The East Asian miracle: Economic growth and public policy: By the World Bank. (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1993. 389 pp. $19.95, paper.)

Este articulo es, a dia de hoy, una de las piezas clasicas y fundamentales para la posibilidad de estudiar las relaciones globales de poder a partir de las herramientas conceptuales desarrolladas por Gramsci a lo largo de su obra. Cox, contribuye de esta forma a las corrientes criticas de las Relaciones Internacionales al discutir varios conceptos gramscianos y cuales serian las implicaciones para estudiar las relaciones internacionales en distintos periodos de hegemonia y contrahegemonia. De igual forma, el autor planteo la cuestion –en su momento novedosa– de la relevancia de tomar en cuenta los procesos internos de construccion de bloques historicos contrahegemonicos como aquellos que podrian tener un efecto revolucionario en las estructuras y organizaciones internacionales, asi como ruptura con la hegemonia plasmada como una clase perteneciente a un orden economico universal transnacional.  This article is a classic and fundamental for approaching global power relations with the conceptual tools developed by Gramsci. Cox contributes to critical thought in International Relations by discussing various gramscian concepts and what their implications are for the study of different historical forms of hegemony and counter-hegemony. Also, the author draws our attention –novel at the time of its publicaction– to the relevance of taking into account the construction of domestic counter-hegemonic historic blocs. He suggests that these could have a revolutionary effect on international structures and organizations, as well as rupture with the hegemony performed by the transnational economic order.

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Gramsci, hegemonía y relaciones internacionales: Un ensayo sobre el método | Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method

Land questions have invigorated agrarian studies and economic history, with particular emphases on its control, since Marx. Words such as ‘exclusion’, ‘alienation’, ‘expropriation’, ‘dispossession’, and ‘violence’ describe processes that animate land histories and those of resources, property rights, and territories created, extracted, produced, or protected on land. Primitive and on-going forms of accumulation, frontiers, enclosures, territories, grabs, and racializations have all been associated with mechanisms for land control. Agrarian environments have been transformed by processes of de-agrarianization, protected area establishment, urbanization, migration, land reform, resettlement, and re-peasantization. Even the classic agrarian question of how agriculture is influenced by capitalism has been reformulated multiple times at transformative conjunctures in the historical trajectories of these processes, reviving and producing new debates around the importance of land control. The authors in this col...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03066150.2011.607692

New frontiers of land control: Introduction

Changes in globalised agriculture raise critical questions as rapid agricultural development leads to widespread social and environmental transformation. With increased global demand for vegetable oils and biofuel, in Indonesia the area under oil palm has doubled over the last decade. This paper presents a case study of how micro-processes that are linked to wider dynamics shape oil palm related agrarian change in villages in Sumatra, Indonesia. It pursues related questions regarding the impact of agribusiness-driven agriculture, the fate of smallholders experiencing contemporary agrarian transition, and the impact of increased demand for vegetable oils and biofuels on agrarian structures in Sumatra. It argues that the paths of agrarian change are highly uneven and depend on how changing livelihood strategies are enabled or constrained by economic, social and political relations that vary over time and space. In contrast to simplifying narratives of inclusion/exclusion, it argues that outcomes depend on the terms under which smallholders engage with oil palm. Distinguishing between exogenous processes of agribusiness expansion and endogenous commodity market expansion, it finds each is associated with characteristic processes of change. It concludes that the way successive policy interventions have worked with the specific characteristics of oil palm have cumulatively shaped the space where agrarian change occurs in Sumatra.

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Processes of inclusion and adverse incorporation: Oil palm and agrarian change in Sumatra, Indonesia

for mildew. After the rainy season comes the dust, especially in the rural areas where there are no paved roads, and the heat which reaches its peak during April and May. Government employees work only during morning hours in this period. The people are hospitable and family ties are very strong. Orphans, halforphans, and old people are well cared for by their own relatives or families. The team assigned to the Demonstration Area and Training Center works under the supervision of the director of the Institute of Hygiene. It includes a manager, health officer, school physician, dental health officer, health educator and nutritionist, nurse supervisor and a staff of five public health nurses, social worker, sanitary inspector, a clerical staff, and drivers. When the WHO maternal and child health consultant and the nurse-supervisor arrived in Quezon, the other member of the team had already completed a house-to-house survey of 18,000 people living in the demonstration area. The team had learned the conditions under which people live, their attitudes and beliefs and, most necessary of all, their needs. The service given in the health centers was mainly curative. Opportunities for health teaching were seldom utilized and the system of record keeping was very time-consuming. UNICEF had agreed to provide supplies and equipment but the Filipinos had been too modest in their requests and the supplies were far from adequate to meet the needs of the proposed service. A new requisition list was therefore drawn up and the most essential equipment was borrowed from other sources so that work in the centers could be improved. The Quezon City Health Department retained responsibility fore providing public health service to the community, while the Rural Health Demonstration and Training Center assumed responsibility for directing and supervising the training program, and helping to elevate the standards of the public health services. The two organizations agreed to participate jointly in carrying out the training program. In each center, one day was set aside for antepartum clinics and another day was designated for chiId health conferences. Procedures were worked out gradually. A nurse of the demonstration team was assigned to each health center or subcenter, in A health demonstration center with a well-

With WHO in the Philippines.

Taking Southeast Asia to Market: Commodities, Nature, and People in the Neoliberal Age

This article explains why massive political corruption appears to be incompatible with economic growth in Russia but compatible with very rapid economic growth in China. The common assumption is that corruption is bad for economic performance. So how can we explain the puzzling contrast between Russia and China? Is Russia being more severely “punished” for its corruption than China? If so, why? This article demonstrates that three intervening factors—comparative advantage, the organization of corruption, and the nature of rents—determines the impact of corruption on economic performance, and that these factors can explain the divergent outcomes. The article thereby offers an alternative to statist explanations of the Russia-China paradox.

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Reform, corruption, and growth: Why corruption is more devastating in Russia than in China

1. Securitization and Institutional Development 2. Capitalizing Thailand 3. Weapon of a Weak State 4. Conserving Smallholder Society 5. Combating Specters and Communists 6. Old Solutions, New Challenges

Land and Loyalty: Security and the Development of Property Rights in Thailand

Why are some Southeast Asian states strong and others weak? This article addresses this question by mapping state capacity across the region on two dimensions—fiscal and legal-administrative—and then exploring alternative explanations. It argues that variation in state capacities relates to differences in regime type and industrial structure. The region's democracies have greater fiscal state capacity than authoritarian regimes, and economies dependent on capital inflows associated with complex exports have greater legal-administrative state capacity than those dependent on other types of capital inflows.

The Strong and the Weak: Ups and Downs of State Capacity in Southeast Asia

Abstract:The history of political thought in Southeast Asia has overwhelmingly focused on nationalism and on socialism and Marxism. Little has been written about the fate of liberalism in the region. This is in stark contrast with the literature that in recent years has emerged on liberal political thought in South and East Asian contexts. Seeking to make a Southeast Asian contribution to this literature, this article asks: Is there liberalism in Thailand? To answer the question, it surveys the existing literature on Thai political thought, outlines the history of the reproduction of the Western liberal canon in Thai translation, and takes stock of contemporary political debates. What does it find? First, that while one might find liberals in Thai history, there is no liberalism. Second, that serious intellectual engagement with liberal political thought occurred comparatively late and has remained modest in Thailand, but that the spectre of Rousseau has nevertheless stalked Thai politics for more than eight decades. Third, and finally, that some Thai intellectual historians and other writers have responded to the country's recent political troubles — in the form of increasing political polarization, intractable and often violent conflict, two military coups, and the ill health and subsequent death of King Bhumibol — by laying the intellectual groundwork for a liberal form of Thai nationalism.

Tomas Larsson

Papers

Taking Southeast Asia to Market: Commodities, Nature, and People in the Neoliberal Age

Reform, corruption, and growth: Why corruption is more devastating in Russia than in China

Land and Loyalty: Security and the Development of Property Rights in Thailand

The Strong and the Weak: Ups and Downs of State Capacity in Southeast Asia

In Search of Liberalism: Ideological Traditions, Translations and Troubles in Thailand