The relation of religion to secular order has once more assumed centre stage in the renewed conflict between secular democracies and a traditional religiosity turned fiercely political. The extreme development of the former had seen politics represented as the only true redemption and religion condemned as the malaise of self-alienated humanity, to be purged altogether or rendered subordinate t...

social capital (sc) is important as much as physical capital and theorists discussed its functions in enhancement of countries. successfulness in international fields is far behind reach without due attention to capacity of countries. these capacities are known as competitiveness capacity (cc) in political literature. twelve indexes have been recognized for the cc which covers different dimensi...

After nearly two decades of studying the causes, processes and outcomes of transitions to democracy, scholars in recent years have again shown a growing interest in the study of the ways and means through which non-democracies maintain themselves in power. Dictators and dictatorships, of course, seldom lack creativity when it comes to staying power, and when creativity fails there is always bru...

This paper examines the politics of EU risk governance in relation to human material. It is argued that the political context has informed the way in which risks in relation to various types of human material have come to be defined as policy problems at EU level. In turn, this has influenced the design and/or persistence of institutional arrangements to manage such problems. It is further argu...

This paper seeks to explore the ethical implications of Carl Schmitt’s decisionism in a poststructuralist reading of Schmitt’s conception of the political as a constitutive exception. The Schmittian problematic of the exception as the constitutive principle of the political has recently made a comeback in the critical discourse, though, as we shall suggest below, the full significance of Schmit...

one tactful strategy in political rhetoric is hedging which is associated with vagueness and innuendos. despite the studies that address hedging in academic discourse and conversation analysis, studies that investigate hedges in relation to political power, face, and politeness are tremendously few. to this aim, four political interviews were selected from cnn and bbc websites on the basis of t...

The three Baltic countries are often considered to be a group of relatively similar countries, but there are in fact, from both a cultural and an economic point of view, significant differences between them. This is also the case in relation to the speed and extent of the integration into the World Economy-into the economy dominated by the Western industrialized countries. How can these differe...