Regime Failure Research Articles

Insights into innovative therapeutics for drug-resistant tuberculosis: Host-directed therapy and autophagy inducing modified nanoparticles

Since the discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), the bacteria that causes tuberculosis (TB), in the 1880s, TB has been a global pandemic; and it is one of the deadliest infectious diseases after covid-19. To date, TB has claimed the lives of over 1 billion people. With an estimated 10.4 million new cases and 1.7 million fatalities each year, it remains the leading cause of human death owing to a single infectious agent. Drug-resistant tuberculosis is a global problem in the battle against tuberculosis, and it is one of the major causes of the present anti-TB treatment regime's failure. This review is set to view the new research disciplines such as Host Directed Therapeutics (HDTs), autophagy modulation, and Nanotechnology that are emerging to overcome the limits and challenges provided by drug-resistant TB. HDT and autophagy manipulation seeks to improve TB treatment effectiveness by modulating the host's immune response to infection by interfering with the processes required by an Mtb pathogen for progressive persistence and reproduction. Whilst nanotechnology investigates increasing the efficacy of HDT-TBadjuncts and current anti-TB therapeutics by directly delivering them to their intended target while shielding them from premature elimination, allowing them to pass through biological barriers more easily.

Dying for rights: putting North Korea's human rights abuses on the record

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) may have the worst human right record in the world. Imagine a country where you can be sentenced to a long prison term for singing a foreign song, possessing a bible, or complaining about a dire state-induced famine—and this only skims the surface. Perhaps due to preoccupation with the nuclear issue and the inability to get good data, there are few comprehensive works on rights in this benighted country. That is where Sandra Fahy's masterful catalogue of North Korea's rights abuses comes in. She believes that North Koreans ‘endlessly’ suffer a winter bereft of ordinary rights (p. 261). Her book details various types of violations: the well-known detentions without due process, torture, summary executions and the most horrible prison camps in the communist world, on top of denial of rights to movement, religious practice, food and freedom from discrimination. The famine of the 1990s was one of the worst man-made disasters of the twentieth century. It did not directly threaten the regime, but it changed the country's rights environment. The right to food is widely accepted internationally, and famine is often blamed on overpopulation and geographic or climate issues. Actually, famine in most countries results from lack of access to food, especially if it is poorly allocated due to power relations within a society, or ‘deliberate acts of commission’ (p. 47). Because famines only gradually develop, people usually do not see a clear link to the government and often do not blame officials. The North Korean official narrative that all people were joined not in famine, but in an ‘arduous march’, made it easy to blame foreign pressure on the country. The problem for the DPRK was that the famine caused ordinary people to violate laws in order to survive. Most notably, they had to seek resources from China, South Korea and beyond. The regime's failure to take action for food security meant that famine-like conditions have since reccured every few years.

Why did the Syrian Uprising Become a Sectarian Conflict? A Provisional Synthesis

ABSTRACT When the Syrian uprising broke out in February 2011, protesters voiced a broad range of grievances. Prominent among these were complaints about pervasive corruption and the regime's failure to respect the rights of citizens. Even after the uprising took a turn toward violent contention, religious rhetoric and symbolism played only an instrumental role in mobilizing popular discontent. As the uprising persisted, however, anti-regime activism started to exhibit a distinctly sectarian character, and by the autumn of 2012 the revolt had become predominantly Islamist. Why this crucial transformation took place merits re-examination. Four factors provide a more compelling explanation for the eclipse of the non-sectarian opposition: the replacement of the principles of Ba'thi socialism by Islamic notions of social justice; rivalry between the extensive network of Islamic charitable associations and radical Islamists; alliance dynamics among anti-regime forces; and the peculiar circumstances in which peaceful protest transformed into armed struggle in Syria's north-central provinces.

Scandal in Mesopotamia: Press, empire, and India during the First World War

AbstractBy providing the first comprehensive account of the role of the British and Indian press in war propaganda, this article makes an intervention in the global history of the First World War. The positive propaganda early in the war, intertwined with a rhetoric of loyalism, contrasted with how the conservative British press affixed blame for military defeats in Mesopotamia upon the colonial regime's failure to effectively mobilize India's resources. Using a highly emotive and enduring trope of the ‘Mesopotamia muddle’, the Northcliffe press was successful in channelling a high degree of public scrutiny onto the campaign. The effectiveness of this criticism ensured that debates about the Mesopotamian debacle became a vehicle for registering criticism of structures of colonial rule and control in India. On the one hand, this critique hastened constitutional reforms and devolution in colonial India and, on the other, it led to demands that the inadequacy of India's contribution to the war be remedied by raising war loans. Both the colonial government and its nationalist critics were briefly and paradoxically united in opposing these demands. The coercive extraction of funds for the imperial war effort as well as the British press's vituperative criticism contributed to a post-war, anti-colonial political upsurge. The procedure of creating a colonial ‘scandal’ out of a military disaster required a specific politics for assessing the regulated flows of information, which proved to be highly effective in shaping both the enquiry that followed and the politics of interwar colonial South Asia.

Critical infrastructure protection and Russia's hybrid regime

The Russian policy on critical infrastructure protection was outlined in the early 2000s and has been consolidated in recent years as a part of the national security strategy. This policy is evolving against a background composed of an uneasy combination of factors: the degeneration of infrastructures critical for the country's economic and social development, and the de-legitimization of political institutions responsible for protecting ‘population’ and ‘territory’. The recent major catastrophes in Russia, the notorious forest fires in 2010 in particular, have become examples of political events that offer a point of reference for the current regime's failure to uphold its promises of ‘order and stability’.

Libya, Social Origins of Dictatorship, and the Challenge for Democracy

This article analyzes the 2011 revolution in Libya by focusing on three elements: the Qaddafi regime's failure to address the question of political reform and its subsequent alienation of important elite groups within the country; the impact of demography, urbanization, and global social media on the progress of the revolution; and the success of an enterprising revolutionary leadership within Libya that was able to obtain critical diplomatic and military support from the United Nations, the Arab League, and NATO. The main thesis of this article is that the regime's inability to make serious political reforms appropriate to changes occurring in the economy, education, and society eventually led to conflict between a dynamic social structure and a rigid political system that was unable to meet the demands and grievances of new social forces, especially unemployed youth. The gap between the Libyan youth and the ruling elite undermined the gains achieved by the regime during the 1970s and eventually led to the formation of an alienated revolutionary coalition. Had Muammar Qaddafi responded with openness to the calls for reform and not overreacted to the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, the urban elite in Libya might have been placated and the violent rebellion might have been avoided.

Conversing with Stalin, Surviving the Terror: The Diaries of Aleksandra Kollontai and the Internal Life of Politics

In this article, Beatrice Farnsworth suggests that Aleksandra Kollontai, Old Bolshevik, socialist-feminist, and former leader of the Workers' Opposition, survived Iosif Stalin's terror largely because in her effort to assure Stalin that she was no longer an oppositionist, she nurtured a friendly dynamic with him. Indeed, in their conversations, she pursued a gendered strategy of warm deference and flattery. Yet, while publicly serving the Soviet regime, even ingratiating herself with the party leadership, Kollontai, in diaries written for history, privately, and at risk to her life, mourned the regime's failure to develop "communist humanism." With their interlocking themes of emotion and personalities, her diaries not only provide insight into Kollontai's uncanny survival and the personal responses of an Old Bolshevik to political changes and people but offer a rare and intimate portrait of the internal life of Soviet politics at their highest level.

Is Russia Becoming a Normal Society?

The word normal is ambiguous in English. It can refer to acting in accord with a given standard of behavior, a norm, or it can refer to the way the average person behaves. In societies in which citizens and institutions act as they ought to, this makes social life both predictable and acceptable. However, what is normalno in Russia is much more problematic. Some scholars have argued that the autocratic institutions of tsarist and Soviet times survived because Russian subjects regarded the state's demands as normal in both the normative and the positive senses.1 However, the Soviet regime has been characterized as a dualistic hourglass society because of a conflict between the norms of the Communist regime and how people actually behaved.2 Vladimir Shlapentokh has recommended managing the resulting tension by adopting the approach of a herpetologist, studying life in A Normal Totalitarian Society as dispassionately as one might study the behavior of other parts of the animal kingdom.3The dissolution of the Soviet Union created the classic structural conditions for anomie in Durkheim's sense of the breakdown of the norms and institutions of polity, economy, and state. The upheavals that followed meant that Russians could not go about their everyday lives normally because they had been socialized to live in the Soviet era. People were forced to cope amidst the turbulence of a society that had not yet established routines of what was normal in the statistical sense. Most Russians have coped by adopting and adapting networks and strategies that were familiar in Soviet times.4By definition, a period of turbulence-and the transformation of Russia's polity, economy, and society was certainly that-can only be sustained for a limited period of time. At some point the void created by the repudiation of the Communist party-state and the command economy is filled by new institutions that require people to behave differently if they are to eat enough, enjoy their leisure, and get the benefits to which they are entitled from public services. Moreover, transformation has brought opportunities that people can seize to better their conditions. For example, by saving money in the knowledge that the shops will have goods if a person can pay the market price or studying English in the expectation that this will lead to a better job.5Two decades after the abrupt start of glasnost and perestroika, Russians have had time to learn, for better or worse, what is now statistically normal in their society. However, the regime's failure to live up to the values that Russians hold about what makes a normal society has led to widespread dissatisfaction with the institutions to which they have had to adapt.6The ambiguity of contemporary Russian life is expressed in the hybrid characterizations that international organizations and many area-studies experts use to describe it. Westerners use compound labels to emphasize values inherent in European norms and deviations from them, such as characterizing the country as partly free or exhibiting managed pluralism or a predatory capitalism. Compound labels can also be used by Russians to emphasize what is valued by the Russian using then. For example, Vladimir Putin's deputy head of administration characterizes the country as a sovereign democracy, an implicit assertion to foreigners that they have no right to comment on what the government does within Russia. The point is made more strongly by Dmitry Medvedev dropping the adjective to assert the claim that Russia is just as democratic as any other country of the G-8, a political challenge to G-7 leaders.However, all assessments of Russian society as a whole have limitations. It is assumed that there is agreement among Russians about what constitutes normal life and that Russians have the same norms and values as Western (that is, European and Anglo-American) citizens. But this assumption has no empirical validity. I draw on New Russian Barometer (NRB) survey data to examine what Russians mean by a normal society, whether they think it is normal today and if not, how many years will it take for Russian society to become normal or if it will ever do so. …

Everyday Fascism in the 1930s: Centre and Periphery in the Decline of Mussolini's Dictatorship

From the first Italian Fascism proclaimed its aim of nationalising, centralising and moralising Italian politics. During the regime the cult of the ethical state was the most obvious and continuing expression of this ambition. This article argues that the decline of Fascism, already very evident by the end of the 1930s, was closely linked to the regime's failure to realise these objectives and that this failure was in large part a consequence of the difficulties experienced by Fascism in changing the relationship between the provinces and the centre in terms of the way in which power was perceived and employed in the provinces. It is argued that these difficulties were implicit in the way in which Fascism had been understood by its provincial supporters from the very beginnings of the movement.

Support for Anti-corruption Campaigns in Rural China

Based on data collected in a survey conducted in six Chinese provinces at the end of 1997 and early 1998, this article offers a preliminary analysis of why some peasants wished to see Mao-style anti-corruption campaigns. It shows that the support for campaigns is negatively correlated with the respondents' evaluation of local officials' performance in governing by law, their confidence in the equality before the law, and their assessment of the effectiveness of lawful participation. It concludes that popular support for mass mobilization could contribute to rural instability as Chinese farmers become increasingly impatient with the regime's failure to control corruption.

In pursuit of votes and economic treaties: Francoist Spain and the Arab world, 1945–56

During the second half of the 1940s the Franco regime found itself isolated in the international arena and confronting severe economic distress. As a strategy for ending the diplomatic boycott imposed on it by the United Nations and expanding foreign trade, Spain began to cultivate close relations with the Arab world. This article examines Francoist Spain's systematic campaign to woo the Arab countries, in the course of which even the regime's failure to establish diplomatic relations with the Jewish state founded in 1948 became a vehicle for improving its ties with the Arabs. In contrast to the diplomatic front Franco was only partially successful in his efforts to foster economic cooperation with these Muslim countries. Finally, all his hopes that hostility towards Israel and political and economic relations with the Arab countries would allow him to maintain Spain's control over northern Morocco proved illusory.

The tale of San Vittore: prisons, politics, crime and Fascism in Milan, 1943–1946

Summary The prison system under Fascism was used to house both common and political prisoners. After 25 July 1943, the prisons were opened, only to be closed once again in occupied Italy as the Nazis took over the system. San Vittore prison in Milan was theatre to a series of changes over the period from 1943 to 1946, culminating in the famous riots of April 1946. This article analyses the changes in the prison system, the mix of prisoners inside the institution and the continuation of the civil war inside San Vittore after liberation. This micro-focus allows reflections on a number of key issues regarding the post-war state: legitimacy, legality, repression and amnesty. The post-liberation regime's failure to keep order both inside and outside of the prison system was a key test of its legitimacy among those who had gone along with Fascism and were worried about what was to come: The article centres on the extraordinary and contested events surrounding the ‘revolt’ of 1946 in San Vittore and argues that accounts thus far provided are neither accurate nor particularly insightful about this key post-war moment. The amnesty of 1946, so long attributed to Togliatti's personal sense of responsibility was, in reality, forced upon the justice minister by the chaos in the prisons right across the peninsula.

Laos in 1990: Winds of Change

Laos in 1990 saw winds of change blowing but not all in the direction willed by the ruling Lao People's Revolutionary Party. Overall, the momentum of economic reform and restructuring was abetted by further infusions of Western aid. However, looming prospects of a cutoff in Soviet bloc aid and disillusion stemming from the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe saw Laos once again bidding up ties with Thailand and China. Otherwise, Laos retains its client status vis-a-vis Vietnam and, as with Vietnam, has sought to keep the lid on pressures for political opening. Thus, while 1990 saw Laos drafting its first post-1975 Constitution, the surface calm of the country was beset with stirrings on the part of both ethnic minorities and urban elements that suggested an impatience with the regime's failure to entertain political reform.

Regionalism in a Systems Perspective: Explaining Elite Circulation in a Soviet Republic

In recent years two lines of research on USSR power and personnel have challenged some long-standing interpretations of the bases of Soviet political activity. In one line, historical studies dealing with the Stalin era have called into question the conventional emphasis, epitomized in the totalitarian model, of a single leader who commands an army of loyal apparatchiki and monopolizes the political agenda. A number of scholars have shown that chaos and confusion in personnel matters were the salient characteristics of this period, rather than a coordinated system for the recruitment, placement, and promotion of cadres—an image suggested by both the totalitarian model and Stalinist boasting of a “monolithic party,” a “unified state structure,” and so forth. In substantive policy, the actual results in implementing regime directives in the Stalin period regularly bore no better than the faintest resemblance to the announced policy. Absent the well-oiled machine highlighted in images of the “totalitarian party,” the regime's failure to control real policy results seems to have followed as a necessary consequence.

The Madrid neighbourhood remodelling programme: A case study

Summary Rapid industrial and urban growth in Spain coincided in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s with a crisis in the countryside, which attracted a massive migration of peasant families to Madrid and other large cities. They came to work in factories and on construction sites and made their homes in conditions of great deprivation in squatter settlements on the city's outskirts. This article examines the background to the problem, its nature and scale, and the Franco regime's failure to resolve it. It continues with an analysis of the comprehensive programme to ‘remodel’ squatter areas which was formulated after Franco's death in 1975 and which has been implemented since the restoration of democracy in 1979: an ongoing programme affecting nearly 150 000 people which represents one of the biggest urban development projects in Europe since 1945.

Corporatisme et colonialisme : approche du cas mozambicain, 1933-1979. I. Une genèse difficile, un mouvement squelettique.

M. Cahen — Corporatism and Colonialism : An Approach of Mocambique's Case, I933-I979, I- A Troublesome Genesis for a Skeletal Movement. The first part of this study (to be continuee! in the next issue) raises the general problem of the specifie particulars of Portuguese colonialism, and more precisely of the possible effect on colonial society of a corporativist, fascist metropolitan State. Insofar as Portugal itself is England's 'semi-colony' while Mocambique is fully integrated within South Africa's economie System, are peculiar characte-ristics of the colony to be explained by fascism in its metropolis? A tentative answer is here based upon an analysis of the officiai, legal birth of 'colonial corporatism' (1937) and, later on (1942-1960), of the first 'national trade-unions' and gremios. A study of the actual working of these structures and of their socio-economic role leads one to consider them as operating quite outside the colonial economy and almost completely lacking any social basis for their existence. The same analysis applied to the fascist political structures (single party, youth orga-nization) reveals the regime's failure in its attempts to set up a real movement among the colonial petty bourgeoisie and the White working-class aristocracy.

The Marian Regime's Failure to Understand the Importance of Printing

The Marian Regime's Failure to Understand the Importance of Printing

Sources of Socio-Political Instability in an African State: The Case of Kenya's Educated Unemployed

On a continent where military coups, civil wars, and other forms of violent disorder have been commonplace, Kenya has appeared an anomaly. The regime of President Jomo Kenyatta has maintained uninterrupted and relatively peaceful civilian rule since the country's independence in 1963. Until recently, Kenya's postindependence body politic had shown few outward signs of social or political stress. Kenya's era of stability may now be nearing an end, however. In early 1975 the country began experiencing a series of crises and disorders that constitute the worst violence since the 1950s nationalist revolt that brought Kenya's present elite to power. Some observers are beginning to question the Kenyatta regime's ability to contain a variety of mounting tensions and pressures (see Africa Report, 1975a: 29, 48-49; 1975b: 28; 1975c: 23-24). In the pages that follow, I present an analysis that predicts a continually escalating state of social and political unrest in Kenya. In the first section, I argue the inherent long-term instability of the Kenyatta regime in terms of the regime's failure to adapt to the aspirations and demands of significant portions of Kenya's newly independent citizenry. In the second and third sections, I present, as a case study of the kinds of underlying social and political processes contributing to instability in Kenya, an examination of the mechanisms through which it appears that members of a growing body of unemployed school leavers are being inexorably drawn toward points of social and political rebellion.