Politikon: The IAPSS Journal of Political Science

"I was a North Korean Diplomat: Inside the Secret World of Pyongyang’s Foreign Service" by Han Jin-myung and Nicolas Levi

2026-07-23T14:16:48-04:00

I was a North Korean Diplomat:
Inside the Secret World of Pyongyang’s Foreign Service

By HAN JIN-MYUNG AND NICOLAS LEVI

Independently published, 2026

186 pp., US$ 16.99 (Paperback)

ISBN-13: ‎ 979-8251587517

“Leaving Russia: How Putin Forced a Country’s Future to Flee” by Jason Corcoran

2026-07-23T14:23:07-04:00

Leaving Russia: How Putin Forced a Country’s Future to Flee

By JASON CORCORAN

London: Quartet Books, 2026

287 pp., £17.20 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-0684077-2-7

Framing the Global South Through Film

2026-07-23T14:02:48-04:00

This study examines Riders of Destiny (2019), a German documentary portraying pacoa jara, the child-jockey horse-racing tradition in Sumbawa, Indonesia. While the film highlights risk such as injury and disrupted education, it frames the practice almost exclusively as child exploitation, offering a narrow view that overlooks its historical, cultural, and economic significance. Using a postcolonial framework grounded in Orientalism and representational politics, this study analyses the film’s content, narrative framing, and production context to explore how Western documentaries construct knowledge about the Global South. The findings show that the documentary’s selective interviews, aesthetic choices, and Western festival circulation reinforce a humanitarian narrative that positions Germany as a moral authority while marginalising local perspectives. Rather than denying concerns about child welfare, the study argues that understanding pacoa jara requires attention to community-based meanings that cannot be reduced to a universal Western standard.

Bilateral Disputes and Hold-Up Problems in EU Enlargement

2026-07-23T14:10:55-04:00

This research note asks whether the European Union’s (EU) unanimity requirement in enlargement decision-making creates a “hold-up problem” for candidate states facing bilateral disputes with a Member State. To test this, the study applies a novel political hold-up framework to a single case: Bulgaria’s veto of North Macedonia’s EU accession bid. It draws on two sources of evidence — statements and actions by political elites in North Macedonia, Bulgaria, and the EU, and qualitative and quantitative survey data on public opinion in North Macedonia. The findings largely confirm the hypothesis: unanimity does incentivize Member States to extract bilateral concessions from candidates. However, the evidence also shows that the accession process’s many intermediary decision points are themselves a key driver of the hold-up problem, pointing to a refined hypothesis that combines unanimity with multiple decision points.

Election Administration and Democratic Consolidation in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic

2026-07-23T13:53:44-04:00

This paper examines the trajectory of electronic innovations introduced by Nigeria's Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) between 1999 and 2023, situating this technological journey within democratic consolidation theory and the broader literature on electoral integrity and institutional trust. Drawing on official INEC reports, legislative documents, academic literature, and election observer mission findings, the paper traces the evolution from manual voter registration in the early Fourth Republic through successive technological cycles, culminating in the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal in 2023. The paper argues that INEC's technological interventions have produced a "trust paradox": while biometric accreditation technologies have materially reduced voter impersonation and multiple voting at the polling unit level, persistent failures in electronic result transmission have generated new focal points for political contestation and public disillusionment. Rather than resolving entrenched patterns of electoral manipulation, technology has displaced them—shifting their primary site from the polling unit to the collation and transmission process. This finding extends existing frameworks on fraud displacement and sociotechnical legitimacy to the Nigerian case, and carries implications for the study of electoral technology in weakly institutionalised democracies more broadly.