How do policy transfer mechanisms influence policy outcomes in the context of authoritarianism in Vietnam?

The literature on policy transfer shows that it may result in simultaneous policy convergence and policy divergence. However, little is known about how such results happen when transferring from multiple and possibly contrasting sources. This study finds that civil service reforms in Vietnam’s merit-based policies are influenced by both western and Asian models of meritocracy. This makes them both closer to universal ‘best practices’ and at the same time sharpens the distinctiveness of Vietnam’s policy. The calculations of political actors in combination with the context of a one-party authoritarian state have led to policy transfer through mechanisms of translation and assemblage which brings about a hybrid of convergence and divergence. This study enhances understanding of policy transfer in the context of Asian authoritarianism. In finding hybridity in transfer outcomes in this national context, the article shows the uniqueness of resultant policy change and develops an analytical framework for the influence of policy transfer on policy outcomes.

Autorytarne formy władzy a realizacja prawa do cywilnoprawnej ochrony prawnoprocesowej przez obywateli w okresie PRL

The study describes the functions of civil procedure as a legal instrument from the times of the socialist authoritarian state of the People’s Republic of Poland. The positions expressed in the doctrine regarding the purpose and principles of conducting civil proceedings, regulated in the Act of 16 November 1964, Code of Civil Procedure, which was adopted during the authoritarian power of the dominant political party of the Polish United Workers’ Party, were presented. Provisions of procedural law, dating back to the authoritarian rule of democratic socialism in the People’s Republic of Poland, were intended to provide protection for the socialized economy and to enable the state to control civil-law relations. Civil proceedings were intended to guarantee the possibility of protecting not only the rights of the individual, but also, or rather first and foremost, of the units of the socialized economy, as well as of the disputes that might arise in connection with relations between the state and its citizens, and between citizens. This principle required the authorities conducting civil proceedings to ensure adequate legal and procedural protection in the event that a party or participant in the proceedings was a unit of the socialized economy. Civil proceedings in which the court, within its powers, could interfere with the legal sphere of an individual in connection with the conferral of discretionary power, was another legal tool and instrument allowing the state to influence private-law relations. In addition, the authoritarianism of the state power at that time was also manifested in this.

Instytucja osobowości prawnej w okresie PRL jako narzędzie ograniczania autonomii jednostek przez państwo autorytarne

The purpose of this paper was to analyze how the regulation of legal personality by positive law affected the rights and freedoms of individuals in the period of the Polish People’s Republic. The possession of legal personality leads to the empowerment of an organization and facilitates it by pooling resources to achieve a certain goal. Having legal personality also gives an entity a certain autonomy vis-à-vis other entities, including its members and the state. The analysis has shown that in the period of the Polish People’s Republic, positive law was deliberately used to limit the possibility of creating entities with their own legal personality. The formal concept of a legal person was used instrumentally as a tool to impede the possibility of building an organization outside state control. It also led to a structurally incorrect and practically questionable recognition of the judicial capacity of entities that did not have legal personality. In addition, using the concept of an economic unit in the area of economy, a functional criterion was adopted to determine the participants of economic turnover, which also broke with the traditionally adopted in this respect approach based on legal personality. This led some of the representatives of civil law doctrine at that time to consider the institution of legal personality as useless, which testified to the fact that the legal environment and the applied mechanisms typical of an authoritarian state suppressed any autonomy and independence of interest underlying a separate legal personality.

Zmiany organizacyjno-prawne przedsiębiorstwa państwowego w okresie Polskiej Rzeczypospolitej Ludowej

In Poland, during the People’s Republic of Poland, the policy of central management of the economy was based on the principles of unity of state power and unity of state property. They constituted the foundation of the state sector and the state economic activity. State-owned enterprises, strongly subordinated to public administration bodies, were the leading form of economic activity. The authoritarian state controlled not only the process of enterprise creation, liquidation and supervision, but also the enterprises’ operational activities. Strong state supervision and lack of responsibility for financial results were the main reasons for their low profitability, which in turn brought about attempts to reform the legal structure of the state-owned enterprises. The aim of the article is to show the legal and organizational changes in state-owned enterprises that are to produce an increase in economic efficiency. Based on the historical-legal method and the grammatical interpretation of the law, it was shown that the reforms undertaken in the field of the organization of state-owned enterprises were not effective.

On a Country in Captive: A Review on Aruni Kashyap’s There Is No Good Time for Bad News

Aruni Kashyap’s poetry is an organic blend of powerful realities and raw emotions. While many of his contemporary poets devote their attention towards the technical nuances of poetry, Kashyap’s focus beams on what he wants to say rather than the how behind it. The form never overpowers the ideas that he ardently tries to convey through the perfectly cut lines of his debut poetry collection, There Is No Good Time for Bad News, which depicts the plight of a state that was brought to nemesis by the insurgency. His poems offer a spatial tour through the unexplored regions of the Northeast to the streets of Manhattan, where numerous lives are entwined into a single destiny. It resonates with the traumatic experiences and suppressed voices of the survivors of the Assam insurgency alerting the world to the brutality inflicted by the authoritarian state which deprives the people of a happy and peaceful life. The poet draws deep from the turbulent personal experiences of the people around him which he then fine-tunes into the shared experiences of the narrator, narrated and the reader. These verses are stained with the everyday violence encountered by the people of his homeland and unquestionably create a lasting impact, with the conversational style of language that is astutely employed by the poet.

Understanding the Reasons for Transition from Iranian Constitutional State to Authoritarian State: an Analysis in the Framework of Laclau and Mouffe’s Discourse Theory

Throughout the history, the formation of the constitutional state has been the first experience of the modern state in Iran. The change in power relations and the restriction of authoritarian power were among the most important issues of constitutional state. The current study aims at investigating the reasons for transition from Constitutional state to an authoritarian bureaucratic state by adopting Laclau and Mouffe’s framework to political discourse analysis. Research methodology is descriptive-analytical conducted by library–based data. The results showed that the constitutional revolution transformed the power structure and traditional state, but the constitutional revolution failed to create a new order. Despite legal provisions such as the formation of the parliamentary system and the constitution, the constitutional state was unable to exercise its legal power. The co-existence of traditional and reactionary components such as the Khānins, tribal leaders, tribal populations and owners in line with modern elements, intellectuals and the heterogeneity of the ruling political elites made the constitutional revolution incapable of producing profound politico-social changes. As a result, a number of internal and external factors such as financial crisis, tribal power, the imperialist treaty of 1907,disillusionment of political elites, the formation of centrifugal forces, insecurity and global chaos and development of neighboring countries, diversity of ideological in line with geopolitical points of view have been the most important factors in the transition to the authoritarian bureaucratic state of Pahlavi and the failure of the nation – building process and the collapse of politico-constitutional system in Iran.

Niezależność sądu oraz niezawisłość sędziowska w sprawach karnych w okresie rządów autorytarnych i totalitarnych w Polsce

At present, there is no doubt that a need exists to ensure the citizens’ right to have a criminal case examined by an independent and unbiased court. For the proper functioning of the court-based administration of justice to be possible, the courts must have the attribute of independence and the judges must be autonomous. These issues are regulated in international treaties to which Poland is a party. The aim of this study is to describe the role of judiciary independence and judicial autonomy in criminal cases. In order to achieve these goals, considerations will be presented on the essence of such independence and autonomy, and a reference will be made to the way the authoritarian state functioned after the May coup in the Second Polish Republic, and the totalitarian state during the era of the Polish People’s Republic.

Mapping the Self: Leonora Carrington’s Journey through the Mad Mind in Down Below

This article examines the Map of Down Below as a central element for understanding Leonora Carrington’s Down Below (1944). Carrington’s Surrealist memoir about madness, first dictated in French and then translated into and published in English, recounts her experience of being interned in a mental asylum during the early Francoist dictatorship in Spain while trying to flee from the Nazis in France. The text has often been read as a Surrealist autobiography contesting André Breton’s Nadja (1928). However, and without disavowing this reading, I argue that the way in which Carrington narrates her experience of madness is a means to gather knowledge about the world and the Self beyond the literary and institutional conventions of the time, namely, autobiography and eugenic psychiatry as part of the authoritarian state. Thus, I explore how Down Below, as life writing, illuminates a form of truth that deviates from the autobiographical tradition of the unitarian Self. Carrington’s found truth sheds light on other possibilities of experiencing—or creating—the Self, while she also challenges both the normative Francoist psychiatry and traditional life writing.

The time–space tactics of Chinese Buddhist and Taoist believers under state–religion tension

This study explores the experience of elderly rural Buddhist and Taoist believers in communist China where the ruling party has maintained decades-long regulatory control over religion. Based on ethnographic observation and oral histories, the analysis begins with how the actors made sense of and coped in their relationship with the state during the fieldwork period (May–June 2020) when state regulations restricted public religious practice because of COVID-19. The analysis then looks back on how practitioners experienced tightening state ideological control from the early 2010s to before COVID-19; further back at the religious revival during the opening and reform (1980s–2010s); and finally, the Cultural Revolution period (1960s–70s) when strict atheistic measures were imposed. Their narratives reveal the practical logic (habitus) which practitioners used to mediate their resistance against and compromise with the authoritarian state. Specifically, four logical modes that involve actors’ different time–space tactics were identified, namely state–religion disengagement, state–religion enhancement, religious (dis)enlightenment, and karma. The implications of these ostensibly conflicting modes of thinking in mediating the actors’ resistance–compliance interface in contemporary China are discussed.