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The chapter summarizes the current debate on worldwide changes in higher education and develops an alternative model to analyze the massive expansion in BRIC countries' university enrollment since 1995. The model puts national state policies at the center of a confluence of forces influencing how states have shaped their higher education systems. These forces include changes in national and global economic conditions that increase payoffs to higher educated labor, driving up demand for university places; global economic and political competition that put pressure on BRIC governments to create “world class” universities; constraints on public financing of higher education expansion; and earlier state higher education policies that shaped existing institutional cultures and, in turn, shape current higher education institutional reactions to changing state policies. The chapter summarizes the main arguments emerging from this model regarding the financing and institutional arrangements that have characterized higher education expansion in each to the BRICs.

The chapter seeks to locate the foundations of the ECHR rights within broader philosophical accounts of human rights. It argues that there is ‘no one-size-fits-all’ theory of human rights because human rights play different normative roles depending on the institutional setting under which they operate. Some theories of human rights, like John Rawls's, aim to provide the minimal conditions for the legitimate tolerance of non-liberal peoples at the international level. Other accounts of human rights, like the one which underpins the work of the United Nations, purport to identify political aims to improve human welfare that all states have a reason to promote. It is argued that none of these theories fits the institutional uniqueness of the ECHR, particularly the fact that the Convention imposes legal constraints on the use of state coercion by the Contracting States and has played an important role in domestic legal practice.

On the morning of April 22, 1989, seven days after the emergence of the 1989 Beijing Student Movement, a state funeral was held for Hu Yaobang inside the Great Hall of the People. The previous night, about 50,000 students had gone to Tiananmen Square, just outside the Great Hall of the People, in order to be part of that funeral. The 1989 Beijing Student Movement has three major characteristics: frequent government policy changes back and forth from concession to repression, quick and successful participant mobilizations, and the dominance of traditional forms of language and action during the movement. This book argues that the rise and development of the 1989 Beijing Student Movement can be explained in terms of state-society relations in China, understood in three impure dimensions: in terms of the nature of the state, of the nature of society, and of the economic, political, and ideational linkages between the state and society. It examines the role of intellectual elites in the 1989 Movement, economic reform in China, state legitimacy, and public opinion about the Movement.

During the 1989 Beijing Student Movement, the Chinese government went back and forth several times between policies of concession and repression, neither of which was successful. Eventually, the government suppressed the movement with military force, ending it tragically. Both the frequent changes in state policy and the eventual repression have been commonly explained as the outcome of power struggles between reform and conservative factions within the government. This chapter argues that the key factor underlying these policy changes and the consequent development of the movement was the ineffectiveness of previous state control measures, an ineffectiveness which in turn had resulted from the presence of conflicting views of state legitimacy in the minds of top state elites, the movement activists, and the rest of Beijing's population. After providing a critical review of theories of factionalism in Chinese politics, the chapter presents a model that reveals the Chinese state's fundamental social control problems by bringing into focus the nature of the regime and its sources of legitimation. Finally, it offers an empirical account of government behavior during the 1989 Movement.

The rules governing international relations in Inner and East Asia changed hugely in the nineteenth century. Asian laws of nations were supplanted under pressures coming from outside, most conspicuously from the West but also from Japan. The resort to violence by Western powers and Asian rulers alike was justified through doctrines of European international law that had evolved so as to remove restraints on European imperialist projects. Asian states scrambled to reorganize along modern, Western lines, and most governments that had ruled them in the nineteenth century were gone by the twentieth, with few exceptions. As new political elites took power, a continent of khans, emperors, hierarchs, and kings became a world of presidents, party leaders, constitutional monarchs, and national assemblies. Interpolity relations underwent a complete conceptual and organizational transformation. Some states, such as Tibet and its Himalayan neighbors, became the objects of competing imperial ambitions, while others, such as Japan, used their new capacities to overturn the hierarchy of earlier relationships, especially with the Qing Great State, and spread their sway over others, notably Korea. Though the older sources of ruler legitimacy and legality did not fully disappear, newer ideologies and rules of interstate relationships largely replaced them.

The chapter details the educational pathway students take during pre-tertiary schooling, their academic readiness before college, and the process they undergo in their application and admission to university. It analyzes how students attending BRIC universities and colleges are selected into differentiated higher education institutions, their learning experiences at different types of institutions within each country, and how students regard their learning experiences and their preparation for work (with special emphasis on engineering and computer science education), As part of this analysis, the chapter investigates how BRIC higher education systems train their engineering and computer science students compared to similar institutions in the developed countries.

Hate speech bans raise problems even on their face, yet literalist notions of free speech ‘absolutism’ waged against bans are untenable. In order to redress misunderstandings on both sides of the debate, the problem commonly ends up relegated to the value-pluralist legislative and judicial processes familiar within democracies. But those processes can never be wholly self-legitimating. Legislatures and courts cannot legitimately exclude portions of that very citizenry which by definition constitutes those bodies. Dominant liberal theory has long sought to supply democracy’s legitimating criteria through individual rights, yet those rights equally end up subject to such processes. Democratic processes can ensure their own legitimacy only through criteria that stand outside those processes. One of those criteria is the citizen’s prerogative of non-viewpoint-punitive expression within public discourse. Neither jurists’ conventional ‘balancing’ approaches nor political scientists’ drifts towards empiricism can eschew the imperative of determining democracy’s legitimating conditions.

This book studies third sectors in different parts of the world. The third sector refers to various types of relief and welfare organizations, innovation organizations, public service organizations, economic development organizations, grassroots mobilization groups, advocacy groups, and social networks. These include civil society organizations, nonprofit organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and formal and informal associations. Building on recent work on the origins, dynamics, and effects of civil society across the globe, this book compares the functions, impacts, and composition of the nonprofit sector for six countries: United States, France, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. This introduction explains the book's approach of using institutional logics to study the third sector, offers new theoretical perspectives on how different types of participation can increase generalized trust and state legitimacy, and considers the impact of neoliberalism and the so-called “New Political Culture” on nonprofits. It also discusses the emergence of New Social Movements and how associational politics might fit into the large picture of political life.

This chapter argues that legal and political dissonance in the formal implementation of sharia in a nation-state is inevitable. State legitimacy resulting from the formal implementation of sharia often generates a conflict of interests between the theory underlying the nation-state and the view of an indissoluble domain. The conflicts exist and are significant given that the Islamic world is divided into a number of nation-states. The Western concept of the modern nation-state, which is thought to have emerged in Europe in the seventeenth century through the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, spread throughout the world via colonialism. Colonialism, in fact, had partitioned Muslim regions into numerous territories, and by the twentieth century, these territories were transformed into newly born different countries, which took the nation-state as their form of political organization.

This chapter discusses the issue of responsiveness and legitimacy of European welfare states from a comparative perspective. It start from the assumption that the failure to respond to societal, socio-economic and ideological transformations might result in a legitimacy crisis of the welfare state. This chapter analyses if this crisis really exists, using data from nine European countries. It shows that legitimacy is a multi-faced concept. Although the literature suggests that three indicators (trust, congruence and satisfaction) might be used, an analysis of European data shows that there is no correlation between these three indicators. Therefore, we cannot speak of a general legitimacy crisis of European welfare states. What is seen however, is diverging public preferences and developments throughout Europe. This raises the question of how to respond to these diverging preferences and developments.