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In this article I discuss how China’s local legislatures, the local people’s congresses, can facilitate the development of rule of law in China. Rule by law and rule of law are perceived here as being a difference in degree, where rule of law increases as more organized groups in society can use the law to pursue their interest. The difference between China’s legislatures and legislatures in liberal democracies can be found not so much in the power functions and voting behavior of the legislators, as in the extent to which legislators are collectively organized and represent organized interest. While legislative reform can improve governance and the efficiency of the legislative system, it is when the legislature is used an instrument for different interests in society that it becomes a strengthener of the rule of law.

Varje år i mars håller Kinas parlament, Nationella folkkongressen, sitt möte. Liknande möten hålls också bland folkkongresser på lägre nivåer. Folkkongresserna har kallats gummistämplar, eftersom de bara ansetts godkänna kommunistpartiets beslut. Men en viss förändring av deras roll har trots allt skett efterhand.

The article analyses the institutional forms and gender specific praxis of care within entrepreneurial families in the context of the post-socialist transition. The state socialist welfare regime created an institutional network, which set gendered forms of praxis for how labour distributed between productive and reproductive spheres. The introduction of GYES (three year paid subsidy) in 1967 was further developed both during and after the fall of state socialism. Despite of severe cuts in the benefits paid for homecare of children below three, this system, which was associated in praxis almost exclusively only by women, carries on to the post-socialist period. However, among rural family entrepreneurs the prevalence of women’s stay with the children during the small child period did not lead to their economic inactivation. Rather, in these families women either returned to paid work, or for many the leave was the way to get involved with the family enterprise. Care regimes are composed of a variety of “institutions” beyond that set by the state, the most important institution being the family and the broader kin unit. Even market based systems are utilised by the entrepreneurial families. The study revealed that these families, faced by the demands of primary capital accumulation at the phase of starting the enterprise are often burdened by not only by restrictive measures on consumption (since all assets are to be mobilised for the enterprise) but even by the excessive demand on labour. Facing these hard times, many families resorted to the strategy of cuts on the standard of consumption, including the standard of care that the family members (including children and themselves) receive. Such measures include both compromising the forms of supervision for children, or the quality of food and cleaning.

In this article we want to show how conceptions about collaboration for local eocnomic development in Sweden are constructed on national and local levels. We also show how these conceptions have been realized in two different company networks; in the city of Östersund (“Odenskog företagsstaden”) and in the city of Karlskrona (“Telecom City”). In politics and research, local collaboration or cluster formation are viewed as important tools and levers for local economic development. However, we argue that the local labour markets and unemployment rates in our case studies do not differ significantly, despite very different strategies for collaboration. Therefore, we suspect that the political focus on collaboration is a way of legitimizing the change in regional policy rather than a delegation of real power to the local level. If this continues, we fear that the current regional policy is reduced to a discourse of popular concepts rather than a real instrument for local economic development.

Stealing economic assets and political offices has become a permanent feature of the Kyrgyz political system.

Stealing economic assets and political offices has become a permanent feature of the Kyrgyz political system.

This article explores the impact of the drug trade on security and stability in Tajikistan. In order to capture the multifaceted nature of this relationship, the effects on territory, population, state institutions, and the idea of the state are examined. The types of threats affecting these components of the state are discussed. These include societal security in the form of addiction and drug-related diseases; the military threat, most notably manifested by the merger of crime and terror; economic and political threats resulting from a criminalised economic and political system; and the relationship between the drug trade and the legitimacy of the state.

Kyrgyzstan’s Drug Control Agency is a key entity in counter-narcotics in Central Asia. The DCA has the status of a law enforcement agency in its own right. It is nevertheless affected both by international and domestic politics. It is entirely funded by the United States, and continued uncertainty regarding Kyrgyz-U.S. relations makes continued funding for the DCA uncertain, just as it the contract is coming up for renewal. Domestically, the DCA suffers from the weakness of its operations in the South, the main locus of drug trafficking. Rumors over imminent changes in leadership further contribute to the DCA’s uncertainty

What is holding reform back in the Western Balkans? This paper aims at identifying obstacles to democratic reform in Albania and Macedonia. The EU enlargement policy is seen as having strong leverage over these countries, but yet there are persitent problems. Which obstacles are identified, and at what levels? A tentative conclusion is that there is significant political resistance regarding some key processes, at least in Albania.

This article argues that EU enlargement policy and actions within that field are guided by the logic of path dependency. By studying the decision to confer candidate status on Macedonia in 2005, which was granted despite important shortcomings regarding democracy and rule of law, we can reveal key aspects of the decision-making process regarding the enlargement policy. The Macedonian crisis in 2001 was instrumental in shaping EU enlargement policy as a foreign policy tool to promote peace and stability in the Western Balkans. The peace agreement that ended the conflict, in turn, became an important reference for measuring reform progress in Macedonia. The enlargement policy thus became locked in a path-dependent pattern, where the implementation of the peace agreement from 2001 has become very important. The strong commitments by the EU towards Macedonia are identified as a particularly strong mechanism influencing the path dependent pattern. Where other influential theories cannot explain contradictions between EU Member State voting and preferences, or ignorance of democratic shortcomings, historical institutionalism offers tools to make such theoretical inconsistencies intelligible.

The aim of the present study is to investigate a multilateral law enforcement cooperation, the Baltic Sea Task Force, and explain some of the factors that may be the reasons for its successful implementation. Choosing to see the Baltic Sea Task Force framework similar to an attempt to create a cooperation forming one international epistemic community from several national ones, I investigate how and to what extent knowledge has been transferred between the communities, and how this was planned for in the original mission mandate. I investigate problems of knowledge transfer across the network of communities (national law enforcement agencies). Since knowledge is context based, the specific context encodes the knowledge, reflecting the nature of the subject area and the community’s norms and values. Explicit knowledge needs embedded tacit understanding to fully work. In turn, embeddedness needs trust, common processes, joint norms and values. Consequently, there must also be a transfer of these norms and values in order for the embeddedness to take place. I investigate how this context-dependent knowledge is received, and how such decoding is assisted by the framework. Where decoding seems to have been slow, I examine possible reasons for this, and study how the framework has dynamically altered its modi operandi to achieve its purpose. I conclude that the Baltic Sea Task Force framework’s enterprise policy contains a broad and holistic perspective, conforming to definitions of a holistic epistemic community.