Matching Items (7)
Description
Behind the United Kingdom's unexpected decision to leave the European Union was a resurgence in nationalism caused by a range of issues including economics, cultural change, and rising anti-EU sentiment. Economic factors include globalization and competition with foreign workers. The culture and immigration section discusses the backlash against post-materialist cosmopolitan values and demographic changes caused by immigration. The relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union is analyzed using concepts discussed in Michael Hechter's Alien Rule (2013). In addition to these factors, we theorize that rising global tension and the interconnectedness of European countries were exploited by nationalist forces to strengthen the backlash against both the European Union and liberal cosmopolitan values in general.
ContributorsJan, Thomas (Co-author) / Akers, Blake (Co-author) / Bustikova, Lenka (Thesis director) / Hechter, Michael (Committee member) / Department of Economics (Contributor) / Department of Management and Entrepreneurship (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
In this paper, I define a religious-political phenomenon called cultist terror groups. A cultist terror (ct) group is a nationalist insurgent organization which employs extreme, ritualized violence, and establishes a cultist doctrine, commonly borrowing elements from established religions. IS, or the Islamic State, is the latest example of a cultist terror group. This paper examines and contextualizes IS by analyzing death cults throughout modern history, and contrasts these case studies with violent, religious, political groups that do not meet the heuristic characteristics of a cultist terror group. Cultist terror groups are so named to drive home the idea that these groups belong to a subset of the broader, religious terror (rt) group category. The paper aims to discern the key components of cultist terror groups that distinguish these groups from other violent, religious groups with political goals (a political theology). These include identity and strategy components. Specifically, it presents a concise set of hypotheses about how cultist terror groups create in-group solidarity (e.g., through synchronous activities), recruit members, prevent defection, select targets, and how these aspects differentiate cultist terror groups from other violent religious organizations with political theologies.
ContributorsBriggs, Noah Blakemore (Author) / Siroky, David S (Thesis director) / Bustikova, Lenka (Committee member) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
Why do states repress sexual minorities? The logic of coercive responsiveness demonstrates that states repress people when they feel threatened. From this perspective and because repression leaves states with international condemnations and sanctions, it is puzzling why states target sexual minorities. First, I explore this puzzle in all states and argue that political regimes repress sexual minorities when their legitimacy is undermined. Repression of sexual minorities becomes a legitimation strategy for political regimes in homophobic societies especially when regimes lack rational-procedural legitimacy. Second, I examine state repression of LGBTQ+ people in conservative countries and argue that political regimes in homophobic societies tend to repress sexual minorities to divert public attention from domestic economic problems. Corruption, government ineffectiveness, and uneven economic development sprout public resentment and discontent. Political regimes act to repress sexual minorities, implementing homophobic policies to divert public attention from poor economic conditions and discourage citizens from demanding redistributive policies. Instilling homophobic elements into nationalist diversionary tactics makes these tactics more appealing to a broader society where traditional family values and normative homosexuality is blended with national identity. Third, I study the repression of sexual minorities in authoritarian countries and argue that regimes which oppose the US-led international liberal order are more likely to repress sexual minorities. Political leaders in these regimes commit egregious human rights abuses against sexual minorities to draw attention from Western media and gay rights organizations, which press Western governments to make condemnations and sometimes impose sanctions. Leaders in these anti-Western then frame these condemnations and sanctions as threats to sovereignty and cultural imperialism, which become appealing to the homophobic public. Testing these conjectures against new country-year data, survey experiments, and five public surveys, I find results consistent with these arguments. The results suggest that state repression has both domestic and external dimensions. Homosexuality is highly politicized in repressive countries. Leaders resort to violence against sexual minorities for various political gains when the public is hostile to homosexuality. I conclude that public acceptance of LGBTQ+ people is paramount to the improvement of gay rights.
ContributorsAbbasov, Namig (Author) / Siroky, David S (Thesis advisor) / Bustikova, Lenka (Committee member) / Hanson, Margaret (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
What factors influence an authoritarian state to emphasize lower-utility repressive methods to neutralize dissidents? Previous studies have addressed covert methods of repression in the form of intelligence gathering to support the state's overt repressive actions. Such constructs, however, fail to fully articulate clandestine repressive methods that not only conceal the identity of the responsible actor from the target, but also the activity itself. To fill this gap, in this study I explore the construct of disintegration as a means for states to clandestinely neutralize dissent. While effective, these methods are also resource intensive, which makes them lower utility for the state from a cost perspective relative to overt repression and in turn begs the questions of why a state would emphasize such methods in their repressive strategy. To answer this question, I forward a structuralist argument that seeks to challenge assumptions in the literature that over-rely on existing theories of state repression. By incorporating literature from multiple disciplines, I outline a causal process that identifies the linkage between a state’s legitimation strategy and its guarantees for civil-political human rights norms to create a mechanism that could cause the state to emphasize disintegration measures. I examine three periods in the history of the German Democratic Republic and find that it emphasized disintegration in its repressive strategy during the mid-seventies due to its financial and economic agreements with the West being dependent on (appeared) compliance with the human rights stipulations of the Helsinki Accords of 1975. Stemming from this case a mid-range theory of disintegration that has implications for contemporary autocracies as well as democracies. The primary contribution of this theory lies in its ability to explain this outcome in authoritarian states that are typically less restricted in their implementation of overt repression.
ContributorsRector, William (Author) / Thomson, Henry (Thesis advisor) / Hanson, Margaret (Committee member) / Bustikova, Lenka (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
What explains the success and failure of radical right parties over time and across countries? This article presents a new theory of the radical right that emphasizes its reactive nature and views it as backlash against the political successes of minorities and concessions extracted on their behalf. Unlike approaches that focus on competition between the extreme and mainstream parties, the theory stresses the dynamics between radical right and non-proximate parties that promote minority rights. Most notably, it derives the salience of identity issues in party politics from the polarization of the party system. The theory is tested with a new party-election-level dataset covering all post-communist democracies over the past 20 years. The results provide strong support for the theory and show that the rise and fall of radical right parties is shaped by the politics of minority accommodation.
ContributorsBustikova, Lenka (Author) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor)
Created2014-10-01
Description
Scholars are coming to terms with the fact that something is rotten in the new democracies of Central Europe. The corrosion has multiple symptoms: declining trust in democratic institutions, emboldened uncivil society, the rise of oligarchs and populists as political leaders, assaults on an independent judiciary, the colonization of public administration by political proxies, increased political control over media, civic apathy, nationalistic contestation and Russian meddling. These processes signal that the liberal-democratic project in the so-called Visegrad Four (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) has been either stalled, diverted or reversed. This article investigates the “illiberal turn” in the Visegrad Four (V4) countries. It develops an analytical distinction between illiberal “turns” and “swerves”, with the former representing more permanent political changes, and offers evidence that Hungary is the only country in the V4 at the brink of a decisive illiberal turn.
ContributorsBustikova, Lenka (Author) / Guasti, Petra (Author) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor)
Created2017-12-29
Description
Recognition of sovereignty provides the means by which states have their independence and sovereignty formalized. In cases of secessionist conflict, the decision to grant or withhold recognition of a new state is forced upon the international system, unlike cases that deal with decolonization or internationally imposed partition. Recognition therefore provides a means by which members of the international system can curate the potential international membership from a set of new secessionist states. A central feature of this curatorial function is that it does not proceed evenly, multilaterally, or simultaneously across all cases. Instead, curation proceeds along hegemonic lines in a Gramscian sense: recognition is granted by great powers that lead particular hegemonic systems in an effort to expand their images of social order to new states. These fractures are expressed clearly in cases of split or contested recognition. The paper proceeds from a discussion of secession since the end of the Cold War, then assesses the input of contemporary literature, and ends with the suggestion of curation as a new means to understand the dynamics of international recognition.
ContributorsInglis, Cody James (Author) / Siroky, David (Thesis director) / Bustikova, Lenka (Committee member) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-12