... repress or not to repress? Who to buy off? To liberalize and yield, or crackdown on opposition and civil society? These are the questions that authoritarian leaders have to find an answer to before they lose power or retain it. There is a myriad of social science theories about democratization, which is a study of [how] and, to a lesser extent, [why] countries part ways with authoritarian past. For quite a long period of time, democratization was considered to be a function of economic growth, which ...
This post will examine whether unrecognised states really fit such a title, and why it is that unrecognised states remain unrecognised and thus outside of the international state system. This will involve a brief appraisal of the definition of statehood itself, as well as a review of the two main theories concerning state recognition. Finally this post will outline the thought process behind non-recognition in international law.
As regards the current legal status of statehood there is little...
It is important that the first post of this blog addresses the theoretical foundation of its subject, namely the environment in which unrecognised states are assumed to operate and the structural restraints this may place upon them. The study of unrecognised states is, by extension, a study of small states, thus it is appropriate to operate within the theoretical boundaries of small state studies.
The study of small states is, until relatively recently, something that has been largely overlooked...
