Download or read book Icelandic Constitutional Reform written by Ágúst Þór Árnason and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-12 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection documents, analyses, and reflects on the Icelandic constitutional reform between 2009 and 2017. It offers a unique insight into this process by providing first-hand accounts of its different stages and core issues. Its 12 substantive chapters are written by the main actors in the reform, including the Chair of the Constitutional Council that drafted the 2011 Proposal for a New Constitution. Part I opens with an address by the President of the Republic and positions the constitutional reform in its full complexity and longer-term perspective, going beyond the frequent portrayal of that process in international discussion as being solely a result of the 2008 financial crisis. Part II offers a nuanced and contextualised reflection on Iceland’s innovative approach to consultation and drafting involving lay participants, including its twenty-first-century digital take on ‘the people,’ which attracted international attention as ‘crowdsourcing.’ Part III analyses the main constitutional amendment proposals, and focuses on natural resources and environmental protection, which lie at the heart of Iceland’s identity. The final part reflects on the reform’s wider significance and includes an interview with the current Prime Minister, who is now taking the reform forward. The volume provides a basis for reflection on a groundbreaking constitutional reform in a democratic context. This long and complex process has challenged and transformed the ways in which constitutional change can be approached, and the collection is an invitation to discuss further the practical and theoretical dimensions of Iceland’s experience and their far-reaching implications.
Download or read book Iceland s Financial Crisis written by Valur Ingimundarson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Being the first casualty of the international financial crisis, Iceland was, in many ways, turned into a laboratory when it came to responding to one of the largest corporate failures on record. This edited volume offers the most wide-ranging treatment of the Icelandic financial crisis and its political, economic, social, and constitutional consequences. Interdisciplinary, with contributions from historians, economists, sociologists, legal scholars, political scientists and philosophers, it also compares and contrasts the Icelandic experience with other national and global crises. It examines the economic magnitude of the crisis, the social and political responses, and the unique transitional justice mechanisms used to deal with it. It looks at backward-looking elements, including a societal and legal reckoning – which included the indictment of a Prime Minister and jailing of leading bankers for their part in the financial crisis – and forward-looking features, such as an attempt to rewrite the Icelandic constitution. Throughout, it underscores the contemporary relevance of the Icelandic case. While the Icelandic economic recovery has been much quicker than expected; it shows that public faith in political elites has not been restored. This text will be of key interest to scholars, policy-makers and students of the financial crisis in such fields as European politics, international political economy, comparative politics, sociology, economics, contemporary history, and more broadly the social sciences and humanities.
Download or read book Protest Publics written by Nina Belyaeva and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-05-10 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the waves of protest that broke out in the 2010s as the collective actions of self-organized publics. Drawing on theories of publics/counter-publics and developing an analytical framework that allows the comparison of different country cases, this volume explores the transformation from spontaneous demonstrations, driven by civic outrage against injustice to more institutionalized forms of protest. Presenting comparative research and case studies on e.g. the Portuguese Generation in Trouble, the Arab Spring in Northern Africa, or Occupy Wall Street in the USA, the authors explore how protest publics emerge and evolve in very different ways – from creating many small citizen groups focused on particular projects to more articulated political agendas for both state and society. These protest publics have provoked and legitimized concrete socio-political changes, altering the balance of power in specific political spaces, and in some cases generating profound moments of instability that can lead both to revolutions and to peaceful transformations of political institutions. The authors argue that this recent wave of protests is driven by a new type of social actor: self-organized publics. In some cases these protest publics can lead to democratic reform and redistributive policies, while in others they can produce destabilization, ethnic and nationalist populism, and authoritarianism. This book will help readers to better understand how seemingly spontaneous public events and protests evolve into meaningful, well-structured collective action and come to shape political processes in diverse regions of the globe.
Download or read book Children s Constitutional Rights in the Nordic Countries written by Trude Haugli and published by Brill Nijhoff. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores whether and how enshrining children's rights in national constitutions improves implementation and enforcement of those rights by comparing Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish law.
Download or read book Rethinking Nordic Courts written by Laura Ervo and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-08-01 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book examines whether a distinctly Nordic procedural or court culture exists and what the hallmarks of that culture are. Do Nordic courts and court proceedings share a distinct set of ideas and values that in combination constitute the core of a regional legal culture? How do Europeanisation, privatisation, diversification and digitisation influence courts and court proceedings in the Nordic countries? The book traces the genesis and formation of Nordic courts and justice systems to provide a richer comprehension of contemporary Nordic legal culture, and an understanding of the relationship between legal cultural stability and change. In answering these questions, the book provides models for conceptualising procedural culture. Nordic procedural culture has partly developed organically and is partly also the product of deliberate efforts to maintain a certain level of alignment between the Nordic countries. Studying Nordic cooperation enables us to gain a deeper understanding of current regional, European and global harmonisation processes within procedural law. The influx of supranational European law, increased use of alternative dispute resolution and growth in regulation density that produces a conflict between specialisation and coherence, have tangible impact on the role of courts in a democratic society, the form of court proceedings and court structures. This book examines whether and why some trends exert more tangible, or perhaps simply more perceptible, influence on procedural culture than others.
Download or read book Comparative Constitutions written by L.Wolf- Phillips and published by Springer. This book was released on 1972-06-18 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Why Iceland written by Asgeir Jonsson and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 2009-08-07 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As late as the mid 1980s, Iceland’s economy revolved around little else than a semi-robust cod-fishing industry. By the end of the century, however, it had transformed itself into a major player in world finance, building an international banking empire worth twelve times its GDP. The tiny island nation of 300,000 was one of the global economy’s great success stories. And then everything came crashing down. Why Iceland? is the inside account of one of the economic meltdown’s most fascinating and far-reaching tragedies. As Chief Economist of Kaupthing Bank, the country’s largest bank before the collapse, Ásgeir Jónsson is perfectly suited to examine Iceland’s collapse in painstaking detail. He witnessed behind-the-scenes events firsthand, such as an intriguing meeting in January 2008 when a group of international hedge fund managers gathered in a bar in Reykjavik to discuss Iceland’s economy—an informal affair that eventually became the center of a criminal investigation by the country’s Financial Supervisory Authority. This inside account examines the pressing issues behind history’s biggest banking collapse: How did Iceland transform itself from one of Europe’s poorest to one of its wealthiest countries? What happened to cause the destruction of the nation’s banking industry during a single week of October 2008? Was it the result of a speculation “attack” by hedge funds on the nation’s currency? Iceland remains the biggest casualty of the economic downturn, and the ramifications of its catastrophic failure reach deeply into the economies of Europe, the United States, and other global markets. Ásgeir Jónsson offers a unique perspective and an expert’s insight into the rise and fall of this once-proud banking giant. Why Iceland? provides the who, what, where, and when of Iceland’s demise, serving as a fascinating read and providing the understanding necessary for forecasting when and where the aftershocks will shake up markets in other parts of the world. "Fearsome Vikings discovered Iceland. Hedge funds knocked it down. It was a humiliating tumble for the former financial powerhouse, which was proud of its status in Europe. A late bloomer, Iceland had been the last country in Europe to be settled, the Nordic nation rapidly caught up with its wealthier relations. It was all fine until October 2008, when country's banking system collapsed in a week. Written by an Icelandic economist, Why Iceland? chronicles the meltdown, in the context of the nation's history."--New York Post (A "Required Reading" Selection)
Download or read book The Veil of Participation written by Alexander Hudson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public participation is a vital part of constitution-making processes around the world, but we know very little about the extent to which participation affects constitutional texts. In this book, Alexander Hudson offers a systematic measurement of the impact of public participation in three much-cited cases - Brazil, South Africa, and Iceland - and introduces a theory of party-mediated public participation. He argues that public participation has limited potential to affect the constitutional text but that the effectiveness of participation varies with the political context. Party strength is the key factor, as strong political parties are unlikely to incorporate public input, while weaker parties are comparatively more responsive to public input. This party-mediation thesis fundamentally challenges the contemporary consensus on the design of constitution-making processes and places new emphasis on the role of political parties.
Download or read book Constituent Assemblies written by Jon Elster and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-21 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1787, constituent assemblies have shaped politics. This book provides a comparative, theoretical framework for understanding them.
Download or read book Participatory Constitutional Change written by Xenophon Contiades and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the recent trend of enhancing the role of the people in constitutional change. It traces the reasons underlying this tendency, the new ways in which it takes form, the possibilities of success and failure of such ventures as well as the risks and benefits it carries. To do so, it examines the theoretical aspects of public participation in constitutional decision-making, offers an analysis of the benefits gained and the problems encountered in countries with long-standing experience in the practice of constitutional referendums, discusses the recent innovative constitution-making processes employed in Iceland and Ireland in the post financial crisis context and probes the use of public participation in the EU context. New modes of deliberation are juxtaposed to traditional direct-democratic processes, while the reasons behind this re-emergence of public involvement narratives are discussed from the aspect of comparative constitutional design. The synthetic chapter offers an overview of the emerging normative and comparative issues and provides a holistic approach of the role of the people in constitutional change in an attempt to answer when, where and how this role may be successfully enhanced. The work consists of material specifically written for this volume, and authored by prominent constitutional scholars and experts in public participation and deliberative processes.
Download or read book The History of Iceland written by Gunnar Karlsson and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iceland is unique among European societies in having been founded as late as the Viking Age and in having copious written and archaeological sources about its origin. Gunnar Karlsson, that country's premier historian, chronicles the age of the Sagas, consulting them to describe an era without a monarch or central authority. Equating this prosperous time with the golden age of antiquity in world history, Karlsson then marks a correspondence between the Dark Ages of Europe and Iceland's "dreary period", which started with the loss of political independence in the late thirteenth century and culminated with an epoch of poverty and humility, especially during the early Modern Age. Iceland's renaissance came about with the successful struggle for independence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and with the industrial and technical modernization of the first half of the twentieth century. Karlsson describes the rise of nationalism as Iceland's mostly poor peasants set about breaking with Denmark, and he shows how Iceland in the twentieth century slowly caught up economically with its European neighbors.
Download or read book The Threat to Reason written by Dan Hind and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, media commentators, intellectuals and politicians declare that western science and rationality are threatened by irrational enemies. Evangelicals, postmodernists, and Islamists are on the march, they say. The Rome that science built is under siege. But there's a problem with these stirring attempts to defend the truth. They aren't true. In this urgent new book, Dan Hind confronts the great machinery of deception in which we live, and which now threatens to destroy our civilization. In particular, he takes to task a group of prominent intellectuals who have exaggerated the threat posed by the so-called forces of unreason-religion, postmodernism and other "mumbo-jumbo." The commentators, says Hind, distract us from much more pressing threats to an open democratic society based on freedom of speech and inquiry. This book shows that the real threats to reason aren't wacky or foreign or stupid; they reside in our state and corporate bureaucracies - and, one way or another, they probably pay your salary. In recovering the idea of Enlightenment, Hind explores its vital importance and reveals how it can help us to achieve a truly democratic politics, in which we have a genuine say in the decisions that are taken on our behalf.
Download or read book tr sarv kingar written by Alaric Hall and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2020 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the global banking boom of the early twenty-first century expanded towards implosion, Icelandic media began calling the country's celebrity financiers útrásarvíkingar: “raiding vikings.” This new coinage encapsulated the macho, medievalist nationalism which underwrote Iceland's exponential financialisation. Yet within a few days in October 2008, Iceland saw all its main banks collapse beneath debts worth nearly ten times the country's GDP.Hall charts how Icelandic novelists and poets grappled with the Crash over the ensuing decade. As the first English-language monograph devoted to twenty-first-century Icelandic literature, it provides Anglophone readers with an introduction to one of the world's liveliest literary scenes. It also contributes a key case study for understanding global artistic responses to the early twenty-first century crisis of runaway, unregulated capitalism, exploring the struggles of writers to adapt realist forms of art to surreal times.As Iceland's biggest crisis since their independence from Denmark in 1944, the effect of the Crash on the national self-image was as seismic as its effects on the economy. This study analyses the centrality of whiteness and the abjection of the “developing world” in Iceland's post-colonial identity, and shows how Crash-writing explores the collisions of Iceland's traditional, nationalist medievalism with a dystopian, Orientalist medievalism associated with the Islamic world.The Crash in Iceland was instantly recognised as offering important economic insights. This book shows how Iceland also helps us to understand the cultural convulsions that have followed the Financial Crisis widely in the West.
Download or read book Constituent Power and the Law written by Joel I. Colon-Rios and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the relationship between constituent power and the law, and the place of the former in constitutional history, drawing from constitutional theory beyond the Anglo-American sphere, with new material made available for the first time to English readers.
Download or read book Assessing Constitutional Performance written by Tom Ginsburg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From London to Libya, from Istanbul to Iceland, there is great interest among comparative constitutional scholars and practitioners about when a proposed constitution is likely to succeed. But what does it mean for a constitution to succeed? Are there universal criteria of success, and which apply across the board? Or, is the choice of criteria entirely idiosyncratic? This edited volume takes on the idea of constitutional success and shows the manifold ways in which it can be understood. It collects essays from philosophers, political scientists, empiricists and legal scholars, that approach the definition of constitutional success from many different angles. It also brings together case studies from Africa, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia. By exploring a varied array of constitutional histories, this book shows how complex ideas of constitutional success play out differently in different contexts and provides examples of how success can be differently defined under different circumstances.
Download or read book Social and Political Foundations of Constitutions written by Denis J. Galligan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-14 with total page 693 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume analyses the social and political forces that influence constitutions and the process of constitution making. It combines theoretical perspectives on the social and political foundations of constitutions with a range of detailed case studies from nineteen countries. In the first part leading scholars analyse and develop a range of theoretical perspectives, including constitutions as coordination devices, mission statements, contracts, products of domestic power play, transnational documents, and as reflection of the will of the people. In the second part these theories are examined through in-depth case studies of the social and political foundations of constitutions in countries such as Egypt, Nigeria, Japan, Romania, Bulgaria, New Zealand, Israel, Argentina and others. The result is a multidimensional study of constitutions as social phenomena and their interaction with other social phenomena.
Download or read book Under Deconstruction written by Libia Castro (Artiste) and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The publication by Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson on the occasion of the exhibition at the Icelandic pavilion at Venice Biennale 2011 is conceived as a first comprehensive overview / in depth analysis of more than ten years of their artistic practice--leading up to their most current works. Four essays by internationally renowned writers approach Castro/Ólafsson's work from different angles, while a conversation with the exhibition curator, Ellen Blumenstein, meanders through the book, takes up the artists own perspective on their work, and focuses on the production of the new projects while digging into recent social and political developments in Iceland. Contributors Maurizio Lazzarato, Susanne Leeb, Halldór Björn Runólfsson, Simon Sheikh Conversation with the artists by Ellen Blumenstein
