Introduction: Rethinking Challenges to State Sovereignty in Mali and Northwest Africa
Strategic Options for the Future of African Peace Operations 2015-2025. Seminar Report
Options Stratégiques pour l’Avenir des Opérations de Paix Africaines 2015-2025. Rapport de Séminaire
Fragmentation and decline in India's state assemblies: A review, 1967-2007
Tracing activity in 15 Indian state assemblies from 1967 to 2007, we find that overall legislative activity declined but there was also considerable variation across states. States with large electoral constituencies and politically fragmented assemblies showed the worst performance, which suggests a link between political fragmentation and institutional performance.
Introduction: Rethinking Challenges to State Sovereignty in Mali and Northwest Africa
Towards Multi-level Security Community Building: The EU’s and Norway’s External Governance in Ukraine
initial objective of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was to expand the European zone of peace beyond the EU’s borders through processes of external governance. It was seen as an instrument for promoting security in the region through processes of integration and association. Although initially developed as a rather coherent policy, it has over the years become something very different. In this paper, we examine what these changes have actually entailed. Our main argument is that the framework of the European Neighbourhood Policy –the lead framework of the EU’s external governance has been developing from the original concept of a set of rationally planned processes coherent across countries of this Neighbourhood, towards a complex and ambiguous set of ‘garbage can’ type of processes in individual countries. We focus on the latter dimension, specifically analysing the nature of coordination of reform processes in Ukraine. Here, the original model of a rational process, with detailed action plans, monitoring, reporting and progress assessment of reforms, has given way to a set of loosely coupled processes involving various interests, problems, solutions and decision-making situations–what Cohen, March and Olsen (1972) termed the garbage can model of change. EU institutions and EU member states are involved in various forms of engagement with Ukraine, resulting in complex and often loosely coupled forms of adaptation. Nevertheless, Ukraine is experiencing unprecedented levels of extensive transformation processes connecting its various societal segments with the EU.
Towards Multi-level Security Community Building: The EU's External Governance in Ukraine
Status and sovereign equality: Small states in multilateral settings
In this chapter, we explore Norwegian UN policy, arguing that it is a central arena for Norwegian efforts to be recognized by others. Our focus on Norwegian UN policy is not an end in itself, but a means to develop a more general argument about status seeking behaviour in a multilateral setting. We argue that status seeking in multilateral settings is distinct from status seeking in other settings, and that this stems from the norms of reciprocity and rulebased cooperation in such settings. Multilateral settings put a premium on behaviour that is in keeping with a commitment to the furtherance and expansion of the rules established by multilateral cooperation and organizations. Certain types of behaviour or role, rather than certain types of resources, can accord status. Norway has specialized in one distinct ‘role’: that of being a team-player, a facilitator – an actor that can be relied upon to take on the burden of doing things in which it has no identifiable direct stake or interest. A case in point is the UN request as to whether Norway could shoulder the responsibility for destroying Syria’s chemical weapons. We conclude the chapter by suggesting that the role developed in multilateral settings has so pervaded Norwegian diplomatic tradition that it is present in bilateral settings as well. We proceed as follows. We first elaborate briefly on the editors’ introduction and highlight how status seeking is reflected in the skills and diplomatic forms that are valued in different settings. We then briefly describe overall Norway’s UN policy, with a few examples of what a status-based reading of this policy can tell us about Norwegian foreign policy, and about multilateralism as a distinct arena for status seeking. Next, we present the specific manifestations of their distinctiveness of multilateral settings, and link this to Norwegian diplomats’ self-understandings and conceptions of what characterizes a good diplomat: the ability to be tapped into what is going on in an effort to present oneself with resources that can be put to good use on issues in which Norway may often not have any distinct or direct stakes. This tendency to stress the role as ‘helper’ is most pronounced in relation to issue-areas where the USA has vital interests, and is less so where less powerful states are concerned. Thus, power differentials play a central role also in multilateral settings, where it matters who is the demandeur for the tasks to be undertaken.