Search results

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

In this article, the authors analyse a complex social process affecting historic public paths in rural areas in southern Spain. Despite the fact that urban populations are demanding the enhancement of this type of natural heritage for tourism, sports and recreational use, some parts of the network have been abandoned or usurped.

The study is multidisciplinary, comprising three interlinked studies. The cartographic study comprises an inventory of public paths in rural areas based on administrative sources. The legal study analyses local, regional and national regulations governing agricultural, environmental, heritage, sports and tourism uses of the infrastructure. The sociological study analyses social discourses on the uses of public paths, and identifies conflicts between farmers, landowners, environmentalists, sportspeople and tourists.

The preliminary results identified an important public paths network in Andalusia, approximately 160,000 km. The legal study found that there are laws regulating use, although local authorities do not monitor compliance or provide solutions to enhance management. The sociological study determined the attribution of environmental, cultural and economic value to public paths, but also the existence of conflicts between rural and urban populations.

Given that this is ongoing research, only state of the art and some preliminary albeit sufficiently consistent results are presented.

The results could help to guide public policy and governance of public paths.

Public paths promote rural development and a green/sustainable economy.

The research results and conclusions are original.

Conflict and violence are the main drivers of globally escalating humanitarian needs. Local grassroots initiatives are pivotal in distributing humanitarian supplies in the acute response phase until more established humanitarian aid organizations can enter. Nevertheless, scant research exists regarding the role of grassroots associations in providing humanitarian assistance during a military conflict. The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of grassroots associations and identify important themes for effective operations.

This paper adopts a case-study approach of three Ukrainian grassroots associations that began operating in the immediate days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The findings are based on analyzing primary sources, including interviews with Ukrainian volunteers, and are supported by secondary sources.

Grassroots associations have local contacts and a contextual understanding of population needs and can respond more rapidly and effectively than large intergovernmental agencies. Four critical themes regarding the operations of grassroots associations emerged: information management, inventory management, coordination and performance measurement. Grassroots humanitarian response operations during conflict are challenged by personal security risks, the unpredictability of unsolicited supplies, emerging volunteer roles, dynamic transportation routes and shifting demands.

Grassroots responses are central to humanitarian responses during the acute phase of a military conflict. By examining the operations of grassroots associations in the early months of the 2022 war in Ukraine, the authors provide a unique perspective on humanitarian logistics. Nonetheless, more inclusive models of humanitarian responses are needed to harness the capacities and resilience of grassroots operations in practice.

While most West European nations were formed around pre-existing entities that could be called “countries” before the modern age, this was not the case in the Middle East. Some entities, like Egypt, did have a clear political and cultural identity before colonialism, others, like Algeria, did not. This chapter discusses the four states of the Maghreb: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, through the perspective of “country creation” going into and coming out of colonial rule. We can see here two “models” of fairly similar types of historical development, one showing a gradual process through a protectorate period to relatively stable modern nations, another through violent conquest and direct colonization ending in violent liberation and military and wealthy but fragile states. The article asks whether these models for the history of country creation and the presence or absence of pre-colonial identities can help explain the modern history and nature of these states in the Arab Spring and the years thereafter. Then, a more tentative attempt is made to apply these models to two countries of the Arab east, Syria and Iraq. While local variations ensure that no model can be transferred directly, it can show the importance of studying the historical factors that go into the transition from geographical region to a country with people that can form the basis of a nation.

Stein Rokkan (1921–1979) gave this lecture in Paris, 4th December 1976. Comparative Social Research here publishes the first English language translation of Rokkan's manuscript for the lecture, which was given in French. The lecture was earlier only available in German (published 1980) and Norwegian (published 1921) translations. The lecture presents the sequence of models that Rokkan developed for his Europe-project aiming to explain the variations between 16 Western European democracies with reference to rights, party systems and systems alternatives. It is the only extensive intellectual autobiography that Rokkan ever wrote.

What kinds of support do interstate rivals provide to domestic actors in ongoing civil wars? And how do domestic actors utilize the support they receive? This chapter answers these questions by comparing Iranian and Saudi military and non-military (mediation, foreign aid and religious soft-power promotion) support to the Houthis and to the Government of Yemen (GoY) during the Saada wars (2004–2010) and the internationalized civil war (2015–2018). It also focuses on the processes through which the GoY and the Houthis have utilized this support for their own strategic purposes. This chapter applies a structured, focused comparison methodology and relies on data from a review of both primary and secondary sources complemented by 14 interviews. This chapter finds that there were less external interventions in the conflict in Saada than in the internationalized civil war. During the latter, a broader set of intervention strategies enabled further instrumentalization by domestic actors, which in turn contributed to the protracted nature of the conflict. This chapter contributes to the literature on interstate rivalry and third-party intervention. The framework of analysis is applicable to civil wars that experience intervention by rivals, such as Syria or Libya.

Despite much attention being devoted to shared leadership, the negotiation of such arrangements remains underexplored. In parallel, the revival of interest in matrix structures reveals their challenges but neglects the dynamics of shared leadership. In this case study, the author analyzes the tensions experienced by senior managers of a healthcare organization transitioning from a hierarchical to matrix structure as they negotiate their leadership roles in this new arrangement.

The author interviewed 16 senior managers, observed their meetings and analyzed documents. These data were combined with secondary data including previous interviews and observations of this top leadership team. The author then conducted an inductive data analysis.

The author's analysis reveals that the tensions experienced by senior managers as they negotiate their roles reflect the co-existence of leadership surpluses (too much leadership) and deficits (too little leadership) in matrix organizations. The author argues that surpluses and deficits are not mutually exclusive but are interrelated and shows how leadership surpluses can create leadership deficits.

The author’s findings suggest that in contexts of leader abundance, actors should explore leadership voids. Particular attention should be paid to incidents of intrusion and exclusion, moments of transition and intense role negotiation, as those contexts are particularly conducive to leadership deficits.

While previous work on matrix structures focuses on leadership surpluses, the author discusses leadership deficits. The author explores how more leaders do not necessarily mean more leadership, but instead how more leaders may result in leadership voids.

Conventional wisdom suggests that war in the host country makes it unattractive for foreign firms to invest. To see if this is true for US firms on the aggregate, this paper aims to examine the veracity of a “permanent war economy” hypothesis, that foreign direct investment (FDI) may, in fact, increase in the host country not despite, but because of, war, i.e. one that lends credence to the idea that, in the USA, “defense [has] become one of constant preparation for future wars and foreign interventions rather than an exercise in response to one-off threats.”

The authors test the hypotheses using Generalized Method of Moments estimation, with Heckman Selection, on US FDI data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and war data from the Correlates of War2 Project, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program/International Peace Research Institute data set, the International Crisis Behavior Project and the Center for Systemic Peace Major Episodes of Political Violence data set. The final sample consists of 351 country-year observations in 55 host countries from 1982 to 2006.

The findings indicate that overall US FDI in a host country in a given year decreases if the host country is engaged in wars with multiple countries and if the US Government is involved in the war. Most notably, the results show that US involvement in multiple host country wars is actually correlated with increased US FDI into the host country, providing empirical support for the “permanent war economy” hypothesis.

While other studies have focused on war and FDI, the authors have sought to show the impact of the involvement of arguably the most influential country, i.e. the USA, in the sovereign matters of a focal host country. By studying FDI from the USA as a function of US involvement in wars overseas, over the years with the greatest use of private military companies by the USA and the largest portion of global FDI accounted for by the USA, this work motivates a research agenda on home-host-"other” relations in the context of war and FDI, with the “other” being the supranational “elephant in the room.”

The paper aims to examine the role played by property tax in influencing strategic decisions regarding marital separation and divorce in Italian municipalities.

The empirical analysis is conducted on a sample of 6,458 Italian municipalities by applying the ordinary least squares (OLS) and instrumental variables (IVs) approaches.

The estimation results show a small increase in marital separations and divorces as the difference between the municipal secondary and primary home tax rate increases. Specifically, an increase of 1‰ in the property tax rate differentials is accompanied by an increase of six marital separations and four divorces per 1,000 inhabitants.

The main limitation of the analysis is that the strategic behavior of the married couple is inferred from econometric analysis with data aggregated at the municipal level. To investigate this phenomenon more precisely, it would be useful to have individual data collected by surveys on strategic divorce decisions due to property tax incentives.

This study contributes to the scant existing literature on the tax incentives for strategic divorce. It is the first study to empirically investigate the effects of property tax on separation and divorce decisions by investigating the Italian context. In Italy, a property tax was introduced in 1993, encouraging “false” divorces by spouses with a second home since the tax on the secondary home was set at a rate higher than that on the primary residence. Moreover, there were no tax deductions and no additional tax breaks on the secondary home, while they were established on the primary one. Higher property taxes and the absence of tax breaks on the secondary home may have encouraged a strategic behavior whereby many married couples filed for false separation and divorce in order to recover part of property tax rebates.