Politikon: The IAPSS Journal of Political Science

Editorial Note

Anna Kuteleva — 2025-06-06

“Natural Law and Modern Society” by Sean Coyle

Gavin Faulkner — 2025-06-06

Natural Law and Modern Society

By SEAN COYLE

Oxford University Press, 2023

496 pp., £110 (hardcover)

ISBN 9780192886996

Collective Security at the Crossroads

Abigail Georgison — 2025-06-06

On the 80^th anniversary of the United Nations (UN), this paper revisits Andrea Charron’s 2007 discussion of the UN’s collective security framework in “Expanding the UN’s Collective Security System.” Charron analyzed the UN’s capacity to uphold international peace and security, reviewing the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and the Duty to Prevent as potential tools for strengthening collective security. This paper situates Charron’s work in the geopolitical landscape of 2007 and examines the R2P and Duty to Prevent doctrines against the seven ideal elements of security. It then analyzes the application of R2P in Libya in 2011 to evaluate its impacts and limitations with consideration of the seven ideal elements of security. Charron’s assertions and predictions are assessed within the contemporary geopolitical context of 2025. Finally, the paper reflects on the future of collective security and the challenges posed by an eroding international rules-based system.

Who Gets to Resist?

Mohammad Amaan Siddiqui — 2025-06-06

This paper examines contested definitions of terrorism and resistance, analyzing how the US and India instrumentalize such labels to suppress dissent and monopolize violence. Notably, it is worrisome that state narratives regarding who gets to resist remain dominant, despite national wars on terror being widely criticized. Moreover, it is puzzling that the US and India, states with historically diverging foreign policies, are today converging on security issues. To address these dynamics, this paper employs case studies of the US and India to demonstrate how they use anti-terror laws and framing inconsistently, privileging elite interests over democratic processes. While the US focuses on opposing resistance against allies abroad, India directs aggression domestically, reflecting differences in federal structures and foreign policy ideologies. These findings provide theoretical insights regarding how states with divergent foreign policies can act similarly on matters of national security, offering timely insights into the US and India’s management of resistance, revealing systemic mechanisms that reinforce state authority under the guise of counterterrorism.

Exploring the Impact of Access to Information Laws on Corruption in Malawi

Lloyd George Banda — 2025-06-06

Malawi's access to information (ATI) law culminated in an advocacy of over two decades, with political leaders opposing and tactically delaying its implementation. While politicians construed the law as a media law, the core policy belief of the advocacy coalition was to eliminate the culture of secrecy in public offices and ensure government openness and accountability, with the control of corruption as a means to an end. This study employs a time-series positivistic approach to analyse data from 1996 to 2022. Additionally, the study employs the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach, bounds cointegration, and the overall error correction model (VECM) to establish the long-run relationship between public access to information and corruption indices. Parameter estimates reveal that any initiative to boost public access to information will reduce corruption by 0.374%, with the impact manifesting after two years. In the long run, however, improving Access to Information laws reduces corruption by 0.264%, ceteris paribus. The results of this study imply that the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) holds true in its hypothesis that the altruism of advocacy groups should not be precluded. Indeed, without at least one shared policy core belief, it would have been hard or otherwise impossible for professionally varied actors to be glued together for a frustrating period of 22 years in pursuit of access to information law.

From Crisis to Technocracy

Greta Comedini — 2025-06-06

This paper examines the relationship between economic crises, institutional factors, and technocratic appointments in European governments during the 2006-2015 period, with a specific focus on the European sovereign debt crisis (2010-2015). Using data from twelve Eurozone member states, the study demonstrates that countries most severely affected by the crisis—Greece, Italy, and Portugal—were the only ones to resort to technocratic appointments between 2011 and 2015. The analysis operationalises technocratic appointments as fully technocratic governments, technocrat-led governments, or technocratic ministers of finance. Through regression analysis, the study reveals that both general government gross debt and legislative fractionalisation serve as predictors for technocratic appointments, with gross debt showing a stronger impact. The findings confirm existing literature suggesting governments tend to appoint non-partisan, expert ministers during severe economic crises, potentially as a strategy to dilute political responsibility while maintaining governmental effectiveness. This research contributes to understanding how economic pressures reshape political institutions and decision-making during crisis periods.