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After war, many countries, such as Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, or Iraq, the transition to a democratic market economy extremely difficult. This failure to thrive, Dead Ends of Transition demonstrates, is often the result of national reliance on foreign aid. Rentier states, the contributors to this study argue, have few incentives to respond to the needs of their societies. Taking a closer look at the policies of rentier economies, this book further identifies new ways in which these countries and their international partners could work together to ease the critical transition to democracy.
The sixteenth edition of Social policy in the European Union: state of play has a triple ambition. First, it provides easily accessible information to a wide audience about recent developments in both EU and domestic social policymaking. Second, the volume provides a more analytical reading, embedding the key developments of the year 2014 in the most recent academic discourses. Third, the forward-looking perspective of the book aims to provide stakeholders and policymakers with specific tools that allow them to discern new opportunities to influence policymaking. In this 2015 edition of Social policy in the European Union: state of play, the authors tackle the topics of the state of EU politics after the parliamentary elections, the socialisation of the European Semester, methods of political protest, the Juncker investment plan, the EU’s contradictory education investment, the EU’s contested influence on national healthcare reforms, and the neoliberal Trojan Horse of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
In the context of the enlargements of 2004 and 2007 the European Union needed a concept for the future relationship with its new neighbours. The result was the development of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). In return for sharing European values and effectively implementing political, economic and institutional reforms, the EU offers economic incentives and closer ties to its eastern and southern neighbours. The ambitious objective of promoting stability, security and prosperity beyond its own borders raises questions about the Union's intentions, means and likely success. This volume analyses the logic and institutional origins of the ENP and provides a critical assessment of the promises and prospects of the EU's broader neighbourhood policies. It does so both from an issue-oriented perspective (e.g. security, visa policy, trade, aid, human rights, good governance) and a regional standpoint: eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, the Western Balkans and Russia.
This volume focuses on the political economy surrounding the detailed decisions that governments make at each step of the value chain for natural resource management. From the perspective of public interest or good governance, many resource-dependent developing countries pursue apparently short-sighted and sub-optimal policies in relation to the extraction and capture of resource rents, and to spending and savings from their resource endowments. This work contextualizes these micro-level choices and outcomes.
Omolade Adunbi investigates the myths behind competing claims to oil wealth in Nigeria's Niger Delta. Looking at ownership of natural resources, oil extraction practices, government control over oil resources, and discourse about oil, Adunbi shows how symbolic claims have created an "oil citizenship." He explores the ways NGOs, militant groups, and community organizers invoke an ancestral promise to defend land disputes, justify disruptive actions, or organize against oil corporations. Policies to control the abundant resources have increased contestations over wealth, transformed the relationship of people to their environment, and produced unique forms of power, governance, and belonging.
Considers how centre-left political parties have fared since the 1970s and the daunting but by no means insurmountable challenges faced by them.
Indian communities have existed in the Gulf emirate of Dubai for more than a century. Since the 1970s, workers from South Asia have flooded into the emirate, enabling Dubai's huge construction boom. They now compose its largest noncitizen population. Though many migrant families are middle-class and second-, third-, or even fourth-generation residents, Indians cannot become legal citizens of the United Arab Emirates. Instead, they are all classified as temporary guest workers. In Impossible Citizens, Neha Vora draws on her ethnographic research in Dubai's Indian-dominated downtown to explore how Indians live suspended in a state of permanent temporariness. While their legal status defines th...
Since the 1990s, the economic development of Central and Eastern Europe has maintained high economic growth rates, seemingly leading to an era of prosperity. This very positive vision of future economic success, linked to current political backlash and a long history of economic adversity, is a thin veil of the economic “way west” for so-called transition countries. The Middle-Income Trap in Central and Eastern Europe examines the reality of the diminishing marginal utility of further international investments alongside the pitfalls of higher government spending to cultivate innovation which ultimately makes foreign capital less attractive. In this volume authors from diverse disciplinary perspectives reflect on current debates surrounding the developmental bottlenecks in East-Central Europe. Their common goal is to analyze the manner of socio-economic transformation, question of the relevance and impact of the “middle-income trap” and identify possible ways to escape it.
This book is an in-depth study of the transformations in Central Europe in the years since the fall of Communism. In a comparative analysis of geopolitical, ethical, cultural, and socioeconomic shifts, this essential text investigates the post-communist countries.