Configuration Of Political Power Research Articles

9 - Digital Technologies and Election Management in Zimbabwe: Pseudo-democratic Transition and Contorted Delirium?


 
 
 This article examines the extent to which the adoption of biometric voter registration in election management in Zimbabwe has appeared a phantom on the horizon regarding democratisation. While the emergence of digitalised election management brought with it expectations of credible electoral processes and outcomes in a country with a history of rampant electoral malpractices in manually managed processes, the phenomenon is yet to yield positive results regarding democratisation in Zimbabwe. Despite the shift from manually managed electoral process to a digitalised approach, the quagmire of irregularities has persisted in Zimbabwean elections. This is largely attributable to the trajectory of governance in Zimbabwe which appears to militate against the exploitation of the opportunities presented by digital technologies in democratising elections in the county. This said, the conclusion drawn from this article is that the configuration of political power, particularly issues of the breach of the democratic principles of separation of power and separation of personnel, are disingenuous to technology-induced democratic transition to credible elections. Secondary research was used to obtain data for this article as data were gathered from books, journal articles, newspaper articles and institutional reports.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Torque Mude, Senior Lecturer, Department of Politics and Public Management, Midlands State University, Zimbabwe. Research Fellow, Regional Integration and AfCFTA Cluster, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, Sub-Regional Office for Eastern Africa, Kigali, Rwanda. Email: mudetorque@gmail.com; mudeta@staff.msu.ac.zw; torque.mude@un.org
 
 

Malaysia’s Creeping Islamization—and Dimming Prospects for Covenantal Pluralism

For countries with religiously diverse populations that have a record of tense relations with each other, the notion of a covenantal pluralism, if successfully established and entrenched as an organizing principle for society, offers an opportunity to break out of the cycle of mutual mistrust and suspicion. Yet, the reality is that the effectiveness of covenantal pluralism as not just an idea but a framework will depend, among other things, on the structural nature of these relationships between religious constituencies and the processes that shape them, as determined by the configuration of political power. This paper proposes that this is precisely the case in Malaysia, where a deeply entrenched narrative of affirmative action favoring the majority ethnic group has found expression in the spheres of politics, economics, social relations, and indeed, everyday life. Concomitantly, it is for this reason that the prospects for covenantal pluralism to gain traction in Malaysia will be profoundly difficult.

The politics of security reform in post-2011 Tunisia: assessing the role of exogenous shocks, domestic policy entrepreneurs and external actors

In post—2011 Tunisia, the reform of the security sector has proceeded haphazardly, hindering security efficiency and lowering the overall effectiveness in countering threats. Since 2015, the combination of three factors — external shocks, international actors' pressures and domestic configurations of political power — have paved the way for a progressive overhaul of the efficiency of security agencies. Following the 2015 terrorist attacks, that destabilized the political system and risked derailing the trajectory of democratic consolidation, European powers exerted pressure to improve efficiency in the security sector. Lastly, these push factors needed an enabling condition, a strong presidency of the republic, to make the changes happen. The measures adopted reflect a technical and supposedly depoliticized view of reforms, in line with a broader post‐interventionist trend in Security Assistance. Based on process-tracing, the analysis of primary documents and several in‐depth interviews carried out between 2015 and 2017, the article illustrates the workings of the policy process in the security arena. It sheds light on the conditions that made possible the adoption of reforms, the role external actors played in pushing for change and in creating a new multilateral mechanism, the G7+, which produced an unintended set of domestic consequences.

Land in Revolt

Abstract In this article, I examine the politicization of natural resources like water and land, and the wider entanglement of environments and politics, in Egyptian cinematic imaginaries. I focus on Youssef Chahine’s film al-Ard (The land, 1969) and its politicization of agricultural land during the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1954–1970) and the British colonial occupation of Egypt (1882–1956). Because histories of colonialism and nationalism in the Arab world are rooted in the economic and political exploitation of material resources (including land, water, and people), I draw on eco-criticism as a method of critical reading to analyze the film’s depictions of these configurations of political power and resource management. I argue that al-Ard roots its depiction of the resistance of the Egyptian peasantry (fellahin) in environmental terms, namely, restrictions to resource access and the affective relationships of the peasants to the land. By tracing these imbrications, I seek to relocate environmental concerns in scholarship on political resistance with reference to Nasser-era cinema.

New World civitas, contested jurisdictions, and inter-cultural conversation in the construction of the Spanish Monarchy

Jurisdictional frontiers were created, contested, and negotiated among a wide range of actors, including native Americans and Europeans, with reference to the cities founded in Castilla del Oro (roughly present-day Panama). This research deals, first, with the reshaping of the concept of a city in the New World, based on its inhabitants’ sense of civitas. It analyses, secondly, the creation and redefinition of jurisdiction during political conflicts and, third, the construction and maintenance of jurisdiction through local relations with indigenous populations described as ‘conversation’. The analysis of the creation and preservation of local jurisdictions allows for an interpretation of the complexities involved in the configuration of political power and political space from below in the territories claimed by the Spanish Monarchy.

War

Though war has long been a neglected topic in the social sciences, we now look back on several decades of systematic research. This review first summarizes the main strands of recent research in political science, where the most influential studies and well-structured debates have emerged. It then outlines four main contributions made by political, cultural, and comparative historical sociologists: the study of ideological, cultural, and legitimation processes leading to and being shaped by war; configurations of political power and inequality as causes and outcomes of war; how wars influence and are influenced by organizational developments (including of state capacity); and the long-term causal forces that produce macro-level regularities.

“Visible Constitutionalism”: A Perspective on Understanding the Fiscal Power Onfiguration of China's Constitution

If the configuration of political power is the core of the constitutional system, then the fiscal power—as the lifeblood from which no political community can be separated—can be seen as the most integral part of the political power: fiscal power configuration can be called the foundation of all political regimes. Fiscal power configuration has its own rules that restrict political power; the synergies of personnel, finance, and functions determine the operating mechanisms of other political powers and their effectiveness. Fiscal power configuration rests on six institutions: revenue, expenditure, transfer payments, budget, final accounts, and the audit system. Constitutional law, tax law, budget law, and the law on transfer payments are its main forms. It is the constitutionalism most likely to be “visible” and constitutes the most pivotal constitutional practice. From this perspective, China's revenue-sharing system reform in 1994 is an unprecedented fiscal power reconfiguration of the People's Republic of China, which should be seen as a far-reaching transformation of the China constitutional practice. The social debate around the reform of the revenue-sharing system and its effectiveness, which began thirty years ago and continues today, also demonstrates the necessity of switching from a static to a dynamic view of the Constitution. Considering constitutionalism as a constant self-repairing and increasingly perfect dynamic process will help us discover living constitutional rules.

No exceptions: authoritarian statism. Agamben, Poulantzas and homeland security

This article outlines and compares two different ways of making sense of counterterrorism and the configuration of political power in its context. Against the backdrop of US homeland security, it first outlines Agamben’s thesis on the permanent state of exception. Despite its resonance with key aspects of homeland security, this thesis is found to be analytically limited and theoretically brittle. To overcome its shortcomings and provide a better understanding of contemporary organisation of political power, a strategic-relational approach is suggested, derived from Poulantzas’s state theory.

When Ideas Trump Interests: Preferences, Worldviews, and Policy Innovations

Ideas are strangely absent from modern models of political economy. In most prevailing theories of policy choice, the dominant role is instead played by “vested interests”—elites, lobbies, and rent-seeking groups which get their way at the expense of the general public. Any model of political economy in which organized interests do not figure prominently is likely to remain vacuous and incomplete. But it does not follow from this that interests are the ultimate determinant of political outcomes. Here I will challenge the notion that there is a well-defined mapping from “interests” to outcomes. This mapping depends on many unstated assumptions about the ideas that political agents have about: 1) what they are maximizing, 2) how the world works, and 3) the set of tools they have at their disposal to further their interests. Importantly, these ideas are subject to both manipulation and innovation, making them part of the political game. There is, in fact, a direct parallel, as I will show, between inventive activity in technology, which economists now routinely make endogenous in their models, and investment in persuasion and policy innovation in the political arena. I focus specifically on models professing to explain economic inefficiency and argue that outcomes in such models are determined as much by the ideas that elites are presumed to have on feasible strategies as by vested interests themselves. A corollary is that new ideas about policy—or policy entrepreneurship—can exert an independent effect on equilibrium outcomes even in the absence of changes in the configuration of political power. I conclude by discussing the sources of new ideas.

Let them Eat Social Capital: Socializing the Market versus Marketizing the Social

Theories of social capital are popular because they claim to insulate society against both the coercion of states and the individualism of markets, as well as to better explain social prosperity and economic performance. But in fact laws, citizenship rights, compulsory associations and political institutions do a much better job of the former, while large-scale civic movements, like Poland’s Solidarity, with demonstrable impacts on the configuration of political power, are the historic keys to democratic prosperity and social confidence.

The local articulation of central power in the north of the Iberian Peninsula (500-1000)

Envisaging political power as dynamic allows the historian to deal with its structures with some sophistication. This paper approaches political power, not as a circumscribed block of bureaucratic elements, but as a complex phenomenon rooted in social reality. The authors explore the dialogue between local and central power, understanding ‘dialogue’ in its widest sense. Thus the relationships (both amicable and hostile) between local and central spheres of influence are studied. The authors propose a new analytical framework for the study of the config uration of political power in the northern zone of the Iberian peninsula, over a long period of time, which takes in both the post-Roman world a nd the political structures of the early Middle Ages.

Bargaining, Uncertainty, and Property Rights in Fisheries

Garrett Hardin's “tragedy of the commons” metaphor is commonly invoked to account for the unfortunate state of world fisheries. But the world s oceans are no longer a global commons and have not been so for the past two decades. Open-access regimes have persisted within many exclusive economic zones (EEZs) during this time, but coastal states' authority to regulate domestic fisheries has existed for more than a generation. Faced with the prospect of Hardin's tragedy, coastal states have had more than twenty years to devise institutional constraints that would prevent it. This article asserts that the dismal experience with EEZs is in large part attributable to distributive bargaining problems that arose within coastal states in the wake of EEZ extension. Moreover, the article argues that high levels of uncertainty that characterize the early stages of institutional development have exacerbated these problems. Finally, the article demonstrates how the variety of institutional designs and paths of institutional development that are observed in the cases of Iceland, Norway, and Atlantic Canada result from the different configurations of political power and political structure within each case. While the empirical discussion is focused upon property rights and fisheries, the theoretical discussion of bargaining and uncertainty has widespread application across comparative and international politics.