Informal practices and the street-level construction of migrant deportability: Chechen refugees and local authorities in Polish accommodation centres for asylum seekers

In a world of unprecedented mobility, an increasing number of migrants are confronted with policies that challenge their belonging and produce subordinate migrant inclusion. This article explores how the deportation regime saturated daily life in accommodation centres for asylum seekers in Eastern Poland, which acted as spaces of deportability that facilitated the deterritorialisation of European political space. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Chechen refugees and local authorities, I argue that the street-level construction of deportability depends on an exchange between formal and informal practices and policies. Ethnographic data indicate that in the Polish centres, the deportation regime took both bureaucratic and non-bureaucratic forms. As street-level bureaucrats carried out their work duties in a way that reduced the scope of their power, the deportation regime relied on refugees to reproduce its disciplinary aspect.     

哈桑·图拉比与苏丹的"伊斯兰试验"

哈桑.图拉比的宗教政治思想充满了理想主义色彩,主张社会伊斯兰化,强调“真主主权论”,否定民族主义,否定国家权威,主张开放与对话,倡导宗教对话。其领导的伊斯兰民族阵线审时度势,相机而动,在苏丹的两度军人政权中推动国家的伊斯兰化。由于国内外的诸多影响因素以及图拉比在理论与实践、理想与现实之间充满的矛盾,图拉比与军人政权的结盟在本质上仍是权力斗争的需要。要实现苏丹政治稳定和国家发展,务实主义的领导集体和治国方略必不可少。     

Of River Linkage and Issue Linkage: Transboundary Conflict and Cooperation on the River Meuse

Abstract

It is a truism in mainstream International Relations that issue linkage promotes regime formation and integration. The present article applies this idea to the transboundary lower river Meuse and finds its history of integration to be a tortuous one. Contextual political factors have at times promoted integration, at times fragmentation. The path towards regional integration, then, has not been not linear, but has consisted of conflict and cooperation, of (Meuse–Scheldt) river linkage and issue linkage, but also counterlinkage and non-linkage. Clearly linkage is not necessarily positive. I will argue that this does not need to be problematic, but suggest accepting more complexity in the analysis of river integration. I propose a way to create some order in the many available concepts of linkage to map out the role of linkage in integration.     

Identification-robust moment-based tests for Markov switching in autoregressive models

ABSTRACT

This paper develops tests of the null hypothesis of linearity in the context of autoregressive models with Markov-switching means and variances. These tests are robust to the identification failures that plague conventional likelihood-based inference methods. The approach exploits the moments of normal mixtures implied by the regime-switching process and uses Monte Carlo test techniques to deal with the presence of an autoregressive component in the model specification. The proposed tests have very respectable power in comparison with the optimal tests for Markov-switching parameters of Carrasco et al. (2014 Carrasco, M., Hu, L., Ploberger, W. (2014). Optimal test for Markov switching parameters. Econometrica 82(2):765–784.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), and they are also quite attractive owing to their computational simplicity. The new tests are illustrated with an empirical application to an autoregressive model of USA output growth.     

Establishing a new scopic regime: the new landscape painting of Mao’s era

ABSTRACT

After 1949, with ‘serving the people’ established as the basic guideline of art, the reform of traditional landscape painting, which had been appropriated by the cultural elites for thousands of years, was put on the agenda as well. Beginning from the early of 1950s, there were continual debates on the reform of traditional Chinese painting within the art field, through which many artists gradually reached a consensus on the development direction of Chinese painting. At the same time, stimulated by the large-scale xiesheng movement sponsored by the government, Chinese landscape painting changed dramatically in subject, theme, and brushstroke technique, and developed a new style which has its own signifying system. Blending both Chinese and western drawing skills, the new landscape painting successfully created a unique scopic regime, which can establish an organic relationship between personal aesthetic experience and collective historical experience. As a prominent cultural achievement of Mao’s era, the new landscape painting embodies the cultural politics and the technologies of the self at that time.     

Optimal financing and dividend policy with Markovian switching regimes

This work investigates an optimal financing and dividend problem for an insurer whose surplus process is modulated by an observable continuous-time and finite-state Markov chain. We assume that the insurer should never go bankrupt by issuing new equity. The goal of the insurer is to maximize the expected present value of the dividends payout minus the discounted cost of equity issuance. We obtain the optimal policies and explicit expressions for the value functions when the risk reserve process is modeled by both upward jump model and its diffusion approximation. Numerical illustrations of the sensitivities of the model parameters are provided.     

Detecting structural change with heteroskedasticity

The hypothesis of structural stability that the regression coefficients do not change over time is central to all applications of linear regression models. It is rather surprising that existing theory as well as practice focus on testing for structural change under homoskedasticity – that is, regression coefficients may change, but the variances remain the same. Since structural change can, and often does, involve changes in variances, this is a puzzling gap in the literature. Our main focus in this paper is to utilize a newly developed test (MZ) by Maasoumi et al. (2010 Maasoumi, E., Zaman, A., Ahmed, M. (2010). Tests for structural change, aggregation, and homogeneity. Econ Model. 27(6):1382–1391.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) that tests simultaneously for break in regression coefficients as well as in variance. Currently, the sup F test is most widely used for structural change. This has certain optimality properties shown by Andrews (1993 Andrews, D.W.K. (1993). Test for parameter instability and structural change with unknown change point. Econometrica. 61(4):821–856.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). However, this test assumes homoskedasticity across the structural change. We introduce the sup MZ test which caters to unknown breakpoints, and also compare it to the sup F. Our Monte Carlo results show that sup MZ test incurs only a low cost in case of homoskedasticity while having hugely better performance in case of heteroskedasticity. The simulation results are further supported by providing a real-world application. In real-world datasets, we find that structural change often involves heteroskedasticity. In such cases, the sup F test can fail to detect structural breaks and give misleading results, while the sup MZ test works well. We conclude that the sup MZ test is superior to current methodology for detecting structural change.     

Gender,work, and childcare in Kazakhstan,Mongolia, and Russia

The current study seeks to understand the nature of gender relations within a post‐Soviet welfare model in Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Russia. On the basis of the analysis of key labour market indicators, parental leave, and childcare policies, it finds that the welfare models in the three countries are hybrid, and neither authoritarianism in Kazakhstan and Russia nor democracy in Mongolia lead to substantive gender equality outcomes. Persistent gender inequality in these countries is underpinned by the neo‐liberal approach to welfare provision, conservative social norms, and limited agency of civil society to influence the policy agenda. Nonetheless, these states have distributed to the population with an emphasis on working mothers, and this policy choice has been driven by economic, demographic, and political considerations, which ultimately serve to support, rather than transform, the patriarchal power structure in these societies.     

Levels or worlds of welfare? Assessing social rights and social stratification in Northern and Southern countries

Since Esping‐Andersen's Three Worlds, it has become a truism of welfare state research that welfare states do not vary linearly along a single dimension but have to be conceptualized as multidimensional phenomena that cluster into types caused by the political economy of class coalitions. However, when moving beyond the 18 original countries of Esping‐Andersen's analysis, the situation is less clear. Although additional worlds have been identified in the Global North and the Global South, these are usually not conceptualized along the same dimensions as the original three worlds and are rarely empirically compared with them. This paper tackles these omissions by explicitly comparing Northern and Southern countries within Esping‐Andersen's framework. It poses the question whether the central insight of welfare state research, namely, that there are not just gradual differences between welfare states, but different types with qualitative differences, expands beyond classic welfare states. Based on newly generated data on social rights and social stratification, we employ cluster analysis with 45 Northern and Southern countries. This analysis produces mixed results. We do find different types of welfare states with qualitative differences, but these do not fully correspond to Esping‐Andersen's Three Worlds. Moreover, our findings also point to a conceptual issue in welfare regime research: regimes are not just defined and measured in terms of different logics of welfare provision but also take into account degrees of welfare stateism. We argue that this issue is poised to become ever more pressing with the geographical expansion of welfare state research.     

无产阶级政权建设规律的初步探索

马克思从揭示人类社会发展规律的角度,通过对世界上第一次出现的无产阶级政权——巴黎公社的分析和总结,阐述了科学社会主义政权建设理论,提出了一些基本政治原则。他指出:建立一个真正的人民国家是无产阶级专政的基础和前提;以责任制廉价政府代替官僚等级制政府是其主要形式;以议行合一原则取代分权制衡原则的权力分配形式可以保证国家机构的政治效能。中国共产党在长期执政实践中积累了丰富的执政经验,党的十九大提出中国特色社会主义已进入新时代。在此契机下重新研读马克思经典著作,对认识和把握中国共产党执政新飞跃、实现国家治理体系和治理能力现代化有着重大现实意义。