‘The world’s shortest highway’ is 1 metre long and was built in 2019 by a Romanian businessman as part of the campaign ‘Romania wants highways’. This brought interesting evolutions to the landscape of social movements in Eastern Europe. It was a highly personalised campaign, one which faced several internal contradictions and displayed an uncritical adoption of stereotypes about progress and development. We argue that it produced a discourse that revolves around ‘Westernisation’ and ‘nationhood’. As this article seeks to demonstrate, the campaign is framed in a discourse of ‘entrepreneurial populism’. By analysing this discourse, we contribute with a peculiar case to the debates on the varieties of populism and on the culture of business celebrities. Our analysis indicates that, although this single-issue campaign is nominally about highways, its substance is rather about business celebrities occupying the space of social activism.
Who is who in Romanian student representation? In this article we answer this (apparently) simple question. We start with early 1990, when the Romanian campuses experienced ample changes – part of the societal transformations which swept over Central and Eastern Europe. Our ambitions in this text are twofold: (1) to construct a map of student federations in post-communist Romania, and (2) to identify and describe the waves of structuration of the field. In doing so, we revert to classical social theory and document the emergence of “organizational archetypes” of student representation. We identify two types of structuration, “bottom-up” and “top-down”. We find evidence regarding the resilience of the “bottom-up” organizational archetypes in relation to the successive attempts of “top-down” (re)structuration.
China’s one-child policy is an essential subject in the quest to understand thecontemporary Chinese society, its future social development perspectives, butalso in order to determine how population control policies impact both menand women. After providing a short overview of the policy and discussing itsconsequences amongst men and women, I focus on the economic future ofChina with respect to the abovementioned policy and also try to answer thequestion on the stringency of such a harsh initiative. I argue that this policyhas had some rational incentives at its core but impacted women in a harshand inhumane way and might severely cripple China’s future developmentgoals.
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