Collapse Of Regimes Research Articles

Deciphering Trump’s “Maximum Pressure” Policy: The Enduring Challenge of Containing Iran

Since the advent of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the US has pursued a policy of containment towards Iran. In a major shift from Obama’s policy of appeasement, the Trump administration has spearheaded the “Maximum Pressure” campaign in an effort to contain Iran and coerce it into changing its behaviour. Although the fate of Trump’s policy remains a puzzle, it is evident that the US administration’s decisions, i.e. the withdrawal from the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), re-imposition of nuclear-related sanctions and re-securitisation of Iran as well as Tehran’s counter-strategies to defy US pressures have exacerbated the enmity between Washington and Tehran. By applying the Regional Security Complex theory and linking it with George Kennan’s “containment strategy”, this article attempts to deconstruct the modus operandi of Trump administration towards Iran and scrutinise the various policy tools the US has employed to implement the maximum pressure doctrine. This research concludes that through exerting vast economic sanctions, maximizing diplomatic pressures and maintaining military deterrence, the Trump administration aims to create the conditions of possibility for regime collapse in the event that Iran refuses to change its behaviour. The article uses an analytical-explanative method and seeks to contribute to the existing academic and policy-oriented research regarding US-Iran relations via employing a hybrid theoretical lens.

Institutionalization of Political Parties on Post New Order Authoritarianism and It’s Implications for Indonesian Democracy

The article is focused on explaining how institutionalization of political parties in Indonesia after the collapse of New Order regimes and how it affects democratization in Indonesia. It is considered important since Soeharto’s regime rose to power, political parties are being forced to limit their ideal function/ In this article, the writers concludes that political parties in Indonesia after the authoritarianism regime, have not been institutionalized and are even far from it if compared to the magnitude level its current problem. Political parties are trapped on long term internal conflict of interest, drained their energy and still continued until now. Moreover, the depth oligarchies pattern in its management is worsened by personalized figure and the dominance of party’s management from the central, forced us into the conclusion that political party are just the sub-ordinates of elite’s interest. The result, political parties are simply failed to play important role in supporting consolidated democracy, since they are busy and distracted by their own internal problems. That’s why, when will Indonesia rise into transition phase in democracy is still questionable, especially if the question is solely based on institutionalization of political parties.

The Role of Religion in the Politics of Saudi Arabia

This article examines factors that influence the stability of the Saudi political regime. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has faced serious threats that have had impacts on the country; however, none of them has threatened the survival of the Saudi royal family in the Kingdom. The Arab uprisings, the well-known Arab Spring, led to the collapse of political regimes in the Arab region surrounding Saudi Arabia, as in Egypt and Yemen. However, the Saudi political regime was able to overcome this wave of popular revolutions and changes. Thus, this study attempts to answer a major question: why is it difficult to topple the Saudi political regime? Whereas the country’s oil wealth or external protection by great powers, Great Britain in the past, and currently the United States, are seen as main factors in the stability of the Saudi political regime, it is suggested here that the key factor that has helped the Saudi political regime successfully confront all internal and external threats rests on the influence of the religious Wahhabi concept, called “ta’at wali al-amr.”

Brief Synopses of New Arabic Language Publications

Brief Synopses of New Arabic Language Publications

Shame in a post-socialist society: a qualitative study of healthcare seeking and utilisation in common mental disorders.

After the regime collapse, the former socialist societies in Central and Eastern Europe experienced rapid social and economic transformations. Consequently, mental health deterioration coupled with ambitions to break with the past triggered reforms of mental health systems. Yet, 30years later, mental health in the region remains poor. Stigma of mental illness may be one of the factors that delays help seeking and, therefore, maintains status quo. Thus, the aim of the article is to better understand the roots of stigma and the process of stigmatisation in one of these countries - Lithuania. Drawing on Norbert Elias's model of established-outsider relations, the article presents the analysis of 23 in-depth interviews with healthcare providers and users of services diagnosed with depression or anxiety disorders. Said analysis reveals how stigma of mental illness might result in damaged self-image and shame of feeling different. Mental illness and healthcare seeking are perceived as a threat to culturally and historically determined self-values, at the core of which seems to be intolerance of difference. The article contributes not only to research concerning mental health in a relatively understudied region of Central and Eastern Europe, but also to existing literature on stigma as embedded in a local context.

Civil society, natural resources and dictatorship

ABSTRACT Resource-rich dictatorships are more inclined to repress civil society than others. In this paper, we analyze the collapse and persistence of authoritarian regimes in terms of oil price shocks and the organizational density of civil society. This organizational density indicates the ability of citizens to credibly threaten the dictator with a revolution and therefore induce regime change. In the civil society protest game, regime change becomes likely in the occurrence of a negative oil price shock, whereas a positive oil shock increases the extractive capacity of the dictator, thus preserving the authoritarian status quo. In the civil society persecution game, repression of failed revolutionaries can avert revolution if a negative oil price shock occurs and the organizational density of civil society is low ex-ante. Historical and contemporary illustrations are drawn from Iran and Russia, respectively.

The Durability of Client Regimes

ABSTRACTConventional wisdom holds that great power patrons prop up client dictatorships. But this is generally assumed rather than systematically analyzed. This article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the relationship between foreign sponsorship and authoritarian regime survival, using an original data set of all autocratic client regimes in the postwar period. The results demonstrate that patronage from Western powers—the United States, France, and the United Kingdom—is not associated with client regime survival. Rather, it’s only Soviet sponsorship that reduced the risk of regime collapse. The author explains this variation by considering the effects of foreign sponsorship on the likelihood of military coups d’état. He argues that the Soviet Union directly aided its clients by imposing a series of highly effective coup prevention strategies. By contrast, the US and its allies didn’t provide such aid, leaving regimes vulnerable to military overthrow.

All in the Family: North Korea and the Fate of Hereditary Autocratic Regimes

Even though the Kim regime has been an exception, the pattern of rapid, unexpected regime collapse among hereditary autocracies indicates a need for policymakers to be prepared.

'Introduction,' to John Witte, Jr. and Johan D. van der Vyver, eds., Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective: Religious Perspectives

At the close of the second millennium, the world is torn by crisis and tumult — by a moral Armageddon, if not a military one. With the memories of world wars, gulags, and the Holocaust still fresh in our minds, we see the bloody slaughter of Rwanda and the Sudan, the tragic genocide of the Balkans, the massive unrest of the Middle East, Western Africa, Latin America, and the former Soviet bloc. On every continent, we see clashes between movements of incremental political unification and radical balkanization, gentle religious ecumenism and radical fundamentalism, sensitive cultural integration and rabid diversification, sensible moral pluralization and shocking moral relativism. Even in the ostensibly peaceful societies of the West, bitter wars have aligned defenders of various old orders against an array of social, legal, and cultural deconstructionists. Cultural conflicts are increasing and are more dangerous today than at any other time in history, Czech President Vaclav Havel declared in 1994. end of the era of rationalism has been catastrophic, [for now] the members of various tribal cults are at war with one another. . . . The abyss between the rational and the internal, the objective and the subjective, the technical and the moral, the universal and the unique constantly grows deeper. Religious beliefs and believers have suffered miserably in these culture wars.1995, the United Nations Year of Tolerance, is becoming just another dark year in a dark decade of religious intolerance. Religious nationalism and fundamentalism have conspired to bring violent death and dislocation to hundreds of religious believers around the world each year. Political secularism and cynicism have combined to bring civil denial and deprivation to religious believers of all faiths. Temples and mosques are denied entrance to neighborhoods. Churches and charities are denied autonomy of governance. Clerics and charities are denied licenses to minister. Pilgrims and missionaries are denied visas and charters. Natives and refugees are denied totems and homelands. Parents and children are denied liberties of education. Employers and employees are denied opportunities to exercise their faiths. To be sure, the collapse of many authoritarian regimes in the past decade has begun to open new venues and avenues for religion to flourish. International and local laws have begun to embrace more generous religious rights provisions. Religious communities have begun to apply their theological learning and moral suasion to the cause of religious rights. But today, by common estimates, more than two billion people still enjoy only partial freedom of thought, conscience, and belief. It is time for us to take religious rights seriously — to shake off our political indifference and parochial self-interest and to address the plight and protection of people of all faiths. It is time to exorcise the demons of religious intolerancethat have beset both religious and non-religious peoples around the world and to exercise the golden rules of religious rights — doing unto other religious believers and beliefs what we would have done to us and ours.

On the turbulence structure of deep katabatic flows on a gentle mesoscale slope.

A comprehensive analysis of the turbulence structure of relatively deep midlatitude katabatic flows (with jet maxima between 20 and 50 m) developing over a gentle (1°) mesoscale slope with a long fetch upstream of the Meteor Crater in Arizona is presented. The turbulence structure of flow below the katabatic jet maximum shows many similarities with the turbulence structure of shallower katabatic flows, with decreasing turbulence fluxes with height and almost constant turbulent Prandtl number. Still stark differences occur above the jet maximum where turbulence is suppressed by strong stability, is anisotropic and there is a large sub‐mesoscale contribution to the flux. Detecting the stable boundary‐layer top depends on the method used (flux‐ vs. anisotropy‐profiles) but both methods are highly correlated. The top of the stable boundary layer, however, mostly deviates from the jet maximum height or the top of the near‐surface inversion. The flat‐terrain formulations for the boundary‐layer height correlate well with the detected top of the stable boundary layer if the near‐surface and not the background stratification is used in their formulations; however, they mostly largely overestimate this boundary‐layer height. The difference from flat‐terrain boundary layers is also shown through the dependence of size of the dominant eddy with height. In katabatic flows the eddy size is semi‐constant with height throughout the stable boundary‐layer depth, whereas in flat terrain, eddy size varies significantly with height. Flux‐gradient and flux‐variance relationships show that turbulence data from different stable boundary‐layer scaling regimes collapse on top of each other showing that the dominant dependence is not on the scaling regime but on the local stability.

Coerced regimes: management challenges in the Anthropocene.

Management frequently creates system conditions that poorly mimic the conditions of a desirable self-organizing regime. Such management is ubiquitous across complex systems of people and nature and will likely intensify as these systems face rapid change. However, it is highly uncertain whether the costs (unintended consequences, including negative side effects) of management but also social dynamics can eventually outweigh benefits in the long term. We introduce the term "coerced regime" to conceptualize this management form and tie it into resilience theory. The concept encompasses proactive and reactive management to maintain desirable and mitigate undesirable regime conditions, respectively. A coerced regime can be quantified through a measure of the amount of management required to artificially maintain its desirable conditions. Coerced regimes comprise "ghosts" of self-sustaining desirable system regimes but ultimately become "dead regimes walking" when these regimes collapse as soon as management is discontinued. We demonstrate the broad application of coerced regimes using distinct complex systems of humans and nature (human subjects, aquatic and terrestrial environments, agriculture, and global climate). We discuss commonalities and differences between these examples to identify tradeoffs between benefits and harms of management. The concept of coerced regimes can spur thinking and inform management about the duality of what we know and can envision versus what we do not know and therefore cannot envision-a pervasive sustainability conundrum as planet Earth swiftly moves towards a future without historical analogue.

The impact of suburbanisation on power relations in settlements of Budapest Agglomeration

The aim of the current paper is to help to understand the transformation of suburban areas in Central Eastern European metropolitan regions with regard to the power relations. The study area is Budapest Agglomeration, which has experienced significant social, economic, and environmental changes after the collapse of state socialist regimes due to the intense suburbanisation. This study examines the composition of municipal councils in Budapest Agglomeration and tests the hypothesis that during the suburbanisation, the newcomers seize the political power in the suburbs. The analysis based on a database about municipal councils members of 18 settlements, and there are data about the main socio-demographic characteristics of these settlements. The results show the growing number of settlements where the incomers become dominant in municipal councils. The role of socio-demographic factors in this process is interesting as cannot be proved a clear relationship between these factors and the changes in municipal councils.

THE END OF POSTCOMMUNISM AND THE TRENDS OF THE FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF EX-POSTCOMMUNIST COUNTRIES

The article is devoted to clarifying the problem of the end of postcommunist transformations and the essence of the further development of the ex-postcommunist countries. The avalanche collapse of the communist regimes at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s led to the beginning of postcommunist transformations. Today it can be stated that this process is over. The author argues this conclusion with the following considerations: 1) any transformational process, the essence of which is to replace one quality of society or its political system with another, cannot go on indefinitely, it must end someday; 2) the end of the transformation process is due to the establishment of a new quality; 3) the totalitarian nature of the previous communist regimes presupposes the multivariate end of postcommunist transformations. Various postcommunist countries have achieved different results during transformations. In Central-Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, and a number of countries in South-Eastern Europe, postcommunist transformations have culminated in the establishment of democracy. The transformations of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan was over the establishment of authoritarian regimes. Neo-totalitarian regimes have emerged in Belarus, Russia, and Turkmenistan. In Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Armenia, Georgia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova and Ukraine, political development fluctuates between democracy and authoritarianism for a long time. The author concludes that the period of postcommunism in all these countries finally over in the middle of 2010s. The end of postcommunism marked the beginning of a new stage in the socio-political development of the ex-communist countries. Its main tendencies are revealed in this paper. The author includes in such: 1) a fall the level of democracy in Central-Eastern and South-Eastern Europe; 2) a strengthening differentiation of political development of single regions and the countries; 3) a growth of nationalism; 4) a changes in relations with the EU; 4) a strengthening Russia's interference.

Post-socialist moral economies of consumption as socially embedded sites of moral tension

Consumption was one of the spheres of everyday life shaken and remoulded by the collapse of socialist regimes at the end of the 20th century. Especially in times of rapid change, a moral economies lens is a fruitful means to understand the contentious moral landscape and moral tensions that pervade consumption behaviour, norms and discourse. Important areas of consideration in post-socialist societies in this field include links between ideology and consumption; transformations of material culture, especially luxury culture; the retraditionalisation and polarisation of gender; and intergenerational and social class divisions. Theoretically, we stress the importance of multiple levels of analysis and address both the empirical and critical dimensions of ‘moral economy’. In particular, this recognises the importance of the Zelizerian relational approach while cautioning against the hostile worlds rhetorical frame. It is through the simultaneous critical and empirical approaches of Polanyi and Thompson that an important analytical focus for post-socialist moral economies of consumption and beyond – moral tensions – is made plain.

The latent characteristics that structure autocratic rule

AbstractResearch on autocratic regimes in comparative politics and international relations often uses categorical typologies of autocratic regimes to distinguish among different forms of autocracy. This paper introduces historical data on dozens of features of dictatorships to estimate latent dimensions of autocratic rule. We identify three time-varying dimensions of autocracy that correspond to ideal types proposed in the literature: party dominance, military rule, and personalism. We show that dimensions of autocratic rule are orthogonal to commonly-used measures of democracy–autocracy, and compare these dimensions to existing typologies of autocracies, showing that time-varying information on personalism is unique. We discuss a measurement model of personalism and illustrate the time-varying features of this measure in applied research on conflict initiation and regime collapse.

When Revolutionary Coalitions Break Down: Polarization, Protest, and the Tunisian Political Crisis of August 2013

Revolutionary coalitions often break down in the aftermath of revolution, leading to the collapse of transitional governments. Fragmentation among revolutionary elites has been extensively theorized, but few works consider the origins and consequences of polarization among non-elite protesters in the revolutionary coalition. This paper examines the case of Tunisia to unpack how polarization among former revolutionaries may drive secondary waves of mobilization that imperil governing coalitions, even when elites are cooperating. Unique protest surveys of pro- and anti-government demonstrations during the Tunisian political crisis of 2013 – which catalyzed the resignation of the country’s first elected assembly – show that polarization within this coalition occurred along ideological lines concerning the role of Islam in governance but not along class lines, as some theories of transition would predict. Revolutionaries are re-mobilized in part through divergent narratives concerning which social groups participated most in the revolutionary struggle, and which groups suffered and profited most under the old regime. This paper counters the elite-centrism of predominant “transitology” approaches by highlighting how protest politics may shape institutional transitions.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall and Namibian Independence

Abstract The Berlin Wall was breached as Namibia’s first democratic election was being conducted. It is therefore wrong to say that the fall of the Berlin Wall ushered in Namibia’s independence. That independence was on track when the Wall fell. But the fall of the Wall, and the associated collapse of the state socialist regimes of Eastern Europe, had significant consequences for the form of independence that emerged in Namibia in 1990.

From national to cultural monuments: an overview of architectural heritage protection in Albania (1912–1992)

ABSTRACTLegislation on architectural heritage protection in Albania follows the political and historical events of the country. In this paper, I will outline how ‘cultural monument’ concept evolves within the main Albanian legislative timeline in the cultural heritage protection field. The discussion will highlight how cultural monuments significance, from the early concept of ‘National Monuments’ at the dawn of the new Albanian State, to ‘Cultural Monuments’ conceived as people common heritage, have always had, and still have, a pivotal role in the Albanian cultural debate. Purged from the regime ideology, those notions reflect the concept of monument intended as the main outstanding material testimony of an artefact or a constructive culture or of its formal and technical evolution which cannot be preserved through passive constraints. Finally, following the years after the regime collapse (1992), the recent updating of the national law on cultural heritage protection has been a priority for the country and the debate is still open. Thus, the 2000s legislative framework, evolved since the post-communist period until present, should be considered in the light of the transition from the notion of cultural monuments to that one of cultural heritage paying attention to cultural values recognition process and significance.

Spatiotemporal variability of human–fire interactions on the Navajo Nation

AbstractUnraveling the effects of climate and land use on historical fire regimes provides important insights into broader human–fire–climate dynamics, which are necessary for ecologically based forest management. We developed a spatial human land‐use model for Navajo Nation forests across which we sampled a network of tree‐ring fire history sites to reflect contrasting historical land‐use intensity: high human use, primarily in the Chuska Mountains, and low human use, primarily on the central Defiance Plateau. We tested for and compared human‐ and climate‐driven changes in the fire regimes by applying change point detection, regression, and superposed epoch analyses. The historical fire regimes and fire–climate relationships reflect those of similar forests regionally and are similar between the two Navajo landscapes until the early 1800s. We then determined that a previously identified, localized, early (1830s) decline in fire activity was geographically widespread across higher human‐use sites. In contrast, fires continued to burn uninterrupted through this period at the lower use sites. Though the 1830s included significantly wet and cold periods that could have contributed to fire regime decline, human factors pose a more spatiotemporally consistent explanation. A rise in Navajo pastoralism in the 1820s–1830s was concentrated seasonally in the heavy use sites. By the 1880s, livestock numbers more than doubled, grazing became far more spatially widespread, and frequent fire regimes of Navajo forests collapsed. The last widespread fire recorded on either landscape was in 1886. In the Chuska Mountains, livestock and fire coexisted for over 50 yr between the initial 1832 fire decline and the end of frequent fires after 1886, an exceptional pattern in the western United States. Though unique in its timing, character, and spatial dynamics, the collapse of historical fire regimes in Navajo forests contributed to now over a century without frequent surface fire, leaving Navajo forests at risk for large, uncharacteristic high‐severity fires.

The Two-step Model of Clustered Democratization

Does democratization diffuse? For over two decades, numerous studies have asserted that democratization diffuses across countries but recent research has challenged this claim. Most recently, work by Brancati and Lucardi has buttressed this null finding by demonstrating that an oft assumed mechanism for the diffusion of democratization—the diffusion of pro-democracy protests—lacks empirical support. We review this contribution in the context of recent research and pose the question: if democratization does not diffuse, then why does democratization cluster in time and space? The answer, we argue, is that democratization occurs in two steps. First, common shocks, economic or political, lead to regime collapse. Then, diffusion does emerge in a second step: new elites are more likely to install a democracy following a regime collapse if neighboring countries have recently democratized. We present evidence from democratic transitions in 125 autocracies between 1875 and 2014.