Search

This paper investigated the reflections of Electoral Commission (EC) officers and voters in the Jaman South District with regard to ballot paper wastage in elections in Ghana using descriptive exploratory research design. Purposive and convenience sampling techniques were used to select 172 respondents for the study with questionnaires, structured interview and interview guide as the research instruments. The study revealed that elections were conducted to help select leaders for the nation and to help ensure that leaders are accountable to the people. Policies and ideologies of candidates were found to have little influence on how persons vote. Factors such as protest voting, low public education on elections, and high level of illiteracy were responsible for rejected ballots in the district. Rejected ballot paper was a cost to the EC officers and the voters in terms of resources, time and energy especially during periods of run-offs. The study recommended that the government effectively collaborate with the EC officials in the district to implement policies that will increase voters’ appreciation of issues underpinning democracy. The EC officers in the district should properly collaborate with the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) to provide adequate public education to enable the electorates in the district to have a proper understanding of basic electoral issues.Key words: Elections; democracy; democratization; disenfranchisement; rejected ballots.

Niniejsze opracowanie stanowi próbę oceny 30 lat funkcjonowania włoskiego systemu finansowania Kościoła Katolickiego, z którego korzystają obecnie również inne związki wyznaniowe. Odwołując się do dostępnych danych Autor dochodzi do wniosku, że składające się na ten system rozwiązania – pomimo różnych szczegółowych zastrzeżeń – znacząco przyczyniły się nie tylko do stworzenia właściwych warunków realizacji wolności religijnej, ale i na przykład do demokratyzacji systemu podatkowego. Pozwoliły też Kościołowi na podjęcie wielu istotnych inicjatyw społecznych, opiekuńczych i kulturalnych z korzyścią dla włoskiego społeczeństwa i ludności państw Trzeciego Świata. Doświadczenia te bez wątpienia mogą być postrzegane w kategoriach zdrowej współpracy (sana cooperatio), której tak bardzo życzył sobie Sobór Watykański II i do której Republika Włoska oraz Stolica Apostolska wzajemnie się zobowiązały w Umowie z 1984 r. Omawiany system finansowania wymaga jednak stałej promocji, która powinna uwzględniać przede wszystkim odwołania do Kościoła jako wspólnoty, której wszyscy członkowie – równi w godności – dzielą odpowiedzialność za dobro wspólne. The main goal of the present paper is to assess the 30 years of the functioning of the Italian system of financing the Catholic Church, also utilized at present by other religious organizations. On the basis of the available data, the Author reaches the conclusion that the solutions making up the system – despite some reservations – have contributed significantly not only to the creation of the appropriate conditions for the realization of religious freedom, but also – for example – to the democratization of the tax system. They have allowed the Church to undertake many important initiatives of social, protective or cultural character for the benefit of Italian society and the populations of the Third World. Without doubt, the experiences described can be regarded in terms of sound cooperation (sana cooperatio), which was recommended by the Second Vatican Council and to which both, the Italian Republic and the Holy See, commited themselves in the Agreement of 1984. However, the analysed system of financing requires permanent promotion, taking into consideration the image of the Church as a community whose members – equal in dignity – share the responsability for the common good.

This paper explores the extent to which latest developments in the Technical and Vocational Education and Training System in South Africa respond to key principles espoused for a developmental, democratic and inclusionary ideal. The White Paper for post school education and training (DHET, 2013) approved by Cabinet in November, 2013 is referred to by the Minister as the "definitive statement of the governments vision for the post school system" (DHET, 2013, p.4) and as such represents a crucial strategy document intended to chart the TVET direction to 2030. Using key theoretical constructs from development theory, this paper provides an assessment of the TVET strategy contained is the paper and explores the extent to which it does respond to the agenda defined by the promise. It is argued that the challenges outlined are not yet able to provide the blueprint for a TVET transformative vision. It is concluded that while the development rhetoric contained in the paper is plausible, the creative tinkering of the system is unlikely to lead to the radical revisioning necessary for a truly transformative TVET system. The underlying assumptions regarding purpose, impact and outcome will need to be carefully reconsidered if the system is to be responsive to the promises of the democratic developmental ideal to which the government is committed. (author's abstract)

In December 2004 the People's Liberation Army issued its status report, the White Paper, summarising its view of the global configuration of forces and projecting its response. The operating assumptions are: (1) while the international situation is stable, there are factors present of instability, uncertainty and insecurity, which are increasing, at the same time that hegemonism and unilateralism are gaining; (2) the tendency towards multi-polarisation is deepening; (3) new changes are altering the existing balance of power; (4) while the developing world is increasing global democratisation with a more vocal say, the gap between the North and the South is ever widening; (5) the world wide revolution in Military Affairs requires both new technology and new doctrines; (6) localised wars of a geopolitical, ethnic and religious nature are a constant threat; (7) any attempt by Taiwan to separate will be crushed; and (8) non-traditional threats are on the increase. To properly position the White Paper in perspective, it is essential to examine the 1999 study by two senior PLA Colonels, Unrestricted Warfare, which was characterised by the US as the doctrine of a technologically weaker China as it confronts the superior US power. A careful examination of this study reveals a thoroughly thought-out evaluation of both US and Chinese strengths and weaknesses in technology, strategy and doctrine. There is little doubt that the wake-up call for the PLA was triggered by the Gulf War—Operation Desert Storm. China's response, it is argued, is multiple—ranging from altering force levels to increasing its educational/technical levels; developing a seamless strategy for a transition from a peacetime to a wartime economy; seeking a leapfrog strategy in military technology; not falling into the trap of seeking superiority in all areas of military technology; and constructing and reinforcing an alliance structure of both multilateral institutional nature as well as on the bilateral level.

In this chapter we focus on the development of the “modern” Japanese paper industry, which was introduced from the West to produce yoshi (Western machine-made paper) in the 1870s. Japan’s traditional papermaking (or washi) culture, introduced from the East, has a long history. In the beginning, the central government’s demand for paper supported the development of the modern paper industry, as it needed yoshi for the announcement and documentation of its modernization policy. Subsequently, the private sector promoted industrial development over the following 130 years, except during the wartime economy. The modern paper industry in Japan has always been characterized by rapid growth, low import dependency, and cartelization. The “Big Three” dominated the market after their merger in the 1930s, but the GHQ’s democratization policy welcomed new industry entrants after the Second World War. Various innovations, including the vertical integration of pulp and papermaking processes and the establishment of coastal manufacturing bases to utilize imported material, were the sources of growth after the Second World War. Japan became the second largest papermaking country in the world for almost three decades beginning in the 1970s, but globalization, the emergence of new developing countries, and the tide of M&A has transformed this industry.

Pamela Reynolds. War in Worcester: Youth and the Apartheid State. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. xii +239 pp. Photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $75.00. Cloth. $26.00. Paper.Dawne Y. Curry. Apartheid on a Black Isle: Removal and Resistance in Alexandra, South Africa. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. xvi + 180 pp. List of Tables. List of Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $95.00. Paper.Lauretta Ngcobo, ed. Prodigal Daughters: Stories of South African Women in Exile. Scottsville, S.A.: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012. xxix + 211 pp. Photographs. $34.00, R195.00. Paper.Sean Field. Oral History, Community, and Displacement Imagining Memories in Post-Apartheid South Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Palgrave Studies in Oral History, xvi + 221 pp. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $100.00. Paper.In the wake of South Africa's democratic transition, we have witnessed a proliferation of narratives that attempt to highlight the role that ordinary South Africans played in the antiapartheid struggle. Oral histories and memory work have been key to creating these narratives and have formed a crucial part of social history, particularly in its accounts of forced removal and antiapartheid resistance. This overview of four recent works leads us to rethink narratives of resistance and removal and to interrogate the categories and concepts on which they are based.Pamela Reynold's War in Worcester examines youth under the apartheid state and the role young people played in bringing an end to oppression. The book examines youths' refusal to accept the adulthood on offer under apartheid's political dispensation and takes on the violence of the state, its cruelty, and the intimacies of its warfare. Drawing on the narratives of fourteen young men identified under apartheid as "African" (11), Reynolds bases her study in Zwelethemba, a suburb of Worcester and a "Coloured" labor preference area, and attempts both an ethnography and a critique of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). She reveals how the commission's victim/perpetrator binary reduced these young activists to the role of "civilians" according to the Geneva Conventions and provided a platform on which they could relate their experiences only as victims. To avoid an ethnography of victimization, Reynolds studies both the TRC and black African activists and draws on versions of the apartheid past that exist beyond both the commission's hearings and the African National Congress's (ANC) formal narrative of the liberation struggle.The idea of war is central to this text. Reynolds discusses how what counts as war also determines who is recognized as a legitimate fighter. While liberation organizations drew on the Geneva Conventions and recognized the antiapartheid struggle as a war, the South African government characterized this resistance as conflict with terrorists. The idea of war extends to how one conceives of children or youth in conflict situations. Reynolds demonstrates how the state under apartheid perceived the black child as unworthy of good governance and as a potential terrorist. Borrowing from Stanley Cavell, Reynolds takes the idea of the child as a necessary and undertheorized figure and asks when a child's process of political and ethical understanding of the world comes to an end, becomes no longer childlike.The central themes of War in Worcester include young men's experiences during the struggle and the TRC's approach to documenting that struggle, as well as its conceptualization of activism and victimhood. It investigates the triangulation among the commission, the activist, and the state; among the commission, the town of Zwelethemba, and the fourteen young men whose experiences Reynolds documents; and among the group, community, and individual. Through this ethnography, Reynolds grapples with the question of what it means to do research on youth in conflict and to study the young who engage in a fight voluntarily and without conscription. …

Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes. Edited by Tom Ginsburg and Alberto Simpser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 278 pp. $95.00 cloth, $34.99 paper.What shape do constitutions take in authoritarian regimes, when governmental power is not limited? Can even "sham" constitutions generate state legitimacy? If so, how? These related questions guide Ginsburg and Simpser's edited volume, Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes. This book begins with a concise introduction in which the editors explain why constitutions matter and what they do for authoritarian rulers. Specifically, constitutions solve "problems of governing" (p. 3) by creating incentives for different political actors to do "what authoritarian rulers wish them to do" (p. 2). These documents can also help to set up governing institutions and build public trust. The political functions of authoritarian constitutions include coordinating competing oligarchs and subjects, establishing "focal points," and even imprinting on rulers and citizens a set of common values, such as the boundaries of permissible and impermissible discourse (Ibid.).The remaining ten chapters are divided into four parts that showcase either theoretical frameworks or empirical cases. Two chapters focus on authoritarian constitutionalism, three on constitutional design, two on the contents of authoritarian constitutions, and three on the consequences of authoritarian constitutions. Generally, the overarching themes relate to the pathologies of authoritarian rule, why authoritarian constitutions exist, and how they might serve or harm democratic transition.Five of the chapters expose the democratic potential of authoritarian constitutions. Tushnet (Chapter 3) looks to Singapore to show how rules found in authoritarian constitutions commit even autocrats to particular courses of action, which may encourage stability and predictability. Using the Polish communist constitution of 1952, Przeworski (Chapter 2) shows how, even if autocrats are not good at following rules, constitutions set out structures for how a government operates and the relationship between its constituent parts. Similarly, Hale (Chapter 10) turns to Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, and Ukraine to argue that democratic transition may come about even in highly paternalistic regimes in which rules are not always followed. Drawing on dozens of presidential elections in authoritarian regimes between 1946 and 2008, Gandhi (Chapter 9) shows how constitutions may drive democratic transition by bringing about multiparty elections. Related quantitative research by Elkins, Ginsburg, and Melton (Chapter 7) suggests that authoritarian and democratic constitutions are converging in form, particularly through their provisions of rights and judicial independence, which also suggests new ways to understand democratic transition.Authoritarian constitutions have insidious and darker sides, too. Law and Versteeg (Chapter 8) reveal that, with limited exceptions, authoritarian governments are likely to use constitutional rights provisions as "shams" or "window-dressing," which creates a gap "between what a country promises ...and how it ... behaves" (p. 187). Drawing on the role of constitutions as "operating manuals," Albertus's and Menaldo's quantitative analysis (Chapter 4) of the effect of constitutions on regime survival in Latin America between 1950 and 2002 reveals that constitutions actually "help[ed] dictators consolidate power, increase investment, and boost economic development - all while generating a steady flow of rents for themselves...without empowering challengers" (p. 53). In that way, governments can use constitutions to create "autocratic coalitions" that keep dictators in power (p. 79). Similarly, Negretto (Chapter 5) draws on Latin American dictatorships from 1900 to 2008 to argue that constitutions are critical for military rulers seeking major social transformation. And Stilt's analysis (Chapter 6) of Egypt's 1971 constitution and its 1980, 2005, and 2007 amendments illustrates how the governing document helped to cultivate images of Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak as "just and pious" presidents who believed in the rule of law and the protection of private property-contrasting to Nasser's earlier "excesses" and helping to preempt opposition (p. …

Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala, by Kirsten Weld. Durham, Duke University Press, 2014. xvi, 335 pp. $26.95 US (paper). In June 2005, investigators with Guatemala's Human Rights Ombudsman's Office (PDH) stumbled upon what appeared to be vast quantities of old papers in derelict offices of Guatemala's infamous national police. The human rights workers soon realized they had discovered the largest collection of secret state documents in Latin American history. The incredible story that follows this discovery, along with the gruesome tale that precedes it, is the heart of Kirsten Weld's brilliantly narrated and written first book. The story Weld tells, while engaging in its own right, holds concrete lessons and insights not only for scholars of Guatemala and Latin America, but for anyone interested in the politics of history and memory, the power of archives and state terror, as well as the process of postwar transition and reckoning. While the role of Guatemala's military in the state-sponsored genocide that took place in the Guatemalan countryside during Guatemala's civil war (19601996) is well known, Kirsten Weld takes us into a lesser known, but equally important, history of the national police and Guatemala City. Paper Cadavers is divided into four parts covering the initial discovery of the archive, the history of the police archive and its role in Guatemala's counterinsurgency, the role of the archives in social reconstruction at the ends of war, and finally the institutionalization of the archive and the development of a new archival culture in Guatemala. The thread tying these parts and chapters together is the national police archive itself and Weld's compelling argument for "archival thinking:" putting archives--their histories, silences, distortions, and politics--at the centre of our questions. Drawing upon recent works comprising the "archival turn," Weld argues that archives must be analyzed as "more than the sum of their parts--as instruments of political action, implements of state formation ('technologies of rule'), institutions of liberal democratization, enablers of gaze and desire, and sites of social struggles" (p. 19). The heart of Paper Cadavers is thus a story of how this one particular archive was transformed from a weapon of surveillance, social control, and ideological management for a counterinsurgent state to use against its enemies into a weapon of democratic opening in the pursuit of justice for war crimes for a demilitarized Left, victims of state terror and their families. In the first part of the book. Weld narrates the explosive discovery of the archive and the challenges faced by human rights workers as they grappled with what to do with 75-million pages documenting over a century's worth of blood-filled history. The "discovery" of the archives, however, was not entirely accidental. Beginning in the mid-1980s, family members of those disappeared and killed in Guatemala City organized around the collective demand for information about victims' fates and state transparency and their struggles provided instructive lessons for those involved in the rescue of the national police archive. The second part of the book takes up these state secrets by looking backward into the history of the national police and its archival practices. …

PurposeThis paper sets out to investigate the potential contribution of the inter‐disciplinary field of ecological economics to the explanation of the current economic crisis. The root of the crisis is the growing disjuncture between the real economy of production and the paper economy of finance.Design/methodology/approachThe authors trace the epistemological origins of this disjuncture to the myths of economism – a mix of academic, popular and political beliefs that served to explain, rationalise and perpetuate the current economic system.FindingsThe authors recommend ending with economism and developing new collective and discursive processes for understanding and engaging with ecological‐economic systems.Originality/valueThe authors embrace the notion of sustainable de‐growth: an equitable and democratic transition to a smaller economy with less production and consumption.

Ben Jones. Beyond the State in Rural Uganda. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2009. xv + 199 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $105.00. Cloth, £22.99. Paper. In 2002 Ole dai village had no NGO projects, no clinic, no local school. This village, deep in Teso District, Eastern Uganda, was not merely undeveloped. The parish chief visited twice in a year; there was not even a concerted effort to collect taxes. Ben Jones argues that what we see in Ole dai is state withdrawal - he speaks of "extraversion" - a process that began decades earlier in Uganda. Ever increasing donor support in the 1990s allowed the Ugandan state to pull ever more resources out of local government; by 2002 there seemed to be little compelling reason for the state to engage with those living in the countryside. Oledai is a subparish, the lowest unit in the Ugandan administrative hierarchy, and the social unit that often corresponds best to the face-to-face community. The physical remains of a more prosperous - and less marginal - way of life are still visible in the village and the region, reminders of the long decline from the well-established cotton and cattle economies of the colonial and early postcolonial days. Drawing on eighteen months of field work (in 2001-2) and extensive historical research, Beyond the State in Rural Uganda is an empirical, grounded challenge to the notion of "state-sponsored development." In his introduction Jones identifies several themes (seniority, prosperity, propriety) that will shape the analysis to follow and serve to frame his interest in the interplay between social institutions and the role and scope of individual actors. Jones starts his study with the colonial construction of Teso society, drawing on a wealth of historical literature and the reflections of Oledai residents upon their own immediate past. He shows us Oledai as a village in decline in a region that has been in decline for more than thirty years; prosperity is a thing of the past. There are three interwoven histories here (perhaps not fully discussed in relation to one another): the longue duree from pre colonial times to the present Teso districts; the economic decline in the Teso region that began with the destruction of the cotton economy in the 1970s; and finally the more immediate catastrophe of the Insurgency (1988-94), when seniority and propriety were brutally challenged. In the next chapters Jones's focus shifts as he examines in more detail changing community life "beyond the state." Since the late 1980s decentralization and democratization have been key parts of the Ugandan reform program, attracting significant donor interest and adding to Uganda's reputation as a progressive African state. In chapter 3, "The Village Court and the Withdrawn State," Jones skillfully blends ethnographic insights from Oledai with a historical analysis of the role of village courts in Teso, and more generally in Uganda and Africa. He argues that the continuing relevance of village courts has little to do with decentralization and much to do with historical continuity. The village courts, established in colonial times to deal with local problems in relative autonomy (at least in comparison with practice elsewhere in Uganda), continue to function at village level. Jones observed all thirtysix "official" cases reported for 2002 (many other cases were decided informally) and interviewed participants. Brief case studies of disputes show that the largest single group of cases had to do with enforcing male seniority and that localized lineages played a large role in the decisions. Litigation in the village court, where decisions can be referred to the sub-county court or the police post, remains the principle remaining link between Oledai and state institutions because it is useful to villagers. This is a valuable discussion of the complex role of the village council chairman, who both represents the village and is referred to as the "eye" of a government that Jones insists is largely uninterested in performing its seeing function - though his claim could have been strengthened by more case material. …