There has been a growing interest in online politics in China. The research mostly focuses on the role of the Internet in two areas, one is its creation of a public sphere and the challenges it poses to the existing communication and political system, and the other one is online censorship undertaken by Chinese authorities to reduce the scope of political discussion online and keep the domestic cyberspace from being merged with foreign cyberspace. However, some political uses of the Internet in China have tended to be overlooked. This thesis seeks to redress this lacuna in research by examining the political focus of a recent Internet phenomenon the Human Flesh Search Engine (HFSE). This term might be more at home in pages of a horror novel but was originally applied by the Chinese media to refer to the practice of online searching for people or human hunting. While existing examinations have focused on breaches of individual privacy by these so called online vigilantes this study mainly focuses on the ability of HFSE to reveal norms transgressions by public officials and lead to their removal. As the politically-focused HFSE is part of the tendency of Chinese popular protest, it is necessary to explore how the HFSE differs from and is similar to those offline protests in China. A case-oriented approach is applied to the research on HFSE. More specifically, the first part of this research puts the understanding of HFSE in Chinese historical context, with the aim of exploring the common dynamics between HFSE and those historical examples of Chinese bottom-up collective action. Then in the second part, a comparison between HFSE and recent Chinese offline popular protests is conducted in order to establish the pattern of politically-focused HFSE. In the third part, based on the empirical cases, the research on HFSE continues with an exploration of HFSE s underlying causal mechanisms to answer a key question of this research: why did HFSE occur? The study implies that there are continuities with respect to the Chinese bottom-up collective action as HFSE and Chinese rural resistances as well as urban labour strikes in the twentieth century of China tend to show similar dynamics, which are determined by the power structure they are exposed to. Moreover, the internal process of politically-focused HFSE differs largely from that of recent Chinese offline popular protests, which indicates that HFSE does not have an offline equivalent, although some of its stages can be witnessed offline. Furthermore, HFSE s occurrence is brought about by a combination of online and offline factors, which are relevant to not only the Internet and Chinese cyberspace, but also the political system that has contributed to the growth of official corruption and low government credibility in China.

published_or_final_version / SPACE / Master / Master of Arts

<p>This thesis analyzes the relationship between trade restrictiveness and corruption levels in Europe and tests the robustness of the results using two different measures of corruption; Corruption Perceptions Index constructed by Transparency International and World Governance Indicators; Control of Corruption constructed by the World Bank. The results show that the outcome differs among the two indices and that previous results found in studies may be subject to data choice and measurement errors. A majority of previous studies have used trade openness in the form of imports share in GDP, or trade openness indices as variables that explain corruption levels. This thesis focuses on trade restrictiveness. It also investigates the differences between restrictiveness and openness in their impacts on corruption. The author of this thesis finds a weak relation between trade restrictiveness and corruption on one hand and an even weaker relation between trade openness and corruption on the other hand when controlling for other variables that may have an impact on corruption. The limited time-frame could be an explanation for this result, i.e. trade policy effects. A longer time-frame would have probably resulted in a bigger difference between variables for trade openness and trade restrictiveness. It is found that the variables showing to have the largest impact on corruption levels in Europe are those associated with historical dimensions such as whether the country has had a tradition of the church being separated from the state or whether being a previously planned economy. Most importantly, the thesis presents suggestive evidence on the fact that not all government involvement increases corruption. Rather, it is regulations that limit internal competition have a large impact on corruption levels in Europe. It has also been found that not all government involvement in the economy implies higher corruption levels. The findings outlined are in line with the common perception that corruption is highly dependent on previous values of corruption and that radical policy interventions are needed to curb corruption.</p>

This work will explore the interconnections between political power and the various forms of corruption endemic in Denver in the late 19th century placing municipal corruption and election fraud into the larger political, economic, social and cultural framework. Municipal political corruption in Denver operated through a series of relationships tying together, the city police, political factions, utility and industrial leaders, con men, gamblers, protection rackets and the election of U.S. Senators. This work will explore not only the operational ties, but also how these ties served all parties, and the discourse used to rationalize the behavior and distribute blame. The dates for this study are bracketed by two significant events: a mayoral election and trial in 1889-1890, and the City Hall War in the spring of 1894. Each of these events represents a point when a rupture in the tight net of political control sparked a battle for hegemony with a concomitant turn to corruption and election fraud on the part of competing political factions. The level of municipal corruption in Denver was not necessarily unusual; however, the extent of the documentation enables a detailed analysis. Denver newspapers blamed the corruption on an unspecified "gang" and a shadowy "machine." The editors railed against the scourge of con men, and simultaneously used the ubiquitous fraud as a metaphor for trickery and corruption of all kinds. This detailed analysis reveals a more complex series of events through which a cabal of business and industry leaders seized control of both the city and the state government, giving them the political power to wage what has been called a war against labor.

This dissertation addresses organized crime in post-Soviet Eurasia (Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan) exploring the nexus between politics, business and crime. Based on extensive field research in the three countries the dissertation examines organized crime groups in the region and describes their inter-relationships with political and business elites, then discusses the impact of the three countries’ Coloured Revolutions on crime and corruption. The impacts of the revolutions on organized crime are situated in several variables, among them political opposition to incumbent regimes; the strength of civil society and the role of organized crime groups during the revolutionary processes; personal morals of the leaders and their views on cooperation with organized crime; and the presence and nature of the “pact” between outgoing and incoming elites. The dissertation also takes into account larger explanatory variables, such as geography, natural resources, industry, and regional wars and documents their role in shaping organized crime. In accounting for the diverging patterns of the three countries in terms of post-revolutionary effects on crime and corruption, the role of the West, defined as a “push” factor for democratization, and the experience of earlier statehood are also considered. The interaction between elites and criminals is regarded as a crucial part of state formation, and is characterized by shifting dominance between the actors of the underworld and upperworld. The thesis identifies points of cooperation and conflict between licit and illicit actors, and provides insight into the collusive nature of criminal networks in the post-Soviet context, arguing that the distinction between licit and illicit is frequently blurred and the representatives of the upperworld are sometimes key participants in organized criminal activity.

Sensor networks are made up of small battery-powered sensing devices with wireless communication capabilities, enabling the network to monitor the environment in which it is deployed. Through their flexible and cable-free design these networks open up for new deployment scenarios that were previously not plausible such as during a natural disaster. Motivated by scenarios where centralized oversight is not possible the focus of this thesis is to equip nodes with further adaptability to changes in the links it has with other nodes. This is achieved through contributions in three areas focusing on observations from a node-link perspective. First, the impact the local environment has on the nodes is explored by deploying a sensor network outdoors next to a meteorological station to correlate the variations in link quality to the changes in the environment. The work identifies temperature as the main factor, where through further investigations in a controlled setting, a linear relationship between the decrease in signal quality and the increase in temperature is described. Secondly, the thesis address how nodes in a sensor network can be motivated to exchange data by modeling it as a game. The game theoretic design is motivated by the absence of any centralized control and focus on the nodes as individual users in the network. The presented design motivates the selfish nodes to participate in the exchange of sensor data, showing that it is the best strategy. Lastly, by exploring and understanding how connections in a mobile sensor network occur, nodes are given more flexibility to determine how to send and sample sensor data. This adaptability to contact occurrences is shown to provide better ways of sending data by selecting higher quality links as well as making sampling more energy preserving by reducing the rate in the vicinity of other nodes. / CNDS / WISENET

La Convention des Nations Unies contre la corruption, adoptée en 2003, est le premier outil international criminalisant la corruption de façon aussi détaillée. Ce mémoire tente d'évaluer sa portée en analysant les dispositions concernant la prévention, la criminalisation, la coopération internationale et le recouvrement d'avoirs. Il tente d’évaluer la pertinence et l'efficacité de la Convention en illustrant ses défis en matière de conformité, pour ensuite étudier d'autres outils internationaux existants qui lui font compétition. Malgré sa portée élargie, il est débattu que la Convention souffre de lacunes non négligeables qui pourraient restreindre son impact à l'égard de la conduite d'États Membres. / The United Nations Convention Against Corruption (adopted in 2003) is the first global in-depth treaty on corruption. This work attempts to assess its significance by analyzing its provisions, in particular concerning the areas of prevention, criminalization, international cooperation and asset recovery. It then seeks to assess its relevancy and effectiveness by giving an overview of the Convention's main compliance challenges, as well as other existing initiatives that tackle corruption. Although the Convention innovates in many respects, it is argued that it also suffers from weaknesses that cannot be overlooked, preventing it from having a real impact on States' behavior.

The awareness about corruption has distinctly risen since the 1990s. In line with this many anti-corruption approaches arose initiated by the international community. This ranged from international legislation, initiatives by international institutions as Transparency International as well as strategic efforts on corporative levels as given with the appearance of Code of Conducts. However, the phenomenon appears to be of stable nature, which clearly impacts international business. Globalisation brings companies from less corrupt countries, unexperienced with its dimensions and handling, in frequent contact with business environments being highly dominated by corruption. Due to this, we find it to be a topic of importance and high relevance for almost any multinational business actor. Within the business related research field of corruption, we identified three research gaps. Firstly, the investigation of the supply-side of corruption within the private sector has not received sufficient attention in comparison to the demand-side. Further it appears that the contextuality of the phenomenon has been widely neglected, meaning that its driving dimensions of economical, social and political nature have not been investigated as a whole, revealing potential interrelations. In connection to this, the third gap we see to be given with a lacking connection of the topic to ethical considerations, which also calls for a contextual embedment. Based on these gaps we formulated the following research question: What drives corrupt practices of Multinational Enterprises within the internationalisation process? We argue that before any decisions concerning the handling of corruption can be made, one firstly needs to understand the phenomenon in its complexity. Building up on that, we further aim to scrutinise whether the above described anti-corruption approaches represent sufficient measures for MNEs when it comes to the practical avoidance of corruption. This represents the purpose of our study. We divided anti-corruption measures into internal and external approaches. The former include corporate anti-corruption- strategies, which in connection with ethical standpoints are commonly stated within Code of Conducts. The latter depicts the international legal framework against corrupt practices as well as international institutions fighting it. We concentrated our research on MNEs based in Europe, which internationalised to the BRIC-countries. In order to gain practical insights, a qualitative multiple case study has been conducted, comprising a sample of ten European companies. Given that we decided to conduct an exploratory study, we interviewed firms of differing size and industries in order to gain diverse data. The data collection was specifically tailored to the sensitivity of our research topic. As an ethical standpoint we took the anthropological perspective of moral relativism, implying that corruption cannot be evaluated as right or wrong without taking its context into consideration. Based on the latter, the findings revealed that corruption depicts a phenomenon of high complexity, being driven by every single of the investigated dimensions. Those are intensively interrelated and further reinforce each other. This characteristic seems to lead to a failure of anti-corruption approaches as sufficient measures on the operative level. Thus, within the BRIC-countries MNEs are unlikely to be able to uphold a strict non-tolerance for corruption as it appears to represent the Western business expectations. Consequently, they seem be entangled in a dilemma, facing the local given of strongly prevalent corruption but lacking tools to efficiently circumvent any engagement. According to this we identified a need for a new perspective, going beyond the oversimplified moral evaluation of corruption as right or wrong, implying a ‘black or white’-decision. We see this to be unrealistic since the real-life- context partly leads to grey-zones, in our view making the engagement in corrupt actions morally acceptable since the assessment has to be based on national moral views and take situational dependency into account. With this, we provide a new perspective on the phenomenon of corruption which can serve as a base for future research. On top of that managers can make use of our implications in order to better understand corruption. Consequently, they are able to make more realistic evaluations, for example acknowledging acceptable cultural adaptations instead of claiming a zero-tolerance approach. This again can lead to the creation of transparency, in the end supporting the combating of corruption.

La thèse de Jean-François Chemain porte sur « le cautionnement dans le monde romain du IIe siècle av. J.-C. au Ier siècle ap. J.-C. ». Elle a été menée à partir de sources littéraires, juridiques et épigraphiques. Dans sa première partie, l’auteur étudie les acteurs du cautionnement (garants et garantis) à la fin de la République : les relations qu’ils entretenaient les uns avec les autres, la catégorie sociale à laquelle ils appartenaient, les motifs qu’on avait de se porter caution, et les stratégies que cela pouvait dissimuler. Dans la deuxième partie, il repose la question des 5 leges de sponsu (lex Publilia, lex Appuleia, lex Furia, lex Cicereia, lex Cornelia), essayant, à partir de leur logique propre, de reconstituer les objectifs du législateur et, partant, de les dater. C’est ainsi qu’il situe la première dans un « long deuxième siècle avant J.-C. », peut-être à l’époque des Gracques, et les quatre dernières entre 67 et 47 av. J.-C. La troisième partie de la thèse est consacrée au devenir du cautionnement au début du Principat, marqué par une visible tentative d’en encadrer (apparition de la fideiussio) et limiter l’usage (préférence pour les garanties réelles, limitation des occasions de cautionner). Dans la quatrième partie, enfin, Jean-François Chemain met évidence que le cautionnement est un bon marqueur des grandes évolutions de la société romaine à l’époque du « Passage ». / Jean-François Chemain's thesis carries " the caution money in the Roman world of the IIth century BC in Ier century AD ". It was led from literary, legal and epigraphic sources. In his first part, the author studies the actors of the caution money (guarantors and guarantee) at the end of the Republic: the relations that they maintained some with the others, the social category to which they belonged, the motives which they had to stand surety, and the strategies which it could hide. In the second part, he asks the questionof the 5 leges de sponsu (lex Publilia, lex Appuleia, lex Furia, lex Cicereia, lex Cornelia), trying, from their own logic, to reconstitute the objectives of the legislator and therefore, to date them. And so he places the first one in a " long second century BC " Maybe at the time of Gracques, and the four last ones between 67 and 47 BC The third part of the thesis is dedicated to the future of the caution money at the beginning of the Princedom, marked by a visible attempt to frame( it (appearance of the fideiussio) and to limit its usage (preference for the real guarantees, the limitation of the opportunities to guarantee). In the fourth part, finally, Jean-François Chemain puts evidence that the caution money is a good marker of the main evolutions of the Roman society at the time of the "Passage".

Title: Bribery and its topical problems This diploma thesis is mainly focused on bribery, its topical problems and their possible solutions for the future. The text is divided into six chapters. The opening chapter deals with the definition of corruption which is a very extensive term. It also clarifies its relation to bribery which is essential for clarity and coherence of this thesis as these two terms are often interchanged. The second chapter focuses on demonstrating the severity of this criminality by pointing out selected criminological aspects of corruption, specifically the extent of corruption and the causes of corruption in general. The following chapter is dedicated to the legal regulations of bribery in the substantive criminal law. The attention is paid to fundamental terminology such as bribe, public official, the concept of general interest and elements of relevant criminal offences. The thesis would not be complete without a description of the procedural part. Therefore, the fourth chapter illustrates the actual problems of the Police, public prosecution system and court system and the need for the establishment of special departments dealing with corruption. The fifth chapter describes legal instruments that support successful detection and proving of bribery. It contains an...