both at the federal and at the state levels, since the early 1990s. The case of the state of Oaxaca stands out in this respect – the local constitution and nearly a dozen secondary laws were reformed during the 1990s, resulting in the conformation of the most comprehensive multicultural framework in Mexico. In this article, I attempt to explain the emergence and the particular development of Oaxaca's unique politics of recognition. Following an explanatory framework proposed by Donna Lee Van Cott, I conclude that the recognition agenda emerged in Oaxaca as legitimacy and governability was put under strain. In addition, I conclude that the (by Mexican standards) rapid and broad fashion in which it developed can be explained on the bases of the severity of the threats to governability and of the capacity of indigenous actors to influence the decision‐making process and form alliances with key political actors – i.e. the state governors.

During the 2021 German federal election campaign, COVID-19 emerged as a highly salient issue in public discourse. Despite its significance, most political parties adopted a strategy of depoliticization, likely as a means to mitigate potential electoral losses. Against this backdrop, our paper examines whether and to what extent COVID-19 was discussed on Twitter in the run-up to the election. Our analysis draws on two original datasets collected in the four weeks preceding the election on September 26, 2021: one comprising 7,374,166 German-language posts mentioning the federal election and another with 3,195,198 German-language posts commenting on the COVID-19 pandemic. Using these datasets, we calculated echo chamber scores (ECS) based on ideological leanings within retweet-based networks and examined the politicization of COVID-19 in the digital election campaign. Our findings reveal that the online discourse polarized into two distinct echo chambers: a “safety-first” community advocating for strict COVID-19 measures, and a “freedom-first” community opposing such measures. While most political figures sought to depoliticize the issue online, key political actors – due to their leadership roles in the upcoming election-could neither avoid addressing the pandemic nor being publicly addressed on the matter. In particular, users within the echo chambers focused attention on two key health policy leaders from opposing political camps: Jens Spahn, the then-incumbent Health Minister from the Christian Democratic Unio/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), and Karl Lauterbach from the Social Democratic Party (SPD), who would later become health minister. Our results underscore that, despite efforts to minimize the salience of COVID-19 in the lead-up to the election, certain leaders were compelled to confront the “elephant in the room” due to the demands of their roles during the health crisis.

Politics and sustainable tourism development – Can they co-exist? Voices from North Cyprus

This article examines how key political actors—the media, the president, andCongress—framed biofuels from 1999 through 2008, and what factors had the most pronounced influence on their storytelling. Special attention is paid to how their stories concerning biofuels changed in response to shifts in the broader political milieu and whether these actors influenced one another's storytelling. The findings indicate that these actors most commonly told stories concerning biofuels' impacts on the environment (good and bad), the economy (good and bad), and energy security. The results also suggest that while these actors had little if any influence on one another's storytelling, media, presidential, and congressional framing was heavily shaped by the economic climate in the country, and by key events such as 9/11, which elevated the issue of energy security. These events and conditions were vital because they established which storylines would resonate in the public sphere.Related ArticlesShanahan,Elizabeth A.,Mark K.McBeth, andPaulL. Hathaway.2011. “.”Politics & Policy39():373‐400.http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2011.00295.x/abstractWaage,Eric.2008. “.”Politics & Policy36():792‐804.http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2008.00135.x/abstractDavitt,Marcia.2008. “.”Politics & Policy36():1148‐1149.http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2008.00157_5.x/abstractRelated Media.2009. “.”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECpYJfpAzY4Trent,Jonathan.2012. “.”TEDGlobal.http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_trent_energy_from_floating_algae_pods.htmlBomani,Bilal.2011. “.”TEDGlobal.http://www.ted.com/talks/bilal_bomani_plant_fuels_that_could_power_a_jet.html.2012. .http://www.afdc.energy.gov/data/

The uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region during 2011, which resulted in the demise of authoritarian rulers or gave rise to some political and economic reforms, proved the significance of human rights and moved that issue to the forefront of academic and political debates. As the protestors brought human rights references to the center of their political struggle, political actors used its rhetoric to claim legitimate authority or popularity. This article, which analyzes the human rights discourses and their use in legal and political action in post-uprising Egypt, focuses on the first two years of the transition process and surveys the main patterns of human rights discourses in post-uprising Egypt, and illustrates the multifaceted and complex potential of human rights in the transitional post-uprising Egypt.Analyzing the main patterns of human rights discourses during this period, the article demonstrates that human rights are not only used as an emancipatory tool by Egyptian citizens against their repressive authoritarian regimes, but also applied by key political actors from various and opposing ideological backgrounds. The article focuses on three significant documents issued during the constitution-making process (viz., the Al-Azhar Document, the National Council Document, and the Silmi Document) and illustrates how diverse opposing key political actors reflected their vision of human rights during the constitution-making process and tried to impose their ideological views on the county’s legal, political, and social frameworks.

Chapter 6 sheds light on the third element of the economy of constitutional change: the choices made by key political actors. In so doing, it seeks to show how choices made in critical moments between 1988 and 1996 had a lasting impact on the trajectory of constitutional change in Mexico—in particular, on the formation of what the author calls the unwritten rule of cooperation and the consolidation of the cross-party entrenchment regime (CPER). Attention is drawn to a key choice that was fundamental for the formation of the rule of cooperation: the deployment of what the author calls the consensus rationale—the championing of the idea of consensus as a necessary condition for the realization of democracy. Through the embracement of the consensus rationale, the PRI set the ground for perpetuating the centralization of constitutional decision-making, and in that way secured the continued availability of constitutional amendment in the country’s economy of constitutional change. In particular, it enabled the government’s ability to cut deals with the political opposition and facilitated the centralization of decision-making. The deployment of the consensus rationale resulted in the formation of the rule of cooperation, which is the main driver of the CPER. The rule of cooperation operates through party discipline and its effect is the centralization of decision-making. As such, it allows the continued use of the amendment mechanism for political entrenchment despite political fragmentation.

The consequences of correctly implementing a normative political theory arguably bear on its acceptability. A theory whose correct implementation permits slavery is highly implausible. We defend a claim about incorrect implementation. We argue that normative political theories that will predictably be put to bad use deserve harsher assessments than theories that will predictably be put to better use. Theories that key political actors will predictably invoke to justify bad policy recommendations are bad theories, even if those recommendations are not logical consequences of the theories (even in conjunction with well-established factual propositions). However, standard discussions of political theories ignore such “misapplications” when it comes to assessing the principles and values proclaimed by those theories. We reject this view because the action guidance that a normative political theory effectively provides is mediated by political actors’ prior beliefs. At the limit, these actors may regard public policies as specifying principles that the theory proclaims, as something different from regarding such policies as causally effective in achieving the ends or enforcing the rights proclaimed by those principles. As a result, political actors see themselves as exempted from the need to undertake careful causal analysis. Morally defensible action guidance requires, then, that those principles be qualified by empirically-grounded policy constraints. Normative political theories qualified in those ways constitute theoretical improvements, that is, improvements on the action guidance that the theories provide on their own.

Perceptions of power and the management of environmental conflict: Forest politics in British Columbia

The complex history of South Africa, which is anchored on colonialism, apartheid, Afrophobia and xenophobia, has incubated and hatched the politicisation of immigration. Premised on the foregoing contextual background statement emanating from the local people’s frustration and aggression, this qualitative desktop and critical discourse analysis study examined the Afrophobic and Xenophobic racialised narratives on immigration in South Africa. This study examined the language and narratives used by key political actors, such as politicians, policymakers, and media outlets, to instigate and legitimise racialised hostility narratives against immigration. This study established that the politicisation of immigration in South Africa stems from racialised narratives, which perpetuate Afrophobia and xenophobic behaviours with the political actors’ endorsement. The findings demonstrate that political actors use political rhetoric to create a sense of crisis and urgency around immigration. The study aids in understanding the interplay between racialised political rhetoric on electoral politics and immigration policy in South Africa. This study’s implication is promoting an inclusive and equitable immigration policy that brings harmony amongst the local and immigrant populations. Finally, the study recommends that policymakers and practitioners should focus on developing pragmatic-based immigration policies as a panacea to the underlying causes of xenophobia and Afrophobia in South Africa. Keywords: Politicisation of Immigration, Racialised Discourse, Electoral Politics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Xenophobia, South Africa