Search Results (49)

Gender equality has become a fundamental indicator of constitutional democracy, effective governance, and the protection of human rights. This study examines the effectiveness of legal and institutional mechanisms for promoting gender equality through a comparative analysis of selected European jurisdictions and recent legal reforms in Uzbekistan. Comparative legal, doctrinal, systemic, statistical, and socio-legal methods were employed, complemented by original empirical evidence from an anonymous sociological survey. The findings demonstrate that the effectiveness of gender-equality reforms depends on the interaction between the scope and enforceability of legal guarantees, institutional capacity and accountability, socio-economic conditions affecting equality of opportunity and outcomes, and the accessibility and effectiveness of protection against discrimination, harassment, and gender-based violence. Although Uzbekistan has introduced significant legislative reforms, substantive gender equality remains constrained by persistent gender stereotypes, unequal career opportunities, and limited public awareness of available legal protections. The study proposes an integrated legal-institutional framework that combines comparative legal analysis with empirical socio-legal evidence to assess the implementation of gender equality reforms in transitional legal systems. It concludes that strengthening institutional accountability, introducing systematic gender monitoring and audits, enhancing transparency in labor relations, and ensuring effective enforcement of existing legal guarantees are essential for translating formal legal equality into substantive equality in accordance with international human rights standards. Full article

American universities have always reached beyond knowledge development. They are constituted through and often defenders of rights central to free and fair democracy. This article makes a novel case for reinvigorated commitments to democratic civic education, including a normative commitment to the dignity of all persons that is institutionalized through equality before the law. The analysis cuts through contemporary pieties of the left and right. The focus is US higher education, including relationships with governments, law, policy, and civil society, proceeding in six significant sections. After defining key terms and the plan of this paper, I clarify the relatively recent innovation of rights and their absence around the world. Rights are foundational for free and fair democracy. I then review critical moments among state, civil society, the rule of law, and higher education across US history, demonstrating that values commitments are essential to establishing basic freedoms for a functioning democracy. The legal and cultural architecture of the rights tradition also undergirds sacred ideals in higher education, including academic freedom and institutional autonomy. That analysis leads to two highly contested issues—national security and policing—to suggest how contemporary institutional patterns undermine progress on critical university goals: deepened insight and/or principled disagreement. Evidence indicates courses related to policing and its critiques are siloed within curricula, student self-selection and institutional socioeconomic sorting undermine potentially related democratic dialogue, and both connect to position campus discourse out of step with marginalized communities. These issues intersect with a key point of this article: individual rights and the formal, legal embrace of shared dignity require government entities. In the final sections, I focus on institutional-level recommendations for civic education that expands commitments to human dignity and the rule of law within a free and fair democracy. Full article

Marriage remains a central social institution among the Vatsonga, functioning not merely as a union between individuals but as a cultural institution through which gender identities, kinship relations, ritual obligations, and communal belonging are constructed and transmitted across generations. While scholarship has extensively explored marriage and gender in African societies, limited attention has been paid to the genealogical processes through which Vatsonga marriage rituals have historically shaped gender identities within changing social, political, and religious contexts. This article examines marriage as a site of gender construction by analysing the relationship between ritual practices, identity formation, and social belonging among the Vatsonga of Southern Africa. Using the genealogical approach of Michel Foucault and the theories of African feminists and decolonials, this study employs interpretive qualitative methodology, which entails the analysis of interdisciplinary literature in African philosophy, anthropology, gender studies, theology, and ritual studies. As a result of this analysis, it becomes evident that marriage rituals continue to play a great role in constructing masculinity and femininity, as well as kinship and community. At the same time, however, these rituals are dynamic and have undergone changes in light of colonialism, Christianity, urbanization, migrations, constitutional democracy, and modern concerns regarding gender equality. This article does not present marriage rituals of Vatsonga as static and monolithic practices, but rather shows their historical contingency, cultural dynamism, and continuous negotiation amid social change. Therefore, this study calls for critical engagement with marriage rituals in order to protect culture as well as to ensure gender equality and the dignity of all parties involved. With regard to the application of genealogy to marriage practices of Vatsonga, this article brings new perspectives to current debates on ritual, gender construction, African epistemologies and the decolonisation of marriage studies. Full article

This article theorizes conscience as a political principle in the context of polarized democracy, examining its strategic articulation in the rhetoric of Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu between 2010 and 2023. While existing scholarship on polarization and majoritarianism has focused primarily on identity politics and institutional erosion, less attention has been paid to the moral vocabularies through which opposition actors reconfigure democratic legitimacy. Drawing on conscience and theories of secularism, this study conceptualizes conscience as a mediating category that unsettles the binary between religious authority and secular reason. Through qualitative discourse analysis of parliamentary speeches, campaign addresses, and party documents, the article demonstrates how conscience is framed simultaneously as transcendent and universal—invoked as divinely resonant yet politically inclusive. I argue that this formulation constitutes a heterodox model of religion–politics relations that departs from both assertive secularism and majoritarianism. By privileging individual moral deliberation over collective identity claims, Kılıçdaroğlu articulates a liberal-pluralist alternative aimed at depolarizing democratic contestation. The findings contribute to political theory by advancing an account of conscience as a performative and strategic resource in democratic struggles. More broadly, the study offers a framework for understanding how moral rhetoric can be mobilized to foster democratic resilience in deeply divided societies, with implications extending beyond the Turkish case. Full article

This article argues that journalism plays a structurally significant role in accountability within contemporary democratic governance and therefore warrants constitutional protection beyond traditional press-freedom guarantees. It develops the concept of the Quarta Politica as a constitutional order composed of four branches of democratic governance: legislative, executive, judicial, and ombudsman power. Within this framework, the Ombudsman Council constitutes the Fourth Branch of Power and safeguards the informational, participatory, deliberative, and corrective conditions necessary for democratic legitimacy. The article conceptualizes journalism not as a privileged profession or sovereign authority but as part of the informational infrastructure through which democratic systems monitor and contest the exercise of power. Particular attention is given to a Chamber for the Protection of Journalistic Independence within the Ombudsman Council, designed to protect editorial independence, media pluralism, and informational accountability. The analysis further examines how digital transformation, platform dominance, algorithmic amplification, ownership concentration, and fragmented communication environments undermine the institutional conditions necessary for independent journalism. Situating the framework within theories of horizontal accountability, monitory democracy, and digital constitutionalism, the article concludes that safeguarding the informational foundations of democratic accountability has become a central constitutional challenge of contemporary governance. Full article

Chile’s economic development model, which was shattered by the military coup, restructured under the dictatorship, and institutionalised under democracy as a neoliberal model, gave rise to a liberalisation process that affects the country’s natural resources and commercial dynamics and, by extension, places society itself at the service of the system. This model, enshrined in the 1980 Political Constitution, was founded on the principles of external openness, private investment, and deregulation. Against this backdrop, this paper examines and analyses the impact of strengthening private ownership over tangible assets on the increase in land transactions in the rural commune of Hualaihué. The research, based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of land ownership records from 2005, 2015, 2021, and 2022, as well as information from 23 semi-structured interviews with different territorial stakeholders, reveals the impact of territorial commodification in the area of study. The results indicate that the sale of rural land, the increase in land sales, and the reduction in the size of plots acquired since 2021 constitute an emerging and latent problem, which confirms that rural land is undergoing a subdivision process that presents urban development characteristics in certain parts of the commune. This needs to be critically examined to develop urgent, comprehensive planning dynamics, thereby reducing emerging socio-territorial conflicts. Full article

This paper examines how Dushyant Kumar’s collection, sāye meṅ dhūp (lit. Sunlight in the Shadows), reinvented the classical ġhazal genre as a vernacular weapon of anti-authoritarian dissent—not by abandoning ambiguity, but by recalibrating it under conditions of constraint—during India’s Emergency. This study argues that Kumar’s work constitutes a radical departure from the genre’s traditional emphasis on the abstract longing of the lover for the beloved and other tropes which are peculiar to writing ġhazal in the Perso-Urdu world. Instead, Kumar systematically repurposed its conventions—its ambiguity, its metaphors of the beloved and the garden, its themes of sacrifice—to mount a sharp polemic against Indira Gandhi’s regime. Through an analysis of ġhazal-s selected for their range of polemical strategies—from direct satire and political allegory to the recasting of traditional themes like martyrdom—this paper demonstrates how Kumar’s conscious use of a blended Hindi–Urdu vernacular was central to his political project. By writing in “the language I speak,” he dragged the elite ġhazal into the public square, transforming it into a medium for articulating collective disillusionment, resistance, and a scathing critique of a democracy in crisis. Kumar’s work thus stands as a testament to the ġhazal’s potent, and often overlooked, capacity for explicit political engagement. Full article

Since 2017, more than a dozen civics institutes have been founded at America’s public universities, marking a renaissance in civic education. Grounded in the liberal arts, these institutes rightly restore the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and reconnect citizens to the nation’s past. Yet liberal education requires assistance to help students navigate today’s data-driven republic, where questions of law and justice increasingly turn on the interpretation of evidence. This article proposes a balanced model for civics education—a “renewed civic pragmatism”—that unites the historical connectedness of liberal learning with the technical skills required for public life and the rule of law. In doing so, civics education recovers its role as a bridge between moral principle, empirical judgment, and the pursuit of justice under law. Full article

This paper conceptualizes institutional resilience as a core condition of democratic sustainability in post-transition Europe. Building on neo-institutionalist approaches and recent scholarship on democratic resilience, we argue that democracies endure when three capacities align: policy coherence, procedural legitimacy, and civic/monitory participation. Using a comparative, theory-guided design, we analyze Romania, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia (2007–2025), triangulating V-Dem/Eurostat indicators with documentary evidence (EU Rule of Law reports, CEPEJ) and interpretive analysis. Romania illustrates “reactive resilience” anchored in judicial independence and civic vigilance; Slovakia shows “restorative resilience” after corruption scandals; Poland exhibits “societal compensatory resilience,” where civic mobilization offsets institutional regression; Hungary demonstrates “instrumental resilience without democracy,” combining administrative capacity with normative decay. We integrate these findings into a three-dimensional model—institutional, normative, and communicative—showing how feedback loops convert crisis into learning. The paper concludes that sustainable democracy depends less on constitutional design alone and more on the institutionalization of learning: redundant veto points, impartial procedures that generate trust, and a monitory public sphere that sustains continuous accountability. For EU policy, the shift from conditionality to capacity (e.g., RRF) can foster endogenous resilience when supranational norms are domestically internalized rather than externally imposed. Full article

Creationism is not only a pseudoscience present in Brazil but also a political problem. In reality, creationism as a pseudoscience and as a political issue are entangled in this Latin American country. Thus, this article has a double objective: to show how Brazilian creationism arises as a danger to both education/science and democracy in Brazil, and to discuss how its epistemological misconceptions and its dependence on Evidentialism portray a divinity that stands in contrast with the Christian understanding of the Trinitarian God. The first section will address how creationism is present in the Brazilian political arena, with special attention to its presence during Jair Bolsonaro’s government and how it constitutes an ongoing danger to Brazil’s education system and democracy due to the rapid growth of the number of Evangelicals in the country and of the Evangelical Parliamentary Front of the National Congress. The second will discuss examples of creationist arguments presented by the two major proponents of the movement in Brazil, the Presbyterians Adauto Lourenço and Marcos Eberlin, that show their standard procedure in dealing with scientific data and drawing religious conclusions from it. The third will analyze how Creationism relies on Evidentialism and portrays a divinity which diverges from the Trinitarian Christian God. I argue that creationism is not based on or an expression of a Christian understanding of the relationship between God, creation, and creatures, but is instead based on epistemological misconceptions, manipulation of data, and religious conclusions drawn from it. Full article

This study explores the interplay between environmental justice and energy democracy in the context of forest-based energy conflicts in Türkiye, focusing on the case of the Akbelen Forest. It draws on qualitative data from community-based actions and legal documents to examine how local communities engage in collective action against extractivist energy policies that threaten their ecological and social environments. The findings reveal a complex web of multilayered injustices, including procedural, distributional, and recognitional dimensions, experienced by the affected populations. In this regard, the Akbelen case demonstrates how these different dimensions intersect and constitute a framework of “multiple justice”. The central argument of this study, developed primarily through our visualised network graph, is that the Akbelen case demonstrates the limitations of current environmental governance frameworks in accommodating community-based ecological values and rights. This analysis demonstrates how energy democracy can function as both a normative and strategic instrument for rethinking participatory planning and forest governance. The present paper contributes to ongoing debates in the fields of political ecology and environmental governance by situating grassroots mobilisation within a broader discussion of just energy transitions. The study also emphasises the necessity of inclusive, multi-actor governance models that prioritise democratic participation, ecological integrity, and intergenerational equity. Full article

(1) Background: This article aims to understand the forms and elements through which the inhabitants of the city of Medellin have configured their subjectivity in the context of the application of neoliberal policies in the last two decades. In this way, we can approach the frameworks of understanding that constitute a fundamental part of the individuation processes in which the incorporation of their subjectivities is evidenced in neoliberal contexts that, in the historical process, have been converging with authoritarian, antidemocratic and neoconservative elements. (2) Method: A qualitative approach with a hermeneutic-interpretative paradigm was used. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 41 inhabitants of Medellín who were politically identified with right-wing or center-right positions. Data analysis included thematic coding to identify patterns of thought and points of view. (3) Results: Participants associate success with individual effort and see state intervention as an obstacle to development. They reject redistributive policies, arguing that they generate dependency. In addition, they justify authoritarian models of government in the name of security and progress, from a moral superiority, which is related to a negative and stigmatizing perception of progressive sectors and a negative view of the social rule of law and public policies with social sense. (4) Conclusions: The naturalization of merit as a guiding principle, the perception of themselves as morally superior based on religious values that grant a subjective place of certainty and goodness; the criminalization of expressions of political leftism, mobilizations and redistributive reforms and support for policies that establish authoritarianism and perpetuate exclusion and structural inequalities, closes roads to a participatory democracy that enables social and economic transformations. Full article

This paper examines the political discourse of South Korean conservative Christianity, focusing on its alignment with far-right ideologies that undermine both democratic norms and the theological integrity of faith. Triggered by recent constitutional crises involving former President Suk-yeol Yoon, far-right Protestant groups have engaged in mobilisations marked by hate speech, disinformation, and theological politicisation. Drawing upon Heinrich Bedford-Strohm’s model of public theology, the study critiques this trend and argues for a reconfiguration of Christian public engagement toward justice, inclusion, and rational dialogue. It further explores the blurred boundaries between conservative and far-right Christian movements, the distortion of the public sphere, and the impact of digital misinformation. Ultimately, the paper proposes a theological and ethical roadmap for restoring the credibility of Christianity in South Korea’s pluralistic democracy. Full article

The first few days of the second Trump presidency saw a flurry of executive orders targeting immigrants, the transgender community, blacks, and federal government employees. The resulting “shocks” to the system are unprecedented, causing many to question the continuation of American democracy. These actions are a few of many policy preferences developed by conservatives and captured in “Project 2025”, spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and with the overall intent of restructuring the federal government to suit authoritarian aims. Using a theoretical framework regarding policy entrepreneurs (PEs), I argue that conservative PEs (CPEs), under the aegis of the Republican Party and a second Trump term, are encouraging a shift away from a federal democratic republic to an authoritarian regime. CPEs of interest include elected officials, think tanks, media outlets, interest groups, and political operatives; collectively, these entities constitute a network of mostly unnoticed conservative political professionals using the mechanisms of policy entrepreneurship to damage American democracy. Overall, the actions CPEs take in terms of setting the agenda, controlling the electoral process, and informing the media indicate an eventual abandonment of democratic norms, an inclination towards the establishment of an authoritarian regime, and acceptance of said regime by a significant portion of the American people. Full article

This contribution examines the human rights framework and legislative developments in South Africa on persons with mental illness, revealing that the initial focus of the legislation was on control and detention at the cost of the rights of mental health care users. Presently, under its Constitutional democracy, South Africa has progressive Mental Health Legislation focusing on the rights of mental health care users and the least restrictive means of treatment. The contribution considers the impact of the legislative developments on the human rights of mental health care users. There are, however, challenges with the implementation of the legislation most notably illustrated by the Life Esidimeni disaster where a mass deinstitutionalization project led to the loss of life. South Africa’s revised Mental Health Policy Framework holds a renewed commitment to respect a mental health care user’s right to dignity, integrity, privacy, and freedom of movement. This is one step closer to the realisation of the obligations created by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The contribution considers the 2018 concluding observations by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which lays bare areas where yet further improvement is needed in South Africa to eradicate all forms of discrimination against persons with disabilities and, in particular, persons with mental illness Areas where progress have been made are highlighted. South Africa has made steady progress but needs to intensify its efforts to domesticize the CRPD. Full article