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This article belongs to a forthcoming special cluster, "Contention Politics and International Statebuilding in Southeast Europe" guest-edited by Nemanja Džuverovic, Julia Rone and Tom Junes. Massive protest waves, mainly led by younger citizens, appeared during the past years in Romania. Gubernat and Rammelt provide an analysis of the production of meaning by the "Romanian street" as a collective actor. They argue that "Vrem o ţară ca afară! (We want a country like abroad!)" became the leitmotif for important parts of the Romanian protests of the past eight years. For so doing, Gubernat and Rammelt analyze the discursive underpinnings and the constructed frames in recent protests in Romania. Their demonstration synthesizes a social phenomenon that appeared during the Roșia Montană protests of 2013, continued with the Colectiv protests of 2015 and was reconfirmed during the 2017–2018 anti-corruption protests: the dichotomy between the discursive appropriation of the West, as a benchmark of progress and social modernization and the "self-racism" manifested in these movements. The use of Frame Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis for the study of these waves of protests enables them to show how the Western hegemonic discourse on state-building provides the cultural conditions for social action as well as it enables mobilizing agents to frame national discontent. "'Vrem o ţară ca afară!' Redefining state-building through a pro-European discourse in Romania" concludes that recent protests in Romania reproduce Western ideals of modern state and politics through a value-based discourse around the idea of belonging to Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2015 refugee crisis has held the attention of Romanian news media, as one of the most challenging issues for the European Union in the last decade, even though Romania is not situated on the main routes on which refugees arrive. Our research focuses on the variation of issue-specific news frames in time, according to media type, and by the countries covered, also addressing the locally salient issue of religion. Articles from the websites of the top-ranked six Romanian news outlets were analyzed, including three quality papers and three tabloids (N=6,183), from 1 April 2015 to 30 September 2017. Using a computer-assisted, cluster-based frame analysis, we identify six primary, mutually exclusive and six secondary, nonexclusive frames: European crisis, context/victimization, relocation/distribution, international conflict, and social problem, national costs, religious issues, US immigration policy, humanitarian/international. The variations in their salience follow the general European tendency toward securitization. At the same time, the emphasis on the issue as a European crisis indicates a tendency characteristic of Central and Eastern European media coverage. Co-occurrence patterns of frames and specific countries also indicate that the salience of some globally recurrent frames varies by countries covered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the development of knowledge management systems in Romanian academic libraries. Particular focus is given to the organizational culture of Romanian academic libraries in preparation for developing a strategy for changes in information management styles and structures. Organizational developments following the 1990 political changes in Romania are examined and the benefits of knowledge management in developing knowledge-based societies are explored. The article explores the organizational values, administration style, knowledge sharing, and innovation in several Romanian academic libraries.

This paper documents the gendered aspects of changes affecting the life course of Romanians post-socialism, and the meanings men and women—with ages spanning across various age cohorts—employ to make sense of their experiences. Based on qualitative data collected during research on precarious prosperity among Romanian households conducted in 2013, the findings show that major shifts occurred in the timing of life events. Romanians’ life courses and their work trajectories have been unevenly affected depending on their intersectional belonging to gender, area of residence and life stage at the moment of the political transition. The analysis of work trajectories unravels increasing gender differentiation among younger cohorts and reinforcement of the gendered life paths taken. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Interdisciplinary investigations of the human osteological remains help us to understand the genetic diversity, the mobility or the paleodiet of the past communities and offer us insights on the diagenetic processes. The present study aims to assess the results of chemical, mineralogical and microscopic analyses performed on different human osteological remains selected from archaeological sites situated in Eastern Romania in order to understand the diagenetic transformations involved in the site formation processes and to estimate their influence on the historical interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist activism is only at an early stage in Romania, yet feminist activists have been able to mobilise mass street protests over the past few years. By looking at the 2012 mobilisations in Romania, this essay aims to understand how feminist movement participation affected the dynamics of these protest events. It is argued that feminist activists have drawn attention to some of the current difficulties faced by women in bringing to the fore alternative voices and messages and resisting patriarchal modes of mobilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article develops a typology of political strategies of coming to terms with the past as a theoretical frame of reference against which it assesses the transitional politics of memory pursued in Romanian post-communist society. It argues that after an initial ‘elusive’ strategy based on a politics of amnesia gave way to a confrontationist stance promoting a politics of anamnesis, the communist past was both politically criminalised and symbolically demonised. The article concludes by arguing that the failure of the ‘mastering the past’ paradigm epitomised by the 2006 Tismăneanu Report needs to give way to a ‘normalising’ paradigm of remembering Romanian communism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the social economy from the perspective of NGOs and voluntary work. The research was conducted on four different territorial levels in the Western Region of Romania and employed both quantitative (questionnaires administered to the general population and within NGOs, bivariate analyses) and qualitative (semi-structured interviews within NGOs) methods of analysis. This method of working has allowed a picture of NGOs and volunteering to be formed that is correlated with territorial realities in the western part of Romania. It has thus been possible to see what underlies the coming into existence of NGOs, their economic scale, and what areas they succeed in addressing. Secondly, a description is provided of the typical Western Region volunteer, focusing mainly on social and motivational aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the idea of “recuperative memory” with respect to the process of coming to terms with the past after the fall of the Romanian Communist regime in 1989. Its method is to examine the mechanisms used by recuperative memory in order to re-appropriate the past and emphasize the inherently mediated and multifaceted nature of this process. Using various examples from oral testimonies, autobiographical writings, literary works, and cinema, the paper argues that the role of recuperative memory is not only to facilitate the process of coming to terms with the past, but also to offer the material necessary to sustain a viable politics of memory. This entails providing a platform for the intergenerational transmission of memory and knowledge for those who did not live under the Communist regime, filling in this way the intergenerational gap, despite the lack of political class engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author examines the political urgency and moral indispensability of coming to terms with the traumatic legacies of the past following the revolutions of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe. Topics covered include the impact of several intellectuals that emerged during the period and several conclusions that were formed based on analyses of the struggles of former communist countries like Romania and Czechoslovakia.

The paper submits the results of a visual research on the perception of inequality within Romanian society. The data were collected by means of drawings, an uncommon method used in studying social stratification. The analysis was applied to 82 drawings obtained from 41 Romanians (and 16 drawings obtained from 8 Italians added to the former, in an attempt to explore differences cross-nationally). The results refer to the resources that are perceived to be unequally distributed in Romania, to the acceptable sources of inequality in Romania and, in exploratory terms, to the comparative analysis upon the perception of inequality in Romania and Italy. The commonest inequality perceived in Romania is the economic inequality. Here, one of the acceptable sources of inequality is related to the prestige of professions, and one of the unacceptable sources of inequality is the qualitative dimension of lifestyle: dissatisfaction, discontent, unhappiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the educational attainment, employment and living conditions of young Roma adults in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania with the aid of national generations and gender surveys and other sources of information. It shows that in spite of a small improvement in the educational attainment of young Roma in comparison to the generation of their parents, the educational achievement and employment gaps have increased considerably during the post-communist period. The article also compares living conditions of the Roma with other population groups. It concludes with a discussion of policy challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The territorial system of the Apuseni Mountains can be considered a critical region from a geo-demographic viewpoint. This is due to two major geo-demographic risks that affect it at present, namely the massive migration, mainly of the young and adult population, and the severe decrease in birth rate, also as a consequence of migration. These two processes determine the main two geodemographic risks within the Apuseni Mountains: on the one hand, depopulation and the geodemographic decline of the settlements and, on the other hand, population ageing. The present study aims to analyse the latter by focussing on the Land of the Moţi. Conclusions emphasise a rather severe process of demographic ageing. The rate of the old age group increased from 17.9% in 1992 to 25.2% in 2011. All the 16 administrative-territorial units under analysis recorded an increase in the rate of the old age group. In 2011, the ratio of the extreme age groups (young population/old age group) is above the unit (1) both in the region as a whole and in the majority of its administrative units. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research study focused on the current state of the urban space in the historical Moldavian Region from an urban legislative perspective. Since the 2003-2005 stage, the settlement system in North-East Romania has undergone severe transformation. Thus, some villages were raised to the rank of towns, without meeting the legally defined minimum conditions, in terms of quantitative and qualitative indicators. By using the GIS technique and basic statistics, it was possible to analyse the current network of urban settlements in Moldavia (21 cities and 33 towns) from the perspective of 16 urban indicators. The indicators ranged from demography, access to safe water, sewerage, central heating, number of beds in hospitals, number of doctors to education facility access, culture and sports, hotels, road access and wastewater treatment facilities. All of the 16 indicators were summed and a final urban coefficient was obtained. The results were interpreted and particularly pointed out in GIS environment. The conclusions emphasise that, after nearly a decade, none of the current towns meets the minimum conditions of being an urban settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The territorial system overlapping cross-border areas shapes a particularly dynamic and complex functional area. This paper synthesises several research outcomes regarding the social and environmental dysfunctions and opportunities defining the marginal territories that were emphasised during the "Analysis and diagnosis of the current situation in the cross-border area', a phase of the project "Common Strategy of Sustainable Territorial Development of the Romanian-Bulgarian Cross- Border Area' (SPATIAL). The main indicators concerning the population structure and movement highlight a series of problematic aspects within the cross-border area: population decline, significant rural population concentration on the Romanian side, demographic ageing, increase in the age dependency ratio, and a negative natural growth and migration rate. The analysis also indicates areas of socio-demographic potential that are marked by population growth, a significant young population presence that is convergent with an important share of active population. In this perspective, the spatial analysis also focused on identifying natural drivers affecting development and restrictive factors, on the environmental quality evaluation, as well as on establishing areas exposed to natural and technological risks. Therefore, delineating and analysing components underlying social and environmental processes were intended to determine those issues and opportunities considered to influence the evolution of this potentially functional area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fall of the communist regime caused a massive flow of humanitarian aid to Romania, from all over the world. Pharmaciens sans frontières (PSF) Anjou, a departmental branch of PSF France, was one of them. After retrieving and sorting unused medication for three years, its members decided to take matters into their own hands and go to Romania. This also led to the development of other types of projects, such as internships and inter-university collaboration. In this article I argue that, at a local level, actions are highly influenced by individual stakeholders. Therefore, this study aims to better understand and illustrate the role of everyday practices in the evolution of humanitarian aid to Romania during the 1990s. The article will also question the purpose and utility of these person-to-person contacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a unique case in recent Romanian history of an identity shift from Carasovans to Croats and the complex socio-political context which made it possible. Given their debated ethnic origins, the identity of Carasovans is considered an ‘ethnic enigma’. The aim of our research is to offer a critical interpretation of the dynamics of ethnic identification of the Carasovans. In particular, we discuss the processes of national and ethnic identification in order to reveal how the Carasovan community was recently reinvented along the lines of the Croat identity. In close connection to these processes, the paper examines the political, economic and cultural elements involved in the dynamics of Carasovans' self-identification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Romania, the issue of child offender, who is not criminally culpable because of age related reasons raises serious difficulties both in preventing and limiting this phenomenon, and in providing effective measures for rehabilitation and social integration for this target group. Byadopting the „Convention on the Rights of the Child”, Romania hasaligned with the rest of the countries involved in respecting the international law regarding the protection of children's rights. However, theinterventions aiming atspecific practices of these cases have failed to outline a strategic line that defines the type of approach: punitive or restorative? In this context, this article describes the laws, principles, authorities, services and specific interventions for children who break the law, who are not criminally liable. For those who are interested in such community problems, this article would representan excellent study on Romania's position both with regard to welfare policies (purely assistance) and in relation to workfare policies (involvement). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a well-known fact today that work, as an economical, rational, social, and political attitude survives by being supported by its own ideology. Our study will try to find some answers to some questions addressed by different authors: What is there so peculiar to Romanians and their way of life that makes them so conspicuous in their "work ethics?" What are the potential causes behind their peculiar mindset towards work? And, finally, is there a link between facts and words, or is their alleged "work ethics" a mere rumor, hearsay? Is there a gap between the representation of work and work itself in Romanian society? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of ageing on community well-being has been part of the policy discourse in the West, but it is a relatively new problem for the post-socialist countries in Eastern Europe. This study focuses on the patterns of ageing in rural Romania and Bulgaria, offering a holistic view of vulnerabilities, including persistent rural disadvantages, ageing in the countryside and the post-socialist transformation. Aggregate statistics and community case studies reveal the links between demographic processes and community development. This paper contributes to the country-specific analysis of the ageing European periphery in the context of social cohesion as a fundamental European goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While migration scholars often neglect the national and transnational relations of production and exchange within which labor migration occurs, international political economists tend to treat labor migration as a mere side effect of transnational capitalism. By contrast, this article considers the constitutive role that post-socialist transformations and the EU integration played in shaping the various patterns of intra-European east–west labor migration since 1989. We argue that labor migration was not driven by development differentials between the west and the east as such, but rather by the particular type of development the latter adopted after the fall of communist regimes and by the way post-socialist countries were integrated in transnational circuits of production and exchange. We are sustaining our claims by a comparative assessment across time of the articulations between the different modes of production and different labor migration patterns during different stages of Romania's post-socialist transformation. This historical comparison enables us to insulate the influence of changing levels of development and modes of production on labor migration because our focus on a single country is keeping the influence of other national institutional factors constant. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 1983, European Years (EY) have been implemented by the European Parliament and the European Council to raise the awareness of the local, regional, and national authorities on a common European issue. This article develops a visual framing analysis of the photographic representation of the European Year of Volunteering (2011) and the European Year for Active Ageing and Solidarity between Generations (2012) at a national level. The data will focus on the photographic images uploaded on the campaign blogs of two Romanian non-governmental organizations. This study has a threefold aim: first, to compare and contrast the use of photographic images in the blogs of two Romanian public communication campaigns; second, to develop a model of visual framing analysis focused on types of represented participants, social actions, and shots; third, to argue that the objectives and outcomes of the public communication campaigns on EY issues depend on the type of “I-ness" versus “we-ness" society a country is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is aimed at presenting an analysis of the punishment system of crimes in Romania and China. The authors have conducted a wide research based on the punishment and law systems in China with a comparison with the Romanian juridical system. A new juridical key value unit (JKVU) is introduced, regarding the different aspects between juridical notion of "incrimination" and "incarceration." The article represents an interdisciplinary research in applied law and language with the aim of giving the lawmakers the necessary background for the future improvements of laws and the punishments within a common European Criminal Code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the question of modernization many a historian have written in the past decades, including Gh. Platon, Ion Bulei, Victor Axenciuc, loan Scurtu, and others, plus sociologists, psychologists and writers such as Liviu Antonesei. The approaches vary greatly in terms of method and interpretation, from positive attitudes that tacitly assume a success in the process of modernization of Romania - if we think of the period between the rule of Alexandra loan Cuza and World War II, to a negative view, as we suggest in the title. In conclusion, we can say that by the debut of the First World War "Romania's economic and social body, by its partial contents, by the trends and perspectives of its development in the capitalist European context, was generally emerging as a capitalist unit with an irreversible evolution with its entire set of factors and mechanisms of market economy, with its specific structures, with its advantages and disadvantages, with its problems and contradictions" (Axenciuc, 2000, 214). The premises of Romania's development at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century will manifest themselves anew between the Wars in a fresh social, economic and political context. There is an organic continuity between the two periods. To return to the question in the title - success or failure - we believe that the modernization of Romania is a significant and undeniable reality because the direction of Romania's social dynamics was clearly ascendant, both in quality, and in quantity. The level of modernization must be analysed with a finely nuanced contextualisation for each and every domain, both internally and externally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the challenges of reforming the child welfare and protection systems in Hungary and Romania --two countries in transition from socialism to capitalism-- and the impact on children, young people, families, and professionals. Brief overviews of the social, political, and economic characteristics of the two countries and of the evolution of their child welfare systems set the context of discussion. The focus is on the efforts made to deinstitutionalise children from large institutions, develop local prevention services, and develop alternatives to institutional care. The two countries had different starting points in transforming the child protection system: Romania started only after 1989 under political and economic pressures with little internal initiative, whilst Hungary begun in the mid 1980s, being more advanced than other transition countries in developing alternative services. Whilst statistical data show a decline in the care population and a shift between institutionalisation and foster care, demonstrating progress and change, the slow implementation of the reforms generate wide gaps between the UNCRC-based legislation and national plans and the quality of life and wellbeing of children. Among the factors causing this discrepancy are: insufficient financial investment, lack of professionalization and accountability, and underuse of research and evaluation to clarify the link between services and needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents results from two samples of adolescents aged 13-16 from Romania and Spain (N = 930 + 1,945 = 2,875). The original 7-item version of the Personal Well-Being Index (PWI) was used, together with an item on overall life satisfaction (OLS) and a set of six items related to satisfaction with school. A confirmatory factor analysis of the six school satisfaction items shows good fit statistics when relating them to a latent variable. However, said latent variable does not show a good fit when related to the OLS or the PWI. Tests have led to the conclusion that the item that best summarises satisfaction with school is 'satisfaction with my life as a student'. Adding this item to the PWI-7 has shown a good fit with Structural Equation Modeling and higher standardised loading on the OLS. The analysis developed here, while confirming that the inclusion of a domain on satisfaction with school life contributes to the PWI with unique variance (2.5 % in this research), also offers an explanation for the surprising results obtained for adolescents in other countries (e.g. in Australia, Tomyn and Cummins in Soc Indicat Res 101(3):405-418 ) by showing that satisfaction with friends at school and satisfaction with classmates did not significantly contribute to satisfaction with school. Our results suggest that school satisfaction is highly related to satisfaction with teachers, but weakly related to overall life satisfaction, while satisfaction with school friends and satisfaction with classmates are highly related to overall life satisfaction, but weakly related to satisfaction with school. Satisfaction with life as a student seems to be the item that best reconciles this 'paradox' (in adults' eyes), at least with our samples of Romanian and Spanish adolescents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social reforms in Romania have been, from the beginning of the 1990s and throughout the EU post-accession phase, the battlefield for many domestic and international actors. The article identifies, from an historical institutionalist perspective, the international actors who decisively influenced reforms of social protection in Romania during the transition, with a special emphasis on the EU pre- and post-accession stages. Further, the article attempts to understand the impact of the various external influences on the sustainability and effectiveness of domestic reforms, by assessing the convergence, or the decoupling, between the rationales - i.e. ideologies and values - that explicitly grounded social reforms in Romania and the domestic public rhetoric on social risks and values. Answers to these questions can provide important insights in regard to both the impact of the EU upon new member states and the challenges of EU enlargement for the EU and its core member states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, high sovereign debt and austerity policies have coincided with regime-changing popular uprisings. Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania was no exception. Why, when faced with a sovereign debt crisis in the 1980s, did his regime choose to pay its foreign debt as early as possible, at the cost of economic recession and dramatically compressed consumption? How did these choices relate to the regime's failure to survive the end of the decade? The article argues that while exogenous shocks shattered the economic bases of the regime, it was the ideas with which the regime understood development and interpreted the crisis that shaped government policy responses in the 1980s. When the price of oil and development finance went up abruptly in 1979, the low energy efficiency of Romanian industry pushed the country into a situation where debt levels became unsustainable. Committed to a view of development that blended nationalist and Stalinist ideas, but with a focus on policy sovereignty, Ceausescu diagnosed the crisis as evidence that debt-financed development and policy independence were incompatible. Consequently the regime decided to pay off foreign debt through a mix of austerity, import substitution, and export-led accumulation of dollar reserves. By the time all debt was paid off in 1989, the regime's economic sources of legitimacy were exhausted. In the external environment of 1989, this policy regime change contributed to political regime change even in the absence of an organized civil society. In addition to casting a new light on the causal mechanisms of the Romanian revolution of December 1989, the findings of this article contribute to emerging scholarship that stresses the nexus between debt-induced economic crisis and popular uprisings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Maria Mälksoo and Bahar Rumelili's contributions in this Forum show, the concept of liminality has either been ignored or understudied in International Relations (IR) theory. To a certain extent, liminality suffers from the same ills as the condition it refers to, since liminal actors, by finding themselves simultaneously inside and outside structures, puzzle and challenge them. It has been shown that through the lens of liminality it is possible to read deeper into the social construction of identities on the international scene, into the question of ontological security, and into actors’ capacities of consolidating or subverting structural arrangements. When considering liminality for a particular case, its position as a concept within IR theory must be kept in mind. It challenges the linearity and neatness of many IR categories, and also, questions certain tendencies in IR theory that make it a rather self-referential system of concepts with the worrying capacity of developing a world entirely divorced from field realities; it is equally important to look at liminality as a way of seeing things which is inspired and informed by the fluctuating facts of social dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article attempts to determine how the Internet has influenced the work practices of journalists in Romania, using data from a qualitative research, “The professional practices and constraints of the Romanian gatekeepers," conducted between December 2010 and January 2011, involving a sample of 73 journalists from 67 local and national media outlets. The results of this research show that the Internet has become both a guide to public expectations and public criticism of the media. In addition, it also serves as a barometer of news consumption, which guides journalists to create the media agenda. The perverse effects of the introduction of Internet in journalistic practices are considered the creation of the Google reporters and copy-paste and office journalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the liberal assumption that socialist societies were closed or isolated entities, and that it was the 1989 revolutionary moment that both freed them and integrated them into global dynamics. Everyday encounters with a particular vision of the global had already shaped the political imagination of ordinary Romanians prior to 1989. Such encounters constituted their instruction into concepts of liberalism and the liberal subject, freedom and democracy. By looking at informal (and illicit) networks of consumption of both goods and ideas (such as tuning into Radio Free Europe and Voice of America), I seek to explore the sensorial dimension of everyday politics in communist Romania and to illustrate how such a sensorial experience reinforced the imagined distance between a free and prosperous ‘outside’ and an impoverished and oppressive ‘inside’. I use Michel de Certeau's theorizing on the everyday, and Ashis Nandy's preference for the ‘non-player’ as the ordinary hero of violent political projects, to go beyond the framework of power and resistance, and to explore the more nuanced practices of coping, survival and subversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost 20 years after the 1989 Romanian revolution, the subject is experiencing a powerful comeback in a number of cinematic reflections that are at the forefront of the so-called Romanian New Wave, including Corneliu Porumboiu's 12:08 East of Bucharest, Radu Muntean's The paper will be blue and Catalin Mitulescu's How I spent the end of the world. This article seeks to establish some of the contributions that the New Wave is making to the reconstruction of the 1989 revolutionary moment, but also, and more importantly, to the renegotiation of Romania's present role in the local and global imaginary. The article offers a particular reading of these films as inspired by Walter Benjamin's writings on history and film, a reading that seeks to understand the careful temporal and spatial renegotiation of the revolutionary moment of December 1989, the key role that the technology of film has played throughout the course of the Romanian revolution and its aftermath, as well as the critical importance that the revolutionary moment continues to have for the way in which Romania imagines itself and is seen from abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on transitional violence in Romania in 1990. According to the author, this violence was caused by competition over resources and responsibility between state security institutions and the favor of elites associated with the National Salvation Front. It is suggested that the revolution of December 1989 had created the conditions necessary for this competition. Topics discussed include demonstrations, Romanian president Ion Iliescu and regime ambiguity.

This study sets out to investigate the changes in the perception of women in leading positions in communist and postcommunist Romania. The study uses a noninvasive paradigm of analyzing the content of obituaries for women and men in leading positions published in a national journal, and shows that the gender gap in management widened during the postcommunist period. In postcommunist Romania, women are perceived as being less able to lead/manage and more relational in their leadership style as compared to men, while in the communist period the gender differences were not significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instrumentalist arguments prioritize the actions of elites in ethnic mobilization, whereas social structure accounts examine why elite appeals might succeed. Each remains incomplete. In this paper, an account is presented of the interactions between elites and masses that drive bilateral ethnic mobilization processes. Event analysis and scaling are used to examine tense instances of Hungarian and Romanian ethnic mobilization in Romania in 1990 and 1992, one of which turned violent. Two forms of comparison are made possible: a comparison of action trajectories by intensity over time, and a comparison of transactions between actors at different points in time. These transaction patterns serve as the building blocks of contentious processes. The patterns identified here are mass-first mobilization, mass-elite tandem for minorities, and cross-group emulation in mobilization and demobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the ways in which the Romanian Orthodox Church (ROC) has attempted to address the discrepancy between church and state and democratic ideals since the collapse of Communism there in December 1989. The article reviews the increase in influence and power Romanian churches gained following the removal of the Communist dictatorship through promises of repentance and reparations. According to the author, the ROC has had difficulty transitioning to democratic precepts of the separation of church and state because the ROC historically identified itself as a national church with privileged status and a responsibility to the state and its citizens, as well as the totalitarian pressures exerted on the ROC during Communist rule.

This article examines the dynamic relationship between the two major dimensions of memory and justice in the context of post-communist countries: truth-telling and retroactive justice. This interdependent and uneasy relationship is illustrated by recent attempts at constructing a new historical narrative of the communist past in Romania in the wake of the de-secretization of the files of both the Communist Party and the communist secret police (Securitate). A systematic analysis of the activity of institutions that have been directly involved in research and public education about the recent past - the National Archives, the National Council for the Study of Securitate's Archives, and the Institute for the Investigation of Crimes of Communism - is undertaken. The work of these three institutional actors shows a direct relationship between truth-telling in its various forms (access to archives, opening the files and exhumations) and any subsequent retroactive justice and restitution. The main argument of the paper is that while deep-seated dichotomies between former communist and anti-communists in addressing the past still persist, a more nuanced way of seeing the regime that explores the ambiguous line that divides outright repression from cooptation is emerging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the imposed lack of mobility prior to 1989 has come to an end, the parents of emigrants play an increasingly complex role as mediators between two cultural spheres by being actively mobile. Testimonies collected during sixteen bus trips between Romania and France (from April 2005 to April 2008) have sparked our interest in intergenerational solidarity within Romanian migrant families. Women's contribution to the success of the migration project seems to perpetuate a gender-based distribution of responsibilities. This adherence to traditional roles might give rise to innovative family patterns in a context of transnational mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author focuses on the film "Videograms of a Revolution," by Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, which is compiled from material related to the political overthrow of Nicolae Ceauşescu's regime in December 1989 in Romania. The author examines how the film relates to theories of media influence on the formation of political memory, arguing that defends authenticity within media theory. The "fake revolution" and authenticity in the images are discussed.

The article discusses academic theology in Romania since the fall of communism, focusing on the influence of the Orthodox Church. It provides an overview of Romania's higher education system and various religious faculties, including Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Greek-rite Catholic (Uniate) ones. Other topics include religious instruction in primary and secondary schools and the roles of church leaders as deans of theology faculties. Double specializations in universities are also examined.

In the 20 years since the fall of communism, the professional field of journalism has been increasingly carved up by press barons, on the one hand, and the majority of ordinary journalists, on the other. The euphoric attitude and the solidarity that marked the very beginnings of a free press slowly faded away. They were replaced by the fight to achieve and maintain control over the resources offered by mass media: economic status, political power and social prestige. In fact, one group has monopolized the economic resources, the access to centres of political decision-making and the channels of distribution of professionally legitimating discourse. This study examines the mechanisms used by a group of journalists to achieve economic and professional control. In other words, the study shows how star journalists became media moguls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the fall of the Iron Curtain in December 1989, the Romanian system of education has started a deep process of reconstruction that asked for a comprehensive package of reforms among which decentralisation. Broadly the paper aims to make a contribution to the emerging knowledge base about the realities of restructuring of post-communist education systems and the impact that governance through markets is having on public services. The paper focuses on presenting and discussing the attempts to decentralise pre-higher education in Romania in considering the role of the state and governance in the provision of public services and the introduction of market mechanisms in education. The decentralisation of education has been proposed by the then Minister of Education Andrei Marga. Although decentralisation in pre-higher education has been piloted for three academic years and the policy documents that introduced it have been permanently amended and updated, more than a decade later, this reform has not reached its aims mainly due to the various changes on the political scene. However, provided that no major amendments will be made to the Laws of National Education (2009), decentralisation in pre-higher education will be a reality from 2010-11. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The long Romanian transition period created a stagnation of the civil society. The paper presents some considerations regarding the role of civil society, focusing on the relationship with urban planning and also analyzing some possible solutions for improving its role with the aim of revigorating the Romanian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes empirically, in Romania's case, the relationships between population growth (dependent variable) and the dimensions of democracy (independent variables). The analysis is based on the construction of a linear "Extreme Value Model". In Romania's case, the probability of annual population growth to be more then 10.000 persons could be high, if the state is a dictatorial monarchy, the political regime durability is high and the abort is legal. In such conditions, the type of political regime and the abort restrictions are brought forward by the democratization intensity and political regime durability. In other words, the main results show that, in Romania's case, the probability of annual population growth to be more then 10.000 persons could be high, if the level of democratization intensity is low and the political regime durability is high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the collapse of the totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe and the consequent opening of borders and initiation of political and economic transitions, a wave of emigration flowed out of those countries to the European Union (EU). This article analyzes the flows of temporary labor migrants from Romania to Europe from 1990 to the present. It attempts to offer an initial X-ray that is needed for further consideration, analysis, and debate. The first part analyzes the country's recent situation. This background is key for understanding why Romania has experienced strong emigration in recent years. Next, the sociodemographic structure and labor trends are examined, which clearly show the size, characteristics, and stages of migration during the transition. In the third section, Romania, now a part of the EU, is situated within trends in both immigration and emigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Europeanisation scholars increasingly debate when and in what ways the European Union influences domestic politics. This article adopts a 'bottom-up' design and the process-tracing method to examine the influence of the EU enlargement context over the political power of the new social movements in Romania between 2000 and 2004 when the EU acquis was being negotiated. It finds that domestic civil society empowerment resulted from the nexus of three interacting causal pathways: the Executive's desire to accede to the EU; a transnational advocacy network, which included domestic NGOs, reinforcing the Executive's anticipatory self-constraint; and to a somewhat lesser extent, the Executive's self-identification with certain elements of the advocacy network, reinforced by a general concern for their external reputation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the context of a changing economic environment since 1990, the westward migration of Romanian citizens continues. As various recent surveys reveal, the potential for migration, especially among the young, is still high. This study analyses the economic and cultural sources of this enduring process. The focus is the rural young: on the ways in which they represent migration and see themselves as would-be migrants. It argues that the migration of young people is typically connected with the problematic transition to adulthood, in situations where jobs are insecure and difficult to obtain in the primary segment of the labour market. Migration turns out to be an indeterminate context linked to the uncertain socio-economic status of a prolonged transition to adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]