Political Expediency Research Articles

Negotiating national identity in postcolonial Zimbabwe through a national dress

AbstractA national dress is a reflection of national consciousness towards the nation and its cultural heritage. Instead of simply being functional, a national dress is also a script that exhibits people's identities. This study examines how Zimbabweans identify with the national dress as a facet of achieving national identity. Qualitative research methods and Gramscianism were employed in the study. It is revealed that the majority of Zimbabweans fail to identify with the national dress due to political, cultural and economic reasons. The national dress is perceived as a campaign strategy being used by the state to achieve political expediency and to be seen as champion of moral as well as cultural regeneration. Some participants associate the dress with cultural imperialism and waste of resources. Very few participants take the dress as a positive step towards the decolonisation of cultural spaces and identities. Conclusively, the majority of Zimbabweans find the dress insignificant in their lives and in national identity construction.

Ծայրահեղականությունը համաշխարհային տնտեսությունում. պատժամիջոցների մեջ «թաթախված» կյանք / Extremism in the World Economy: Life Deep in Sanctions

Recently, sanctions have become a unique tool for regulating foreign relations and forcibly limiting the economic opportunities of other countries. In this regard, 2022 is an unprecedented year in terms of scope, coverage and scalability of sanctions. Although the practice of imposing sanctions is accompanied by “noise and shout” of humanism and pacifism, their main motivation is “political expediency”. The latter is justified by the use of double standards when imposing sanctions on a particular country that exhibits similar behavior. Based on the well-known Russian-Ukrainian events of 2022, the West “flooded” Russia with a stream of sanctions. As of November 9, the US, Canada, Switzerland, EU, UK, France, Australia and Japan have imposed a total of 12,747 sanctions against Russia. The sanctions packages also include a ban on imports from Russia of a number of vital resources that are, in fact, critical to the economy of the sanctioners themselves. In such circumstances, it is still difficult to clearly assess which of the parties will be more deeply "mired" in losses as a result of all this.

Інституційна база регулювання виробництва та обігу цифрових товарів в Україні

The purpose of the study is to offer a scientific vision of the essence of digital goods and recommendations for its reflection in Ukrainian legal regulation based on the study of scientific publications of researchers of digital goods and existing normative acts regulating the processes of their production and circulation. The article brings forward arguments to support the opinion that «virtual assets», «digital assets» and «crypto assets» are not good names for goods operating on the basis of distributed ledger technology, since such a name is not scientifically based and does not reflect the essence of these objects. From the point of view of economic science, it is more expedient to use the name «crypto goods», which reflects both the commodity essence of these objects and their external technological form, formed on the basis of cryptography and a distributed ledger. According to their functional role, among crypto goods can be distinguished articles related to money, investment goods, personal consumption items, and means of production. It is determined that regulators chose such names, guided not by scientific, but political expediency, as they try to prevent competition on the part of monetary crypto goods for the sake of the monopoly of issuing public money by central banks. Simultaneously, the economic essence of crypto goods in general forces the relevant institutions to be appointed directly responsible for the regulation of certain crypto goods. For example, monetary crypto goods are regulated by central banks, and investment crypto goods are regulated by bodies that are usually engaged in the regulation of the securities market. The philosophy of regulation is aimed primarily at legally making all crypto goods either investment or consumer goods. Monetary crypto goods is only viewed as digital currencies of central banks. A promising direction of research in this area may be the analysis of the consequences of the spread of the production of crypto goods, especially in metaverses, for national economies and for business.

ПОЛІТИЗАЦІЯ ІСТОРІЇ І ЇЇ РОЛЬ В МІЖНАРОДНИХ ВІДНОСИНАХ: ТЕОРЕТИЧНИЙ ТА ЕМПІРИЧНИЙ АНАЛІЗ НА ПРИКЛАДІ ПОЛЬСЬКО-НІМЕЦЬКИХ ВІДНОСИН

Development of bilateral relations between States is a complex and multifaceted process. There are many factors to affect the quality, and sometimes-quantitative characteristics of the relationship. For example: economic feasibility (bilateral patterns of trade, economic interest in partners, and level of investment attractiveness), political expediency (to what extent the partner country is of interest to political elites or the public), image of the country within society, cultural cooperation level. To the above list, which is by no means exhaustive, historical memory should be added. Historical memory of yourself and partner's country, or how this term is articulated within a given society.

The political summer of 2022 in Japan: A storm before a lull?

The article addresses the political processes in Japan in the summer of 2022. The central place among them is occupied by the elections to the House of Councilors held in July, which brought victory to the ruling coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito. As the main reason for the strong performance of the conservatives in the author views is the fact that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida grasped and duly took into account in his election program a shift to the right in the mainstream sentiment of the Japanese society, under which, against the background of the tightening security environment around Japan, it began to show “understanding” to the growth of military spending, the revision of Article 9 of the Constitution and the abolition of other pacifist restrictions. Kishida returned to the principles of the inter-factional balance of power in the cabinet reshuffle, introducing a significant number of newcomers in accordance with the wishes of the factional leaders. Given the current situation in the parliament, as well as the fact that national elections are not expected in Japan until 2025, Kishida received a huge freedom of hands, not being bound by the need to constantly act basing on the considerations of political expediency. So far, he has shown himself to be a loyal disciple of his predecessor Abe, with great reverence for most of his endeavors, but it is still difficult to say whether he will continue Abe’s policy in all areas.

Determinants of Internal Audit Effectiveness in Federal Public Sector Organizations in Nigeria

The study investigates the determinants of internal audit effectiveness in Nigeria's federal public service with reference to 28 self accounting public sector organizations operating in the North East geo-political zone, one of six such zones recognized for political expediency. Primary data was obtained from 139 valid responses out of 148 questionnaires administered on internal auditors of such organizations. Partial least square SEM technique of multiple regressions was employed for data analysis. The finding of this study revealed that the quality of internal audit work; competence; and management support were most dominant with positive significant contribution on internal audit's ability to meet its objectives while independence and information and communication technology (ICT) conversely showed negative insignificant influence. The study recommends an improvement of operational standards; compliance with Internal Audit's minimum entry requirement; its recognition as an independent organizational function; and provision of required resources by relevant government offices (OAGF; OHSF; NITDA).

ПОЛИТИЧЕСКАЯ ПРАКТИКА ПРИМЕНЕНИЯ И ТОЛКОВАНИЯ ПРИНЦИПОВ ПРАВА НАРОДОВ НА САМООПРЕДЕЛЕНИЕ И ТЕРРИТОРИАЛЬНОЙ ЦЕЛОСТНОСТИ ГОСУДАРСТВ

The opposing positions of countries on the application of the principles of the peoples’ right to self-determination and the territorial integrity of states are considered. The purpose of the article is to prove that the positions taken by countries are not determined by international legal norms or a custom, but by political necessity. Research methods: comparative, historical, systematic methods and content analysis of documents. The main results of the work are the following provisions. The situation with the secession of Kosovo from Serbia, the recognition of Kosovo's independence by a number of states was the first precedent in the application of the principles of the peoples’ right to self-determination. Then, first of all, the Western countries adopted an atypical position for them to deny the inviolability of the borders of the state of Serbia. On the other hand, these same countries are characterized by persistent non-recognition and disregard for the independence declarations of Pridnestrovie, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. According to the results of the study, the author came to the following conclusion. Research results. The author proved that in the situation with Kosovo, the countries of the West made a strategic mistake in the political interpretation of the principles of the peoples’ right to self-determination and territorial integrity of states. This bloc of states has shown that in practice it is ready to deviate from predictable and legally correct interpretations of the principles under consideration, moreover, under the influence of political expediency.

UNCITRAL Model Law Development of Arbitration Framework for EPC Disclosure of Travaux Preparatoires using Political Expediency of Tax Planning

Corporate Governance is a conceptual framework of business designs intended to illustrate the various activities of a company towards fulfilling its profit goals as private stakeholder and contributing to public interests for social obligation of sustainable development. Disclosure of corporate social responsibility is the central mechanism of corporate governance. Based on stakeholder theory, corporate governance strongly influences corporate social responsibility disclosure to enhance the relationship of stakeholders and its business community. Tax aggressiveness is utilized by board director and its members to lessen tax contribution which is contrary to the government sector goals of maximizing tax impositions for public welfare and safety. Unlawful behavior on tax aggressiveness is known as tax evasion while tax avoidance is not a violation and serves as a loophole to the taxation system. UNCITRAL model law is a legal arbitration concept of making “commercial” expand to other comparable jurisdiction of international trade. The European Patent Commission is the legal authority that delineates medical policies from patented products. Travaux preparatoires is a design practice within legal context of restricted jurisdiction for commercial exercise of strict liability. This paper aims to develop arbitration framework based on stakeholder theory of corporate governance to explain the correlation of tax planning with patented products and medical processes involving therapeutic, surgical, and veterinary policies. Therefore, tax evasion is not apparent criminal behavior and tax planning on medical policies and patented drugs must have a separate strategic means of increasing monetary success for tax avoidance to be clearly managed by the company.

China–Iran Relations from the Perspective of Tehran’s Look East Approach

In recent years the Iranian government has emphasised its Look East approach. As a diplomatic choice, the Look East approach has also aroused different understandings among Iranian scholars and in this context, China has received more attention from Iran. For different reasons, many countries have tracked and observed Iran's Look East approach and China-Iran relations. At present, there are many negative perceptions about the Look East approach and Sino-Iranian relations in Iran and the international community. So far, China has made very few official comments on Iran's Look East approach, and this is essentially the case with Chinese scholars and media. China is very concerned about whether Iran's Look East approach is an act of political expediency or a strategy. Some of Iran's actions in the past few years have partially proved the necessity for China to be so suspicious. Although there are some negative views of China in Iran, Beijing should still pay more attention to deepening relations with Tehran. Even if Iran's Look East approach is not a long-term strategy, it is no longer just an expedient measure to deal with Western sanctions. China must be an important goal of Iran's multilateral diplomacy. China and Iran, which need each other, urgently need to increase political mutual trust.

Perspectives on Race, Gender and Power Differentials in Lived Experiences of Failed Suicide Bombers in Pakistan

The study documents lived experiences of failed suicide bombers in Pakistan. It describes the influence and impact of social structures like gender, geography race and ethnicity with reference to their experiencing of suicide bombing. The study also characterizes the power relations in their interactional contexts entailing in unquestioning submission and support to militant organizations. Owing to ideological charged conditions and overwhelming existence of terrorist organisation certain regions and ethnicities in Pakistan exhibit unusual inclination to suicide terrorism. The article also argues the strategic necessity and ideological under pining of feminizing suicide terrorism in Pakistan by terrorist outfits. Feminizing of suicide terrorism in Pakistan is driven by out of strategic and political expediency. Women in Pakistan are enlisted mostly by means of physical and emotional coercion, exploitation of familial ties and patriarchal influences. The lived experiences of the male and female suicide bombers gathered from in-depth interviews and secondary data delineate the factors and process of ‘zombification’. Keywords: Female suicide bombers, Suicide bombing, gender, race and ethnicity, terrorism, power.

Інституційний аудит як інструмент підвищення інституційної спроможності органів виконавчої влади

Розглянуто систему аудитів у публічному секторі та визначено роль інституційного аудиту в підвищенні інституційної спроможності органів виконавчої влади та формуванні засад доброго врядування. Виокремлено напрямки посилення інституційної спроможності органів виконавчої влади. Визначено об’єкт, результати та потенційні вигоди процесу оцінювання інституційної спроможності як складової інституційного аудиту. З метою підвищення ефективності інституційного аудиту запропоновано залучати громадські об’єднання до інституційного аудиту відповідних органів виконавчої влади чи їх структурних підрозділів.

The Concentration Camp as Site of Refuge: The Rise of the Refugee Camp and the Great War in the Middle East

The refugee camp today has been naturalized as a product of failed international idealism and political expediency that serves as a timeless reminder of the plight of displaced peoples. This article explores the refugee camp’s origins as a product of a late Victorian imperial and military legacy and the contingencies of World War I. The use of the concentration camp as a tool to provide refuge and control displaced populations began during the war as a humanitarian measure. Part of a larger world of camps that interned civilians, prisoners of war, and refugees during World War I, the refugee camp in the Middle East existed at the crossroads of Allied military objectives and the Western-led humanitarian movement. In the wake of victory in the east, the army of occupation, aid workers, and local actors fashioned the concentration camp as a site of refuge as part of an emerging international order. American relief efforts led by Near East Relief and later the League of Nations have been well studied. Less understood is how and why Britain, due to the central role it played in combat operations and eventually in dividing up the Middle East with its French ally, guided and shaped norms and conditions for dealing with displaced peoples. Ultimately, the experience of total war shaped Allied war strategy regarding civilian populations during the humanitarian crisis that engulfed the east. It produced the refugee camp as an ostensibly temporary solution to what became for many a permanent problem of statelessness.

“The desire for that measure of justice”: Consciousness, Political Expediency, and the Rise of Women’s Suffrage in Montana and the West, 1869–1920

“The desire for that measure of justice”: Consciousness, Political Expediency, and the Rise of Women’s Suffrage in Montana and the West, 1869–1920

Editor's Column

Editor's Column

In praise of Arab ‘Defeat’: another reading of Arab struggle

This article seeks to detach the 2011 Arab uprisings from an ontology of revolution and resistance that relegates them only to a discourse of success and failure. While the grievances of street mobilization of millions of protesters are familiar, they cannot be contained in a narrative that simply measures them against a Western prototype of democracy or a blueprint of revolutionary practice. Such an analysis, I argue, dilutes the contextual specificity of these events by subsuming them into an exhaustive model they either conform to or deviate from. Instead, I ask, what if we opened up the archive to read these events differently? What if we wrote against the grain and tempo of that dominant archive to demystify Arab societies and evoke a long view of Arab protest, a view that is not obsessed with interpretive ease and an external political expediency? Drawing on a historical record of continuous struggle in Morocco and using the media work of Hicham Lasri as an example, this article provides an alternative reflection on the necessity to read these uprisings as a persisting expression of a people’s demand for agency, dignity, and possibility in societies still afflicted by the burdens of autocracy, corruption, and neoliberalism and tormented by their quest for political rights and cultural independence. The ‘Arab Spring’ in this analysis ceases to be a singular event or a fleeting spectacle of revolutionary potential.

Legal status of cryptocurrency in Asian countries

The article is devoted to the study of the experience of legal regulation of the legal status of cryptocurrencies and transactions with them in Asian countries (except for the People's Republic of China and Asian countries - members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, as the author examined them in separate publications). In the article the author, based on the study of regulations, administrative and judicial practice of all major countries in this part of the world, emphasizes the divergent trends in cryptocurrency transactions regulation in the region, when some countries move from a liberal approach to the use of cryptocurrencies to their total ban and vice versa. It is noted that almost all countries in the region give a legal assessment of the payment function of cryptocurrencies, using regulatory or prohibitive approaches, depending on the chosen policy, which indirectly confirms their understanding of the legal nature of cryptocurrencies primarily as a means of payment. At the same time, these countries not only categorically distinguish cryptocurrencies from fiat money issued by central banks, but also mostly avoid the official definition of cryptocurrency as private (decentralized) cash, preferring to qualify them as an intangible asset, virtual asset, digital asset, financial value and even a good or service, which is currently a kind of compromise between political expediency and economic realities. The author also notes that the Asian region is characterized by very active attempts to resolve the legal status of cryptocurrencies at the legislative level, and not just administrative or judicial response to the actual legal relationship, although the progress of different countries in this matter is different.
 As a result, the author concludes that in the Asian countries considered in the article, there is no same view on the legal nature of cryptocurrency, its qualification as an object of civil rights, and ways to regulate transactions with it (libertarian approach, positive-cryptocurrency approach but with detailed government regulation and control or a completely restrictive policy in relation to the cryptocurrency market).

Science, Innovation, and Society in the Age of Pandemics: Reflections From the Inaugural Sir Alasdair Breckenridge Lecture.

Science, Innovation, and Society in the Age of Pandemics: Reflections From the Inaugural Sir Alasdair Breckenridge Lecture.

Populist and vindictive constructions of sexual offending, pluralities of violence, and the implications for criminal and social justice: Populistyczne oraz mściwe konstrukcje przestępstwa seksualnego, większość względna przemocy, i implikacje dla sprawiedliwości karnej i społecznej.

Drawing upon the “sociology of vindictiveness” (Young 2003; 2007) and Sumner’s (1990; 1994) work on censure the authors examine the construal, responses and treatment of individuals who have committed a sexual offence against a child/children (ICSOAC). We seek to understand the dynamics and social processes of the exclusion of others and the way negative, sectional and bureaucratised discourses, policies and practices can “other” marginalised groups, for political expediency. We argue that to fully understand these responses we need to better understand the wider social dynamics and constructions which inform and shape societal perceptions in pursuit of an essentialised “good enemy”. In line with this, we go on to outline the interaction between vindictiveness and populism in the administration of justice and situate the challenges this poses for both punishment and the rehabilitation and reintegration of individuals convicted of sexual crime.

Between “colonial amnesia” and “victimization biases”: Double standards in Italian cultural heritage law

AbstractThis article offers a critical appraisal of the evolution of Italian cultural heritage law with respect to issues of colonial and war restitution and of control over the import of potentially trafficked cultural property. As Italy is usually considered a “source country” and a victim of historical depredations, a form of “selective blindness” to its colonial past and to its role at the receiving end of both past and current misappropriations of cultural objects is discussed. Some recent restitutions of cultural property taken in times of colonial occupation are also analyzed as signs of a possible change in policy and practice, but the article also highlights the features of political expediency that have influenced them as well as the many legal and practical obstacles still to be faced by restitution and repatriation claims. Finally, the potential effects of recent (mostly international) inputs on Italy’s cultural heritage policy are presented.

A Matter of Facts: The Value of Evidence in an Information Age. By Laura A. Millar. [Review

To refer to Laura Millar’s A Matter of Facts: The Value of Evidence in an Information Age as timely is both an understatement and inaccurate. It is an understatement because, as of this writing, the COVID-19 pandemic has emerged as not only the most disruptive event across the globe in generations, but has also been subject to the worst excesses of the epistemic crisis that Millar details throughout the book. Perhaps now more than ever, facts, evidence, and the truths they support are urgently needed—they are a matter of life and death—but yet they are constantly subjugated to selective incredulity, confirmation bias, and political expediency. The reference to A Matter of Facts as timely is also inaccurate, not through the fault of the author’s straightforward approach or concise handling of the subject matter, but because any single work cannot possibly account for the depth of the problem of misinformation or anticipate the rate at which it has evolved and embedded itself into our social fabric in such short order. Certainly, Millar is aware of the intractable yet fluid nature of the current situation, and the developments in just the year or so since the book was published could very well provide a tremendous amount of cautionary fodder for an expanded edition at a later date.