Showing papers on "State (polity) published in 2013"

Let Many Civil Societies Bloom: The Rise of Consultative Authoritarianism in China

Abstract: In this article, I analyse civil society development in China using examples from Beijing to demonstrate the causal role of local officials' ideas about these groups during the last 20 years. I argue that the decentralization of public welfare and the linkage of promotion to the delivery of these goods supported the idea of local government–civil society collaboration. This idea was undermined by international examples of civil society opposing authoritarianism and the strength of the state-led development model after the 2008 economic crisis. I find growing convergence on a new model of state–society relationship that I call “consultative authoritarianism,” which encourages the simultaneous expansion of a fairly autonomous civil society and the development of more indirect tools of state control. This model challenges the conventional wisdom that an operationally autonomous civil society cannot exist inside authoritarian regimes and that the presence of civil society is an indicator of democratization.

Imperial debris : on ruins and ruination

Abstract: Imperial Debris redirects critical focus from ruins as evidence of the past to "ruination" as the processes through which imperial power occupies the present. Ann Laura Stoler's introduction is a manifesto, a compelling call for postcolonial studies to expand its analytical scope to address the toxic but less perceptible corrosions and violent accruals of colonial aftermaths, as well as their durable traces on the material environment and people's bodies and minds. In their provocative, tightly focused responses to Stoler, the contributors explore subjects as seemingly diverse as villages submerged during the building of a massive dam in southern India, Palestinian children taught to envision and document ancestral homes razed by the Israeli military, and survival on the toxic edges of oil refineries and amid the remains of apartheid in Durban, South Africa. They consider the significance of Cold War imagery of a United States decimated by nuclear blast, perceptions of a swath of Argentina's Gran Chaco as a barbarous void, and the enduring resonance, in contemporary sexual violence, of atrocities in King Leopold's Congo. Reflecting on the physical destruction of Sri Lanka, on Detroit as a colonial metropole in relation to sites of ruination in the Amazon, and on interactions near a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Brazilian state of Bahia, the contributors attend to present-day harms in the occluded, unexpected sites and situations where earlier imperial formations persist. Contributors . Ariella Azoulay, John F. Collins, Sharad Chari, E. Valentine Daniel, Gaston Gordillo, Greg Grandin, Nancy Rose Hunt, Joseph Masco, Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao, Ann Laura Stoler

Complements or Substitutes? Private Codes, State Regulation and the Enforcement of Labour Standards in Global Supply Chains

Abstract: Recent research on regulation and governance suggests that a mixture of public and private interventions is necessary to improve working conditions and environmental standards within global supply chains. Yet less attention has been directed to how these different forms of regulation interact in practice. The form of these interactions is investigated through a contextualized comparison of suppliers producing for Hewlett-Packard, one of the world’s leading global electronics firms. Using a unique dataset describing Hewlett-Packard’s supplier audits over time, coupled with qualitative fieldwork at a matched pair of suppliers in Mexico and the Czech Republic, this study shows how private and public regulation can interact in different ways — sometimes as complements; other times as substitutes — depending upon both the national contexts and the specific issues being addressed. Results from our analysis show that private interventions do not exist within a vacuum, but rather these efforts to enforce labour and environmental standards are affected by state and non-governmental actors.

Business, Politics, and the State in Africa: Challenging the Orthodoxies on Growth and Transformation

Abstract: * Introduction: growth, governance, and economic transformation in Africa * 1 Developmental patrimonialism? * 2 Tanzania: growth with poverty reduction * 3 Ghana: a star but static performer * 4 Ethiopia: rent-seekers and productive capitalists * 5 Rwanda: the party leads, the market follows * Conclusion: challenging the orthodoxies on business and politics in Africa

Normative power as hegemony

Abstract: This article identifies four key problems in the debate about normative power Europe that may be fruitfully tackled when linking it to the concept of hegemony: the debate about whether EU foreign and external policy is driven by norms or interests; the problem of inconsistent behaviour as a result of competing and contested norms; the question of the role of state and non-state actors in EU foreign and external policy; and the problematic standing of normative power as an academic engagement, in particular in regard to whether the theory is of primarily explanatory, descriptive or normative value. The author suggests that the concept of hegemony may address these problems. First, it combines norms and interests, thus transcending the divide that has resulted in endless debates about the EU’s standing as a normative power. Second, hegemony does not start from a pre-given set of norms with fixed meanings, but rather puts the struggles about these norms at centre stage, thus seeing inconsistencies not as und...

The Struggle to Remake Politics: Liberal Reform and the Limits of Policy Feedback in the Contemporary American State

Abstract: President Barack Obama's two signature first-term legislative victories—the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Act—are the law of the land, but the political battle over their entrenchment continues. The question now is whether these landmark reforms will be consolidated and create a new politics going forward. We develop an argument about the limits of policy feedback to illuminate the obstacles to durable liberal reform in the contemporary American state. We argue that political scientists have paid insufficient attention to the fragility of inherited policy commitments, and that the capacity of reforms to remake politics is contingent, conditional, and contested. Feedbacks are shaped not only by the internal attributes of policies, but also by the interaction between policy-specific characteristics, the strategic goals of officeholders and clientele groups, and the political forces arising from a contentious and uncertain political environment.

The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy

Abstract: Suzanne Mettler Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 163 pp During the Tea Party's 2009 rallies many signs decried the threat of government to programs actually provided by government. A...

Different Paths to the Modern State in Europe: The Interaction Between Warfare, Economic Structure, and Political Regime

Abstract: Theoretical work on taxation and state-building borrows heavily from early modern European experience. While a number of European states increased centralized tax revenues during this period, for others revenues stagnated or even declined and these variations have motivated alternative arguments for the determinants of fiscal and state capacity. This study reviews the arguments concerning the three determinants that have received most attention, namely warfare, economic structure, and political regime, and tests them by making use of a new and comprehensive tax revenue dataset. Our main finding is that these three determinants worked in interaction with each other. Specifically, when under pressure of war, it was representative regimes in more urbanized-commercial economies and authoritarian regimes in more rural-agrarian economies that tended to better aggregate domestic interests towards state-building.

Life for Sale? The Politics of Lively Commodities:

Abstract: When so many facets of nonhuman life are commodified daily with little challenge, this paper looks to shed light on what is objectionable about commodifying nonhuman life. As a contribution in this direction, we undertake a comparative examination of the formation of two different but equally lively, and international, commodities: Exotic pets and ecosystem carbon. In this paper we first set out to understand what characteristics of life matter in the production of the commodity. We argue that a particular mode of value-generating life predominates in each commodity circuit: in exotic pet trade, an individualized, ‘encounterable’ life; in ecosystem services, an aggregate, reproductive life. Second, we find that hierarchies between humans and other beings are highly generative in the formation and effects of lively commodities. On one hand, these hierarchies cast nonhumans in a disposable state that is integral to the functioning of exotic pet trade; on the other hand, these hierarchies are partly what eco...

A NATION IN FRAGMENTS: Patronage and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Indonesia

Abstract: Scholars of Indonesia are still searching for ways to characterize the ordering principles of the new post-Suharto politics In the 1950s and 1960s, Clifford Geertz's notion of aliran (stream) politics captured central features of Indonesian political life In the 1970s and 1980s, the state took center stage, with scholars seeing the New Order state as standing above society, depoliticizing and reordering it Since reform began in 1998, these analyses are clearly no longer adequate, but scholars have yet to find persuasive alternatives This article offers one attempt to diagnose the fundamentals of political organization in contemporary Indonesia It starts by emphasizing the organizational fragmentation that characterizes much contemporary political life It seeks the origins of this fragmentation in two sources: the ubiquity of patronage distribution as a means of cementing political affiliations and the broader neoliberal model of economic, social, and cultural life in which patronage distribution is

The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

Abstract: In The Story of the Human Body, Daniel Lieberman, Professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, shows how we need to change our world to fit our hunter-gatherer bodies. This ground-breaking book of popular science explores how the way we use our bodies is all wrong. From an evolutionary perspective, if normal is defined as what most people have done for millions of years, then it's normal to walk and run 9 -15 kilometres a day to hunt and gather fresh food which is high in fibre, low in sugar, and barely processed. It's also normal to spend much of your time nursing, napping, making stone tools, and gossiping with a small band of people. Our 21st-century lifestyles, argues Daniel Lieberman, are out of synch with our stone-age bodies. Never have we been so healthy and long-lived - but never, too, have we been so prone to a slew of problems that were, until recently, rare or unknown, from asthma, to diabetes, to - scariest of all - overpopulation. The Story of the Human Body asks how our bodies got to be the way they are, and considers how that evolutionary history - both ancient and recent - can help us evaluate how we use our bodies. How is the present-day state of the human body related to the past? And what is the human body's future? "Monumental. The Story of the Human Body, by one of our leading experts, takes us on an epic voyage". (Neil Shubin, author of Your Inner Fish). "Riveting, enlightening, and more than a little frightening". (Christopher McDougall, author of Born to Run). Daniel Lieberman is the Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and a leader in the field. He has written nearly 100 articles, many appearing in the journals Nature and Science, and his cover story on barefoot running in Nature was picked up by major media the world over. His research and discoveries have been highlighted in newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, Boston Globe, Discover, and National Geographic.

The political economy of oligarchy and the reorganization of power in Indonesia

Abstract: When three decades of authoritarian rule unravelled in Indonesia following the fall of President Suharto in 1998, it was widely expected that this would also open the doors for a dramatically different sort of politics in which individuals and social organizations could demand accountable governance and rule of law. It was indeed true that the old centralized authoritarian regime gave way to a remarkably open system of electoral democracy and to the devolution of state administrative authority. A vibrant and often chaotic media emerged to debate ideas previously proscribed, and new figures flooded onto the political landscape. And in the volatile period that followed the Asian financial crisis just a few years previously, successive Indonesian governments had been forced to agree to the demands of the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and other global organizations for widespread reforms in finance and banking, in public and corporate governance, and in the judiciary, especially in the commercial courts. However, such institutional changes were not reflected in the way social and economic power was concentrated or imposed in Indonesia. Well over a decade after the fall of the Suharto regime, access to and control of public office and state authority continues to be the key determinant of how private wealth and social power is accumulated and distributed. Many of the old faces continue to dominate politics and business, while new ones are drawn into the same predatory practices that had defined politics in Indonesia for decades. Even political parties that presented themselves as

The hybrid state: Crime and citizenship in urban Jamaica

Abstract: In inner-city neighborhoods in Kingston, Jamaica, criminal "dons" have taken on a range of governmental functions. While such criminal actors have sometimes been imagined as heading "parallel states," I argue that they are part of a hybrid state, an emergent political formation in which multiple governmental actors—in this case, criminal organizations, politicians, police, and bureaucrats—are entangled in a relationship of collusion and divestment, sharing control over urban spaces and populations. Extending recent scholarship on variegated sovereignty and neoliberal shifts in governance, I consider the implications of this diversification of governmental actors for the ways that citizenship is experienced and enacted. The hybrid state both produces and relies on distinct political subjectivities. It is accompanied by a reconfigured, hybrid citizenship, in which multiple practices and narratives related to rule and belonging, to rights and responsibilities, are negotiated by a range of actors. - See more at: http://www.anthrosource.net/Abstract.aspx?issn=0094-0496&volume=40&issue=4&doubleissueno=0&article=339507&suppno=0&jstor=False&cyear=2013#sthash.6XmjPANm.dpuf

Territory's Continuing Allure

Abstract: The role of the territorial state has changed in recent decades in the wake of the communications revolution; the explosion of transnational social, political, and economic formations; accelerated ...

Existential Authenticity: Place Matters

Abstract: While there are multiple theoretical approaches to the concept of authenticity in tourism studies, existential authenticity, an activity-based approach, has witnessed the greatest proliferation in the literature in recent years. Existential authenticity refers to a state of Being, rather than an essentialist, objective quality. As a result, research that has engaged this concept has focused on emotions, sensations, relationships, and a sense of self. However, these same studies also suggest the significance of the performance of place for tourists’ experiences. So while geographic perspectives have long shed light on the connections between place and experience, place has received little attention in studies of authenticity. Thus, it is argued that place matters in existential authenticity, which consequently points to the importance of geographic perspectives in further development of this concept for tourism studies.

COUNTERFEITING THE NATION? Skopje 2014 and the Politics of Nation Branding in Macedonia

Abstract: This article analyzes the political dynamics centered on Skopje 2014, an urban renovation project sponsored by the government of the Republic of Macedonia, which is linked to efforts to define a distinctive nation brand for the country. Examining the project and the controversies it has generated, I argue that the form of nation branding represented by Skopje 2014 indicates a new modality of neoliberal governance in which the state functions as an entrepreneurial subject within a competitive global marketplace oriented to the attraction of deterritorialized finance capital. I show how promoting a national brand image defined a field of state management where the development project was imagined to mediate Macedonia's relationship to foreign investment and tourism. However, as illustrated by the Macedonian case, nation branding not only rationalizes a new state project but also grounded an idiom of popular claim-making on the state. Through portrayals of the Skopje 2014 project as an inauthentic and counterfeit copy of other European cities, critics have constructed counterproductive national promotion as both an economic and existential threat to citizen-subjects. The article therefore explores how nation branding can open a new space of politics when nation-brand images emerge as sites of popular contestation. [nation branding, national identity, representation, citizenship, neoliberalism, Macedonia]

Environmental Litigation in China: A Study in Political Ambivalence

Abstract: 1. Post-Mao: economic growth, environmental protection, and the law 2. From dispute to decision 3. Frontiers of environmental law 4. Political ambivalence: the state 5. On the front lines: the judges 6. Heroes or troublemakers? The lawyers 7. Soft support: the international NGOs 8. Thinking about outcomes.

War, Identity and the Liberal State: Everyday Experiences of the Geopolitical in the Armed Forces

Abstract: War, Identity and the Liberal State critically examines the significance of gender, race and sexuality to wars waged by liberal states and the soldiers who wage them. Drawing on original fieldwork research with British soldiers, it offers insights into how their lived experiences are shaped by, and shape, a politics of gender, race and sexuality that not only underpin power relations in the military, but a wider geopolitics of war. It explores how shared and collectively mediated knowledge on gender, race and sexuality facilitates certain claims about the nature of governing in liberal states and about why and how such states wage war against ‘illiberal’ ones in pursuit of global peace and security. In linking the politics of daily life to the international, this book insists that it is vital to explore how geopolitical events and practices are co-constituted, reinforced and contested in everyday experiences, practices and spaces. The book also urges scholars interested in the linguistic construction of geopolitics to consider the ways in which everyday objects, spaces and bodies also reinforce particular ideas about war, identity and statehood and some of their violent consequences.

Russia and Syria: explaining alignment with a regime in crisis

Abstract: This article explores explanations of Russia's unyielding alignment with the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad since the Syrian crisis erupted in the spring of 2011. Russia has provided a diplomatic shield for Damascus in the UN Security Council and has continued to supply it with modern arms. Putin's resistance to any scenario of western-led intervention in Syria, on the model of the Libya campaign, in itself does not explain Russian policy. For this we need to analyse underlying Russian motives. The article argues that identity or solidarity between the Soviet Union/Russia and Syria has exerted little real influence, besides leaving some strategic nostalgia among Russian security policy-makers. Russian material interests in Syria are also overstated, although Russia still hopes to entrench itself in the regional politics of the Middle East. Of more significance is the potential impact of the Syria crisis on the domestic political order of the Russian state. First, the nexus between regional spillover from Syria, Islamist networks and insurgency in the North Caucasus is a cause of concern—although the risk of ‘blowback’ to Russia is exaggerated. Second, Moscow rejects calls for the departure of Assad as another case of the western community imposing standards of political legitimacy on a ‘sovereign state’ to enforce regime change, with future implications for Russia or other authoritarian members of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Russia may try to enshrine its influence in the Middle East through a peace process for Syria, but if Syria descends further into chaos western states may be able to achieve no more in practice than emergency coordination with Russia.

Contesting Food Safety in the Chinese Media: Between Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony

Abstract: Food safety is a matter of intense contestation in the Chinese media. Through three case studies, this article shows that government and corporate elites strive to maintain media hegemony while citizen-consumers and activists engage in counter-hegemonic practices. Under conditions of hegemony, citizen dissent is most likely to take one of two forms: diffused contention or radical protest. Like the yin and yang of civic dissent, these two forms are both the results of, and responses to, state and corporate hegemony.

Fragile and failed states: Critical perspectives on conceptual hybrids:

Abstract: Over the last decade, Western government agencies and international organizations have increasingly turned their attention to the issue of state ‘fragility’ and ‘failure’ in developing countries that are confronted with war, violence and extreme poverty. They have presented this issue as a major international policy challenge in the fields of security and development assistance. Policy analysts and scholars have also played an instrumental role in the dissemination and legitimization of the two concepts. This article disputes the analytical underpinning of this new research agenda. It argues that the concepts of fragile and failed states are confusing, inherently superficial and unstable policy-oriented labels. First, it elaborates five critical ideas concerning the scientific dimension of this literature. Second, it interprets the analytical framework of fragile/failed states as a reactivation of developmentalist theories, primarily driven by a Western conception of the polity. Third, it encourages the r...

War Signals: A Theory of Trade, Trust and Conflict

Abstract: We construct a dynamic theory of civil conflict hinging on inter-ethnic trust and trade. The model economy is inhabitated by two ethnic groups. Inter-ethnic trade requires imperfectly observed bilateral investments and one group has to form beliefs on the average propensity to trade of the other group. Since conflict disrupts trade, the onset of a conflict signals that the aggressor has a low propensity to trade. Agents observe the history of conflicts and update their beliefs over time, transmitting them to the next generation. The theory bears a set of testable predictions. First, war is a stochastic process whose frequency depends on the state of endogenous beliefs. Second, the probability of future conflicts increases after each conflict episode. Third, "accidental" conflicts that do not reflect economic fundamentals can lead to a permanent breakdown of trust, plunging a society into a vicious cycle of recurrent conflicts (a war trap). The incidence of conflict can be reduced by policies abating cultural barriers, fostering inter-ethnic trade and human capital, and shifting beliefs. Coercive peace policies such as peacekeeping forces or externally imposed regime changes have instead no persistent effects.

The Political Economy of the Euro

Abstract: The Eurozone's present state of crisis originated from decisions made at its creation. The decision to create a monetary union was motivated by political objectives and completely disregarded the economics of a monetary union. Political leaders did not understand the necessary economic conditions for a successful monetary union and did not recognize the inherent fragility of the monetary union they established. They showed the same disturbing lack of understanding of the economics of the sovereign debt crisis in 2010. They misdiagnosed the problem, and their response included disastrous decisions that intensified the crisis. This review explains these errors and concludes with recommendations for saving the euro.

Cities and Conflict in Fragile States in the Developing World

Abstract: The articles presented in this Special Issue draw on five years of research by the Cities and Fragile States programme of the Crisis States Research Centre, based at the London School of Economics and Political Science. This programme, funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), was an exploratory ‘blue skies’ endeavour that set out to examine the relationship between cities, states and conflict in conflict-affected parts of the developing world. Our starting-point was the neglect of cities in contemporary discourses of state-building and state fragility, despite the fact that it is widely accepted that cities have historically played a critical role in processes of state consolidation, transformation and erosion (see, for example, the work of Charles Tilly, 1989, 1992, 2010). Our research has found that cities are still central to such processes, but in much more complex ways. The articles that make up this Special Issue represent a sample of the larger research output of the programme, which we also refer to throughout this introductory article. We begin by exploring the relevance of Tilly’s ideas for cities in fragile and conflict-affected areas of the contemporary developing world, highlighting how these constitute a useful starting-point for analysis, but also how cities, states and conflicts in these contexts differ significantly from those characteristic of the period examined by Tilly. Focusing particularly on the changing nature of conflict, we then outline an original tripartite typology of contemporary conflicts, distinguishing between sovereign, civil and civic conflict. We draw on the research presented in this Special Issue and beyond to explore the ways in which cities are incorporated into these different forms of conflict as either targets, spaces of relative security, or incubators of further strife and antagonism

The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire

Abstract: Preface ix Guide to Ottoman Turkish Words and Names xxxvii Abbreviations xxxix CHAPTER ONE Ottoman Sources and the Question of Their Being Purged 1 CHAPTER TWO: The Plan for the Homogenization of Anatolia 29 CHAPTER THREE: The Aftermath of the Balkan Wars and the"Emptying" of Eastern Thrace and the Aegean Littoral in 1913-14 63 CHAPTER FOUR: The Transformation of Ottoman Policies toward the Ottoman Greeks during the First World War 97 CHAPTER FIVE: The Initial Phase of Anti-Armenian Policy 125 CHAPTER SIX: Final Steps in the Decision-Making Process 157 CHAPTER SEVEN: Interior Ministry Documents and the Intent to Annihilate 203 CHAPTER EIGHT: Demographic Policy and the Annihilation of the Armenians 227 CHAPTER NINE: Assimilation: The Conversion and Forced Marriage of Christian Children 287 CHAPTER TEN: The Question of Confi scated Armenian Property 341 ELEVEN Some Official Denialist Arguments of the Turkish State and Documents from the Ottoman Interior Ministry 373 CHAPTER TWELVE: Toward a Conclusion 449 Selected Bibliography 453 Index 471

Effects of a Data-Driven District Reform Model on State Assessment Outcomes

Abstract: A district-level reform model created by the Center for Data-Driven Reform in Education (CDDRE) provided consultation with district leaders on strategic use of data and selection of proven programs. Fifty-nine districts in seven states were randomly assigned to CDDRE or control conditions. A total of 397 elementary and 225 middle schools were followed over a period of up to 4 years. In a district-level hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analysis controlling for pretests, few important differences on state tests were found 1 and 2 years after CDDRE services began. Positive effects were found on reading outcomes in elementary schools by Year 4. An exploratory analysis found that reading effects were larger for schools that selected reading programs with good evidence of effectiveness than for those that did not.

Power in Concert: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Global Governance

Abstract: How states cooperate in the absence of a sovereign power is a perennial question in international relations. With Power in Concert, Jennifer Mitzen argues that global governance is more than just the cooperation of states under anarchy: it is the formation and maintenance of collective intentions, or joint commitments among states to address problems together. The key mechanism through which these intentions are sustained is face-to-face diplomacy, which keeps states' obligations to one another salient and helps them solve problems on a day-to-day basis. Mitzen argues that the origins of this practice lie in the Concert of Europe, an informal agreement among five European states in the wake of the Napoleonic wars to reduce the possibility of recurrence. The Concert first institutionalized the practice of jointly managing the balance of power, through its many successes, and Mitzen shows that the words and actions of state leaders in public forums contributed to collective self-restraint and a shared commitment to problem solving-and at a time when communication was considerably more difficult than it is today. Despite the Concert's eventual breakdown, the practice it introduced-of face-to-face diplomacy as a mode of joint problem solving-survived and is the basis of global governance today.