Vol. 22 No. 1 (2022)

This issue brings together the five research articles IAPSS Politikon published in 2022, covering African security, East Asian welfare politics, academic freedom in Europe, constitutional change in Turkey and democratic theory.

Tinashe Sithole examines the political economy of the insurgency in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province. He traces how natural resource governance has fuelled the conflict and argues that the Southern African Development Community (SADC) must act to stop it spreading across the region. Yeo Qin-Liang compares Singapore and South Korea to ask how civil society shapes welfare expansion in East Asia, and why protest has produced very different outcomes in the two states.

Vaia Papanikolaou, Yiannis Roussakis and Panagiotis Tzionas build a model of the “collapsing university”. Drawing on the case of the Central European University in Hungary, they show how state pressure on academic freedom and institutional autonomy erodes the university’s democratic role. Özge Korkmaz Şahbaz uses process tracing to explain the constitutional changes that moved Turkey to a presidential system, from the 1982 constitution to the 2017 referendum. Donovan van der Haak argues that Jason Brennan’s case for epistocracy cannot be reconciled with moral relativism.

The articles were first published online between March and September 2022 and brought together in this issue in December 2022.