Political Liberty Research Articles

Dynamics between national security laws and repertoires of political action: A comparative analysis of Hong Kong and South Korea

AbstractThis article undertakes a comparative analysis of two cases, Hong Kong and South Korea, each characterized by distinct levels of political and civil liberties to elucidate how the institutionalization of national security operates in shaping the repertoires of popular political actions and the repressive conduct of state actors. In both cases, the legal frameworks serve to curtail popular political action, both online and offline, often through discretionary applications of national security norms, resulting in ambiguity. They bestow legitimacy upon state agencies to engage in protest policing, surveillance, and the suppression of individuals or organizations in the name of upholding national security. In contrast, the national security laws in Hong Kong and South Korea, influenced by varying interpretations and applications of perceived threats to national security, result in differences in the extent and degree of contentious political actions and state repression.

На пути к свободе слова: Особое совещание по составлению нового Устава о печати в 1905 г.

The article deals with the discussions that accompanied the work of the Special Council on drafting a new press statute in 1905. The Council, also known as the «D. F. Kobeko Commission», worked from February 10 to December 18, 1905. The minutes of its meetings, which served as the main source for the study, were deposited in the personal fund of the prominent statesman and public figure, lawyer A. F. Koni in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). Researchers who approached them earlier were primarily interested in the institutional aspects of the activity of the The Special Council: the procedure for its formation, composition, course and results of the meetings. The participants in the discussion, with their views, ideas and proposals, remained in the background. Meanwhile at the The Special Council was represented the expert community, organized on the authorities` initiative. In addition to officials, lawyers, publishers, journalists and public figures of various views were involved in drafting the new press law. This determined the problematic nature and acuteness of the discussions. During the meetings of the Special Council, the positions of the two most significant and influential groups of the Russian public – the ideological supporters and the convinced opponents of the reforms – were formulated and determined. Representatives of each of them were guided by different worldviews that determined their political and social position. In their judgments, which for the first time are considered comprehensively in historiography, they went much further than the issues of the press. Their discussions revealed their positions on the key issues of Russian public thought in 1905: representation of the people, constitutional state, political and civil liberties and revolution. The intellectual history`s methodology made it possible to place the statements of the members of the Council in a broad socio-political context. And the use of additional (mostly unpublished) office documents allowed to determine to what extent the Special Council corresponded to the key trends of the state policy in the field of press and propaganda. And to what extent the «D. F. Kobeko Commission» foresaw and determined these trends. On the basis of the study it is concluded that in 1905 the Russian public was widely integrated into the lawmaking process. This cooperation did not always bring legislative fruits. But it significantly changed the political agenda, considerably narrowing the «boundaries of permissible» for the supreme power.

“Subjects,” “Liberty,” and “Equity”: Queen Victoria's Proclamations and Bengali Writers

Starting with Queen Victoria's address to the Proclamation Durbar in 1877, this article surveys how Bengali writers critiqued British colonialism in India through their stories, songs, poetry, journalism, and lectures, sometimes directly about the queen herself, more often when discussing governance, social reform, and the desire for political liberty.

Freedoms and Personal Rights of Women as Part of the Fundamental Rights Recognized by the Constitution

The personal freedoms and rights of women are indispensable and integral to the individual freedoms and rights in a democratic society. National and international legislation safeguards these rights and freedoms, which establish the status, autonomy, and function of women in society. Women's personal freedoms and rights are essential components of individual freedoms and rights as a whole. Ensuring and advocating for these rights enhances the establishment of a fair, impartial, and comprehensive society that encompasses everyone. The Constitution of the Republic of Albania establishes and safeguards the basic rights and liberties of individuals, encompassing the rights of women. The examination of these factors establishes the extent to which women's individual rights and liberties impact their autonomy, worth, and societal position, fostering an environment where women are seen as equals and held in high regard. Essential to achieving these objectives is the implementation and adherence to laws and policies that safeguard and advance these rights. The manifesto addresses several aspects of economic, political, social, and cultural liberties and entitlements.
 
 Received: 2 October 2023 / Accepted: 10 December 2023 / Published: 23 December 2023

Complementary educational and cultural institutions to Rawls’s ‘fair value of political liberty’

Complementary educational and cultural institutions to Rawls’s ‘fair value of political liberty’

KEBEBASAN BERAGAMA, RELIGIUSITAS DAN PEMBANGUNAN EKONOMI

This study employs a literature review methodology to investigate the interplay among religious freedom, religiosity, and economic development. It examines how religious freedom influences religiosity levels and economic growth, drawing on various research propositions and empirical evidence. The research relies on reputable international journal sources and keywords related to religious economy, competition, markets, and their impact on religiosity and economic development. The study reveals a significant relationship between religious freedom and religiosity, highlighting seven key propositions, including the role of state involvement in regulating religious activities, the effects of unregulated religious activities, and the impact on societal acceptance of religious symbols and rituals. It also explores the connection between religious freedom and economic development, emphasizing that it is integral to civil and political liberties, removing barriers to innovation, trade, and investment and ultimately contributing to social stability and cultural diversity. In conclusion, this study illuminates the complex connections between religious freedom, religiosity, and economic development, offering insights for policymakers to protect religious rights, encourage pluralism, and foster a diverse and inclusive society that values religious freedom and economic growth.

The Impact of Covid-19 on the Move towards Authoritarianism: The Case of Hungary

As the Freedom House Report 2023 shows, there has been a global trend from democracy to
 authoritarianism over the past 17 years. This gained further momentum in late 2019 with the outbreak
 of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in Wuhan, China. In the fight against this virus, which has
 resulted in the deaths of millions of people, governments implemented several significant measures,
 including closures, curfews, and mandatory vaccinations. Under the pretense of combatting the virus,
 populist politicians, who already had authoritarian inclinations before the pandemic, disregarded
 important democratic principles, such as free and fair elections, separation of powers, political liberties,
 and civil rights. The violations of these principles by populist leaders accelerated global democratic
 backsliding. In this context, in March 2020, in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Hungary’s Prime
 Minister Viktor Orban, who has used every political crisis to find excuses to pursue undemocratic
 policies and strengthen his hold on power, pushed the Hungarian parliament to grant him extraordinary
 emergency powers. He used coronavirus precautions to establish one-man rule in Hungary by
 bypassing parliament. His government devised a legislative framework to suppress critics of its policies
 in the media, civil society, and the opposition. Orban also implemented restrictions violating judicial
 independence, minority rights, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly through constitutional
 amendments. In other words, Orban utilized the coronavirus outbreak to further weaken Hungary’s
 democratic structures and principles. Human rights organizations and the European Union have
 criticized Hungary’s slow erosion of democracy under Orban’s administration. This article analyzes
 the impact of COVID-19 on the acceleration of democratic backsliding in Hungary, under the rule of
 Prime Minister Viktor Orban, in terms of Wolfgang Merkel’s (2004) four conditions for democratic
 consolidation: electoral regimes, civil rights, political freedoms, and separation of powers.

애덤 스미스와 민주주의

The name of Adam Smith is inextricably linked with modern economics. The most fundamental goal of his academic life, however, was the study of the principles of law and government. He formally declared this goal, pursued it throughout his life, and wrote The Wealth of Nations as a partial fulfilment, contributing to his immortality as a thinker. Although Smith was not a scholar dedicated to the study of democracy, he did explore the principles of law and goverment, and his writings contain rich discussions of political decision-making issues from which we can infer his understanding of democracy. This paper reconstructs them through the lens of realising and limiting majoritarianism.
 While Smith's view was that majoritarianism should be at the centre of political decision-making, and he emphasised the role of elections as a means of realising majoritarianism, this does not mean that the path to majoritarianism is limited to elections. Rather, this paper argues that Smith saw the role of public opinion in influencing public deliberation as an important means of realising majoritarianism. In this regard, Smith identified the problem of class bias in public opinion based on socioeconomic conditions as a reason for the adoption of mercantilism, and recognized the role of the state in addressing this problem. Smith's discussion has significant relevance to the problem of the limited political role of the people in today's democracies, and the need for the active exercise of political liberty to prevent the implementation of unjust policies that violate liberty.
 At the same time, Smith also touched on the possibility of the limiting majoritarianism. Majoritarianism is typically realised through representative legislation, and Smith recognized the existence of a higher normative content that guided statutory law by regarding such parliamentary legislation as aiming to be consistent with the rules of natural justice that arise from the sympathy of human nature. Smith also emphasized the existence of the state's duty of equal treatment as a normative principle that guides legislation in the area of police. Essentially, Smith recognized that representative decision-making is constrained by more fundamental norms. On the other hand, by locating the source of this limitation in the moral principles or political will emanating from the members of the state as a whole, Smith is credited with showing that the limitation of representative decision-making and the ideology of majoritarianism may not be incompatible. By viewing a constitution based on popular sovereignty as a product of the will of the majority, being higher democratic law-making than ordinary legislation, Smith's position has a similar logical structure to the current debate that even if a constitution appears to limit representative legislation, it can ultimately be reconciled with the ideology of majoritarianism.

The monarchical origins of modern liberty: the Norman Conquest and the English constitution revisited, 1771–1861

ABSTRACT This article recovers a largely forgotten and quite surprising argument about the origins of political liberty in Britain: that the Norman Conquest, by making possible an extremely powerful absolute monarchy, paradoxically set in motion the historical process which would later lead to the emergence of limited constitutional monarchy. The article shows how the eighteenth-century writer Jean Louis de Lolme initially made this argument to explain the divergent constitutional orders of Britain and France. De Lolme’s hypothesis was then taken up by numerous historians and political theorists. François Guizot and his fellow Doctrinaires, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill were among the writers who further developed his historical explanation of the British constitution. The liberal philosophy of history in the nineteenth century sprang from De Lolme's account of how absolute monarchy leads paradoxically to constitutional liberty.

The Legal Artifice of Liberty: On Beccaria’s Philosophy

Beccaria’s penal philosophy hinges on the doctrinal paradigm of liberty through law. Inconceivable in the absence of laws and unattainable in the presence of arbitrary powers, liberty is profiled as the legal situation of the person who may act, within the sphere of what is not forbidden and not bound, without suffering illicit interference from private individuals or organs of the state. Thus, the form of law becomes an essential matter in the construction of the political space suitable for free living. In the analysis proposed in this article, the notion of “political liberty”–which Beccaria takes from Montesquieu–is declined in relation to the legal order, criminal law and the social contract.

Mark Coeckelbergh, Green Leviathan or the Poetics of Political Liberty: Navigating Freedom in the Age of Climate Change and Artificial Intelligence

Mark Coeckelbergh, <i>Green Leviathan or the Poetics of Political Liberty: Navigating Freedom in the Age of Climate Change and Artificial Intelligence</i>

WOMEN'S POLITICAL PARTICIPATION UNDER THE BRAZILIAN MILITARY DICTATORSHIP (1964-1985)

This study questions how the Brazilian Military Dictatorship (1964-1985) articulated its structures around violations of women's political liberties, considering the relations between hierarchies of gender and military regimes' authoritarianism. The main goal is to investigate in what forms this specific repression occurred while demonstrating its distinctive elements. To this end, legal-historical research was conducted, based on both bibliography and documental sources. Through the research carried out, records of events and testimonies related to women's political performance during the period were analyzed. Initially, we discuss the institutionalization process of repression through institutional acts and its effects on women's political participation. Then, we approach the ways found by women to act in this scenario politically. Finally, in the last section, we work on the materialization of dictatorial violence against political activists and its specific features. It was possible to understand that the repression of women's political participation was expressed in meeting opponents' persecution with gendered violence and potentialized through this connection.

The Islamic Human Rights Deficit: Region, Not Religion, Is the Driver

ABSTRACT Scholarly research, journalistic accounts, and popular discourses often portray Islam as detrimental to human rights. Governments in Muslim-majority countries are considered especially prone to violating bodily integrity protections, curtailing civil and political liberties, repressing women and LGBT people, and restricting religious freedoms. Using cross-national time-series data for a majority of the world’s countries, this article demonstrates that Islam per se is not responsible for human rights deficits in any of these domains. Simply being a Muslim-majority country is not associated with increased rights violations. Rather, human rights gaps are confined to Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa region and, in some cases, to Arab countries. Additional research to explain these patterns is warranted.

India in 2022

India continued its recovery from COVID-19 in 2022. The Omicron strain was less lethal than previous waves and consequently had a smaller economic footprint. The economy began rebounding, with trade and foreign direct and portfolio investments recovering to pre-pandemic levels. India remained one of the fastest-growing economies in the world in 2022. However, it suffered very significant setbacks to its democracy, with increased attacks on civil and political liberties and human rights, and on its institutions, by BJP-led governments at the center and in the states. India effectively managed foreign policy challenges stemming from the Ukraine–Russia conflict, incursions into Indian territory by China, and the Islamophobic rhetoric of its own party leaders. Overall, 2022 was marked by a slew of BJP victories in six out of seven states and by the negative consequences of the BJP’s political strength for Indian democracy.

존 롤스의 자유론이 경제적 자유를 홀대하는 논거

Even those who value political and civil liberties tend to ignore, or at least downplay, economic liberties. Among the modern philosophers who represent such a trend, the representative figure is John Rawls. He neglected the freedom to own the means of production and the freedom to contract as essential freedoms of a market society, on the grounds that they could not be conditions for developing and exercising “moral capacities”. In the just world he envisioned, extensive economic freedom is not allowed.&#x0D; The purpose of this article is to show, firstly, that severe restrictions on economic freedom endanger civil and political liberties as an institutional condition for the development of a sense of justice, on the ground that economic freedom is the bulwark of all freedoms, and especially that it is the soil of democracy. Secondly, a market society is by no means a society in which people act out of narrow-minded selfishness. People depend on each other to live. Equal freedom is what makes human interdependence possible. Only those who maintain the beneficial bonds of interdependence can succeed in the marketplace. Productive interdependence, facilitated by voluntary associations independent of politics, such as family, public life, moral, religious and business associations, is the source of innovation and entrepreneurship.&#x0D; When Rawls deliberately excluded economic rights from his basic rights list, the intellectual basis toward counter-free society were well settled, through which liberal-leftist redistribution became possible virtually with no limit.

Addressing the rise of inequalities: How relevant is Rawls's critique of welfare state capitalism?

Addressing the rise of inequalities: How relevant is Rawls's critique of welfare state capitalism?

David Hume and the Politics of Slavery

David Hume alluded to the politics of slaveholding throughout his career and was among the first to observe that the republican tradition has an awkward relationship with slavery. This article places Hume’s critique of Roman slavery in conversation with recent debates over “neo-Roman” liberty, paying special attention to Hume’s complaint that some republican advocates for political liberty have also apologized for personal slavery. Most of Hume’s direct comments on slaveholding appear in the 1752 essay, “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations,” where Hume criticized Roman slavery for its negative effects on population growth. But more was at stake than ancient demography. Even abolitionists who abhorred Hume’s racism still drew upon his argument against ancient slavery—which they read as a commentary on the modern colonies.

:Literary Rebels: A History of Creative Writers in Anglo-American Universities

:<i>Literary Rebels: A History of Creative Writers in Anglo-American Universities</i>

Intersectional analysis of women human rights defenders’ lived experiences under COVID-19 lockdowns in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on providing a nuanced understanding of how COVID-19 lockdowns in Zimbabwe exacerbated the vulnerability of women human rights defenders (WHRDs). It utilises a desk research approach to narrate the lived experiences of WHRDs in a context where historically they have faced abuse, exclusion, and social and political stigma. COVID-19 evolved from a public health crisis to a sociopolitical and economic crisis that affected multiple groups. Government responses to COVID-19 exacerbated the ‘hostile environment’ specifically for WHRDs in different social and virtual spaces, and they had to grapple with the multi-dimensional crises of livelihoods, health, state repression, and everyday survival. Civil and political liberties came under severe attack in Zimbabwe after March 2020. The most apparent were the violations of the right to freedom of movement and the right to freedom of association (including the right to religion) through curtailment of population mobility as well as postponement of political and elections-related activities on 25 March 2020. In all these spaces WHRDs were targeted by government and their activities curtailed by the curfews imposed within communities. The soaring economic crisis and the effects of COVID-19 are intertwined with police brutality, abduction of political and media personalities including WHRDs, and harassment of press and silencing of WHRD voices. State-sponsored attacks against women have come in the form of beatings by the police and army, and arrests under the guise of enforcing COVID-19 restrictions. This paper also highlights the agency of WHRDs to continuously create spaces and ways to keep fighting for improved service delivery in the face of increased state repression, by confronting institutionalised impunity, risking jail to protect and promote civic and political rights, and challenging oppressive traditional practices.

“I Dreamed of an Alliance between the Authority of Dogma and Political Liberty”: Mormonism and Socialism in France in the Nineteenth Century

“I Dreamed of an Alliance between the Authority of Dogma and Political Liberty”: Mormonism and Socialism in France in the Nineteenth Century