Implications For Political Stability Research Articles

Navigating Party Loyalty and Party Hopping in Malaysia Through Nordin Salleh and Khaliq Mehtab’s Cases

This article delves into the intricate dynamics of party loyalty and its implications for political stability in Malaysia, with a specific focus on party hopping. This study applies a doctrinal approach by examining statutory provisions, courts’ judgments and secondary sources. Through a detailed analysis of two landmark cases – Nordin Salleh and Khaliq Mehtab – this study uncovers the underlying challenges within Malaysia's political landscape. The analysis illuminates the judicial position in Nordin Salleh and the departure in Khaliq Mehtab’s cases; to which contrasting judicial positions were taken by the then Supreme Court in the former and the Federal Court in the latter. In light of these findings, the study underscores the critical need for robust and adaptable political institutions capable of withstanding such disruptions, thereby fostering a stable and resilient democracy. Furthermore, this study draws attention to the 2022 constitutional amendment addressing party hopping, acknowledging it as a positive step towards enhancing stability. However, it also highlights the existing gaps in the reforms, particularly in light of the pending application in court. In conclusion, this study posits that the constitutional amendment represents a commendable effort to advance political stability, but its efficacy remains to be seen.

Mechanisms to empower Iraqi youth in conflict-affected areas and their implications for political stability after 2017

Armed conflicts waste many opportunities for young people's social, political and economic participation, through which they create spaces to express themselves. In fact, armed conflicts not only destroy infrastructure, but also destroy social capital as a result of population displacements in conflict areas, often accompanied by broad ethnic and national divisions, and in local communities. In the Iraqi case, the youth group became the most affected by the conflicts that Iraq witnessed after 2003, as a result of the terrorist organizations (ISIS) occupying cities and large areas of Iraq. In fact, the seriousness of the role of youth in perpetuating the momentum of conflicts at times, or for young people to become victims of them, was one of the most prominent challenges related to youth empowerment, and in confronting this, societies emerging from conflict (Iraq after 2017) must reap the benefits of stability. By making appropriate investments in youth by creating enabling mechanisms at multiple levels in order to reconnect youth to the societal system.

UMNO dan PAS dalam Persaingan Politik Sekuler-Islam di Malaysia

This article aims to look at the political competition between the United Malay National Organization (UMNO) and the Se-Malaysia Islamic Party (PAS) in political dynamics in Malaysia. These two parties are the two largest parties in Malaysia which both consider themselves to represent the voices of the Malay-Islamic community. In writing, this article uses historical research methods in four steps: heuristics, criticism, verification, and historiography, using a political approach. This approach is used to view a historical event from a political point of view. While in terms of data collection techniques, this article uses library research to collect sources related to the topics discussed. The results of the study show that, since their inception, UMNO and PAS have experienced differences in their political goals. UMNO prioritizes the Malay side of its political strategy, while PAS makes Islam its main strategy. These two parties are trying to win most ethnic Malay votes as the largest ethnic group in Malaysia. Mutual claims and criticisms continue to be carried out by the two parties. Another result is that competition between UMNO and PAS has implications for political stability in Malaysia. The arrest of political opponents between the two parties is unavoidable, resulting in the erosion of the Malay majority vote in the Malaysian general election.

The Great Political Divergence

This paper investigates the worldwide phenomenon of divergence'' between the East and the West. During the 8th to 10th centuries, Western Europe and China both achieved political stability, but they did so through dramatically different routes. Western Europe developed parliamentary representation on the basis of a power balance between the aristocracy and the crown, whereas China consolidated absolutism based on a state bureaucracy and an exam-based meritocracy. This paper provides empirical evidence to document this great political divergence, and it proposes a theory to understand the relationship between institutions and the monarchy-aristocracy power balance and the implications for political stability and long-run political development.

IPOB Agitations for Self-Determination and the Response of the Federal Government of Nigeria: Implications for Political Stability

This study examines the strategies of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) agitations and the response of the Nigerian government towards IPOB agitators and its implications on political stability. The study adopted the use of survey research design. The sample of the study was taken from IPOB members in selected six locations of six states including Abuja. The selected locations were chosen due to the high activities of IPOB group. Using a sample size determination table, the sample size of the selected areas was summed up 385. In-depth interview was the second method of data collection. The returned copies of the questionnaire were analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The findings showed that the government’s strategy for dealing with the Biafra separatist movement has focused mainly on police action, most times, involving excessive use of force. It can be concluded that the recurring agitation for Biafra has serious implications for political stability and democratic consolidation. Finally, it was recommended that the positive responses of government on development projects and inclusivity in governance will determine the courage IPOB and the Biafra movement will have going forward.

Neoliberal Democratic Reforms in Post-Gaddafi Era: Implications for Political Stability in Libya, 2011-2016

This study investigates the neoliberal democratic reforms in post-Gaddafi era and its implications for political stability in Libya. Specifically, the study examined the contradictions of the ruling class project of democratization in Libya and their implications for political instability in the post-Gaddafi era. The study found that the democratic project as propagated by the ruling class in post-Gaddafi’s Libya is an intrinsic feature of modernization, a transition from authoritarian to more open political systems, a process linking economic reform and political liberalization perceived as not expressing an organic unity, but separate and either consecutively or concurrently linked. By viewing political instability as an inevitable pendulum of the cyclical transition from authoritarian to more democratic system, neoliberal democracy in post-Gaddafi’s Libya legitimizes authoritarianism in so far as it promotes modernization and liberal system of free market economy. The implication of the study is that the adoption of a new economic system, as well as western-style political institutions in post-Gaddafi Libya, relegating the consultation and active participation of the Libyan people undermined the democratic project. The exclusion of Libyans in the democratization process ultimately gave rise to political instability in post-revolution Libya. We therefore, recommended a referendum as a preferred option for Libyans to decide economic and political organization of Libya.

Northern Ireland and Brexit: Three effects on ‘the border in the mind’

For those who spoke on behalf of Leave voters, the result on 23 June 2016 meant the people of the United Kingdom were taking back ‘control’ or getting their ‘own country back’. However, two parts of the United Kingdom did not vote Leave: Scotland and Northern Ireland. Here, the significant counterpoint to ‘taking back control is “waking up in a different country”’, and this sentiment has unique political gravity. Its unique gravity involves two distinct but intimately related matters. The first concerns the politics of identity. The vote was mainly, if not entirely, along nationalist/unionist lines, confirming an old division: unionists were staking a ‘British’ identity by voting Leave, and nationalists an Irish one by voting Remain. The second concerns borders. The Good Friday/Belfast Agreement of 1998 meant taking the border out of Irish politics. Brexit means running the border between the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom across the island as a sovereign ‘frontier’. Although this second matter is discussed mainly in terms of the implications for free movement of people and goods, we argue that it is freighted with meanings of identity. Brexit involves a ‘border in the mind’, those shifts in self-understanding, individually and collectively, attendant upon the referendum. This article examines this ‘border in the mind’ according to its effects on identity, politics and the constitution, and their implications for political stability in Northern Ireland.

Electoral Violence in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic: Implications for Political Stability

Electoral Violence in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic: Implications for Political Stability

Regional fragmentation in Tajikistan: The shift of powers between different identity groups

This work tackles the process of regionalism in the present-day Tajikistan. In the wake of the Civil War, the Tajik leadership pledged to unite the nation around common linguistic and historical ties and eliminate the manifestations of regionalism and localism that had thrown the country into an abyss of political chaos and economic collapse, and left thousands of people dead, millions displaced and impoverished. Using the recruitment practices analysis, this paper sets out to identify the state of societal fragmentation in Tajikistan and demonstrate a shift of powers between identity groups in Tajikistan from the Soviet period and after. As in the Soviet period, regional, local, clan, and kin ties remain at the core of recruitment practices and policies in Tajikistan's state institutions. They, in turn, sustain a pattern of regional differentiation, discrimination, special-interest lobbying and policies. Regionalism and localism remain a central part of Tajikistan's political and socio-cultural milieu which has serious implications for political stability.

The Politics of Multiple Identities: Lineage and Ethnicity in Kazakhstan

IN POST-COLONIAL SITUATIONS1 dual efforts to create an effective state apparatus (state building) and foster broad-based popular allegiance to that apparatus (nation building) run up against the institutional, material and discursive legacies of the previous political order.2 These two-fold imperatives are thus fraught with pitfalls that, in the extreme, can result in civil conflict, as in Tajikistan, or even near-total state collapse, as in Somalia.3 Given its implications for political stability, the difficult process of nation building leads students of identity politics to focus on a central question: 'Why do some nation building efforts succeed, while others fail?' The question is critical, but, as posed, it has an unintended consequence: it limits theoretical discussion to a single dimension. Following the broad tendency to theorise identities as single and isolatable,4 analysts routinely ignore the possibility that nation building efforts have implications that are not neatly captured on an analytical spectrum from success to failure. This article5 highlights the central linkages between forms and levels of identity politics by suggesting that elite efforts at ethnic nation building in Kazakhstan served, willy-nilly, to place sub-ethnic identities at the centre of political life. The argument is that the weak post-Soviet Kazakhstani state, bent on strategies of ethnicity-based compensation, lacked the resources to implement its programmes to promote ethnic Kazakhs. Instead, it created a broad discourse of ethnic redress that was left to individual actors in individual locales to translate into political practice. In doing so, many such actors used knowledge of genealogical lineage, which undergirded sub-ethnic identities, as a marker of Kazakhness. A virtual bidding war among locales ensued over these ethnic markers that served to construct lineage identities as politically salient. The context was a society popularly perceived as bi-ethnic. Political competition centred on two groups-Russians and Kazakhs-and much of the Kazakh political elite was culturally and linguistically russified. The actual cultural composition revealed greater diversity. When the USSR collapsed, Kazakhstan was the only successor state whose titular group was an ethnic minority (39.7%). A significant Russian population (33%), Germans and Ukrainians (4% each), Belarusans, Uzbeks and Crimean Tatars (2% each) rounded out this population of under 17 million. As for sub-ethnic lineage identities, the nomadic society of the pre-Soviet Kazakh steppe was segmentary. Kazakhs generally divided themselves into three zhuz (tribal

The Gulf crisis: Implications for political stability in the middle‐east

(1991). The Gulf crisis: Implications for political stability in the middle‐east. Cambridge Review of International Affairs: Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 34-44.

Nigeria and the advancing desert

A wide area of Nigeria is now being subjected to the adverse effects of the advancing Sahara Desert. Although public policy focus appears to have been directed at this problem, its implications for political stability are more serious than presently realised. The need arises therefore to adopt an approach that will consider the multivarious dimensions of the desertification problem.