Spain as an Object of Jihadist Propaganda

The purpose of this article is to look at the importance and treatment that Spain receives in jihadist propaganda. This study offers a series of empirical observations based on a content analysis of a sample of propaganda produced by jihadist groups between January 1994 and September 2008. The analysis of this material, the context in which it was spread, and a comparison with other Western countries leads to the conclusion that the role played by this country in jihadist propaganda can only be understood by taking into account “structural factors” that have little to do with a greater or lesser level of interference in “Islamic affairs.”     

Building Italianità in Northern Adriatic: the case of organized migration of population from Pola/Pula

The article analyzes the process of building italianità in the case of migration of population from Pola/Pula that started as early as May 1945 and culminated in an organized process that officially began on 23 January 1947 and lasted until 20 March that same year. The article sheds light on the premises of that identity by analyzing complex activities of the Italian authorities who wanted to “defend Italianism” in Pola/Pula, as well as in other border areas of former Venezia Giulia. At the state level, they were mainly carried out by the Office for the Julian March/Ufficio per la Venezia Giulia and following reorganization beginning at the end of 1946 by the Office for Border Areas/Ufficio per le Zone di Confine, and at the local level by a network of pro-Italian organizations and groups. Analysis contributes to the understanding of the top-down and bottom-up italianità building process. On the local level, common identity was built upon the myth of the patria, reiteration of traumatic/“wounded” memories and victim presentation of the “Italian” population, fear to be separated from the patria, and unjust peace treaty propaganda. Simultaneously, the “Italian” population understood the Italian state as their defender.     

The “Forest Jihad”

Recent Al Qaeda threats and related jihadi propaganda potentially herald a new weapon in the terrorist arsenal: the deliberate setting of forest fires and other conflagrations both to terrorize society and wreck untold economic damage. Beyond the immense, new burdens that would be placed on emergency response personnel, these fires could also create grave environmental crises causing severe pollution from gases escaping into the atmosphere. The strategy of “Forest Jihad,” now being championed by Al Qaeda strategists, is supported and justified theologically by radical Islamic scholars. With this new weapon, the terrorists believe, maximum physical and financial damage can be inflicted to targeted countries at comparatively little risk.     

Propaganda by the deed: Terrorism and anarchist theory in late nineteenth‐century Europe

Abstract

This essay examines the development of anarchist theory by radical intellectuals such as Peter Kropotkin and Elisee Reclus in response to certain acts of violence in late nineteenth‐century Europe. It argues that propaganda by the deed, as a strategy for political action, became central to the elaboration of anarchist theory and that a philosophical justification of individual, as well as collective, violence developed logically out of it. This becomes especially apparent in the thought of Reclus whose writings, until recently largely neglected, reveal important dimensions of European anarchism and help to clarify how propaganda by the deed fits into the larger framework of anarchist theory. Those anarchists who were frequently ambivalent when confronted with the reality of acts of violence, notably Kropotkin, but also Most and even Goldman, misunderstood the nature of their own conception of such “propaganda.”     

A “quest” for using information

Abstract

After several unsuccessful attempts to take power by force, the German Communist Party (KPD), from 1923 on, concentrated its efforts on electoral politics, trade union activity, and the struggle against Social Democratic reformism. However, the Communists had not relinquished their goal of a forcible seizure of power, as shown by the existence throughout the Weimar period of a secret Communist apparatus (Apparat) whose goals were to undermine the German armed services and police, train party cadres for insurrectionary combat, and carry out other subversive activities. Developed with Soviet assistance and headed by German Communists who had been trained in Russia, the Apparat controlled a network of spies, agents, and informers that penetrated German army and police units, government offices, and hostile political organizations. The Apparat also distributed illegal propaganda, furnished “military‐political” training and literature to KPD members, performed espionage and counterespionage duties, and made preparations for the party's continued operation were Communist organizations to be outlawed. Occasional terrorist acts can be laid to the Apparat, which, although prosecuted vigorously by Weimar authorities, scarcely constituted a serious revolutionary threat. The most important function of the Apparat was to control the Communist rank and file itself through surveillance of party members, searches and interrogations, and denunciations and betrayals. Ironically, it was the very existence of the Apparat that provided the Nazis with further corroboration for their claims to have saved Germany from Bolshevism.     

From reorganizing to reinventing: sixty years and “we still don’t get it”

Sixty years ago the “Brownlow Committee Report” was written by some of the most prominent members of the emerging field of public administration. Its recommendations had serious consequences for the way both our democratic republic and the field of public administration have evolved. In developing principles in which to anchor the recommendations, Luther Gulick, who was both the intellectual and political force behind the committee, contributed to a confusion of the concepts of organizations and the polity and those of management and governance.

Some of the story of how the concepts promoted by Gulick and the Papers on the Science of Administration led to a misconception, which became public administration's living legacy is told in this article. We then discuss the Brownlow Committee Report as something which changed: our very conception of the Constitution; Gulick's rationale for cooperation with Franklin D. Roosevelt; the Report as a misplacement of organizational concepts upon a polity; the dimensions of constitutional change in the report; and the staying power of Gulick's and the Committee's ideas. In conclusion, we contend that if we are to move beyond Gulick's legacy, that the field must learn and act upon the distinctions between organizations and the polity and management and governance.

“The charge that the Brownlow Committee set in train the development of the “imperial presidency” can be advanced only by those who have not read the Committee's report.”

James Fesler, former staff member of the Brownlow Committee Public Administration Review (July/August, 1987)

“How interesting it is historically that we all assumed in the 1930s that all management, especially public management, flowed in a broad, strong stream of value-filled ethical performance. Were we blind or only naive until Nixon came along? Or were we so eager to ‘take politics out of administration’ that we threw the baby out with the bathwater?”

Luther Gulick, member of the Brownlow Committee From Stephen K. Blurnberg, “Seven Decades of Public Administration: A Tribute to Luther Gulick” Public Administration Review (March/April, 1981)

was as old in American politics as it was popular. Yet, before the end of his second term, Roosevelt, with the help of Charles Merriam, Herbert Brownlow, and Luther Gulick, would use such hoary symbolism towards ends that would fundamentally alter our perceptions of the constitutional order, the nature of the presidency, and public administration. How did this come to pass? Barry Karl says that “He (Roosevelt) had continued as President to look at reorganization through the eyes of those who saw in it a means of saving money, balancing the budget, and thereby giving security to the nation's economy.” But Karl adds, “By 1936, this viewpoint had undergone drastic revision.”⁽⁶⁾ The revision in his thinking replaced “saving money” with “managerial control” as the principal aim of reorganization. “Managerial control” by the president would enable him not only to manage New Deal programs but protect them against potential Republican counterattacks, i.e., in short, to strengthen his hand as president.

The impetus for this change apparently came directly from the President's experiences in seeking to administer the government's burgeoning and increasingly chaotic Executive Branch. Roosevelt was a skilled, intuitive, and flexible administrator. But, according to Karl, his experience in seeking to administer the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act with a loose arrangement, quickly dubbed “the five ring circus,” taught the President several lessons. First, “it demonstrated the growing dependence of the President on official staff, other than cabinet members, working exceedingly close to the President's own sphere of daily operation. “⁽⁷⁾ Second, the problems of administering the Act raised questions among the participants themselves as to whether or not the President could “administer and control so complex an operation as federal relief given the inadequate machinery in his possession.”⁽⁸⁾ In other words, the effort was not simply a “five ring circus” because of FDR's famed flexible and informal style, but also because of the inadequacy of the available structures. Karl notes that “despite the problems inherent in the fiscal machinery as it stood, a continued development of governments within governments could only lead to a dangerous chaos over which the President would have no control whatsoever.”⁽⁹⁾ The questions raised suggested to the President that perhaps there was some merit to the position of those urging that emergency agencies be absorbed into the existing framework. This could meet a very practical question by “placing agencies within the purview of budget and accounting procedures already in existence.”⁽¹⁰⁾

According to Gulick, FDR told Brownlow and him at a November 14, 1936, meeting “that, since the election, he had received a great many suggestions that he move for a constitutional convention for the United States” and observed that “with Coughlin and other crackpots about there was no way of keeping such an affair from getting out of hand. But,” he said, “there is more than one way of killing a cat, just as in this job I assigned you.”⁽¹¹⁾ Gulick also quotes FDR as specifically telling the Committee, “We have got to get over the notion that the purpose of reorganization is economy. . . . The reason for reorganization is good management.”⁽¹²⁾ Of course FDR meant management as in “presidential management.”

So it was that President Roosevelt by 1936 was prepared to do something quite beyond “abolishing useless offices” in the words of his 1932 speech--something significantly more constitutional in nature. His other aim was no doubt to strengthen his hand significantly to protect the New Deal programs from Republican counterattack. But whatever his aim, the practical effect was to treat the executive branch as a hierarchical organization headed by a chief executive of corporate or city management conception. In so doing, the delicate constitutional balance among branches was altered. Recommending the reorganization of the executive branch as they did inevitably led to reorganization of the larger whole, the government, which was not an organization, but something qualitatively different.⁽¹³⁾     

Forest Jihad: Assessing the Evidence for “Popular Resistance Terrorism”

Despite increasing concern over the potential threat from “forest jihad,” there has been no systematic attempt to assess whether such attacks are in fact taking place. Drawing on principles from the geospatial profiling of terrorist events, fire-risk prediction data, and information on jihadist convictions, this article offers a thorough review of the evidence to address this question. The available information suggests that so far, jihadists have not attempted to attack North American or European wildlands by means of arson. Despite calls for “popular resistance terrorism” in the jihadist literature, and the apparently low costs associated with this type of attack, jihadists have so far shown little appetite for “forest jihad.”     

The Blue (White and Red) Orchestra: a soundtrack for the country that never was

The aim of the paper is to go beyond the commonly accepted view of Sarajevo’s Plavi orkestar (The Blue Orchestra) as the 1980s “teen pop-rock sensation” and illuminate the less conspicuous, but nevertheless crucial, political dimension of the band’s music and visual aesthetics. This will be done by discussing several “pieces of the puzzle” essential to understanding the background to and motivations behind Plavi orkestar’s political engagement in the second half of the 1980s: (1) the “Sarajevo factor;” (2) the Sarajevo Pop-rock School and the New Primitives “poetics of the local;” (3) the generational Yugoslavism; (4) the New Partisans “poetics of the patriotic;” and (5) the post-New Partisans “hippie ethos.” The concluding section of the paper will reflect on Plavi orkestar’s resurgence in 1998 and explore the question of the band’s continuing resonance within the post-Yugoslav and post-socialist contexts. An argument underlying the discussion of all of these elements is that Plavi orkestar’s Yugoslavism of the 1980s is best understood as a soundtrack for the country that never was (i.e. a popular-cultural expression of what, from the viewpoint of a particular generational cohort and its location in the “Yugoslav socialist universe,” the community they thought of as their own ought to have been but never really was), and that the current value of this soundtrack lies in offering not only a particular window into the pre-post-socialist past but also in being a symbolic referent for a certain kind of retrospective utopia that gauges the realities of the post-socialist – that is, neo-liberal capitalist – present and, in so doing, figures as a “normative compass” for the life of dignified existence.     

Becoming Patani Warriors: Individuals and the Insurgent Collective in Southern Thailand

Focusing on the case of Thailand's ongoing insurgency in its southern Malay Muslim majority region, this article examines the circumstances surrounding individual's choices to engage in violent revolt and their conformity and non-conformity with the norms and disciplines of the movement in which they operate. Insurgent-driven violence in Thailand's southern border provinces has attracted considerable attention, but little has been published about the people who become “Patani Warriors” (juwae). Based on the authors’ direct encounters with current and former insurgents and study of Thai official documentation and captured insurgent propaganda material, this article presents the most detailed information currently available on southern Thailand's shadowy fighters. We argue that there is no single type of Malay Muslim insurgent: this variegated reality defies the normative ideals projected in insurgent's indoctrination material while it also poses a challenge for the Thai authorities to define in simple terms those who oppose the state.     

CACOPHONIES IN THE CONTEMPORARY CHORUS ABOUT CHANGE AT PUBLIC WORKSITES,AS CONTRASTED WITH SOME STRAIGHT-TALK FROM A PLANNED CHANGE PERSPECTIVE

The New Public Management (henceforth NPM) has coalesced into a movement in a short period of time, virtually worldwide. Thus, inter alia, we hear about the allegedly-new focus on the “customers” of public services, which are to be provided by “public intrapreneurs” as well as by cadres of employees at all levels who are “empowered.” And so on and on—through the conventional organizational litany including cross-training, total quality, performance measurement, and eventuating in strategic planning. These emphases make for a pleasing, even convincing, organizational libretto.

If the “chorus” proclaiming the NPM libretto is both ubiquitous as well as insistent, however, the chanting is often loosely-coupled, curiously directed, and at times even contradictory—at times so much so as to alert one's native cunning about what forces are really at work. Hence, the reference here to the “chorus” and also the “cacophonies” this essay detects in NPM's ardent vocalizing. This reflects our judgment that, in equal measure, NPM combines ubiquity, too much of some useful things, unreconciled diversities, and issues at sixes-and-sevens.

But this essay also urges that NPM can “walk its talk.” In effect, several emphases will at once help explain how NPM was all-but-predestined to experience serious shortfalls, as well as prescribe how NPM can rise about these limitations. Particular attention gets directed at appropriate guidelines interaction and structural arrangements.

Four emphases relate to these critical-cum-constructive ambitions. In preview, NPM 1. seldom even attempted detailing a useful approach to applications;

2. typically neglected systemic or millieu characteristics within which applications occurred;

3. usually did not specify a useful front-load in designs: i.e., training in values, attitudes, and interaction skills that would facilitate developing a “cultural preparedness” for appropriate applications; and

4. seldom specified supportive structural/managerial arrangements.

This essay proposes to do better.

This essay takes a direct if dual approach to describing the New Public Management “chorus” and its “cacophonies.” To begin, introductory attention goes to NPM as a “liberation” of theory and practice beyond the classic conservatisms of Public Administration. Then, four limitations of this NPM “chorus” will be detailed, and this quartet of “cacophonies” also implies ways to enhance NPM applications, as well as urges a stark warning against overselling.     

Reflections on helping I: sustainable development,capacity building and participation

This selection focuses on the useful sense of what “help” means in development context. “Sustainable development is the goal, in sum; this requires the building of both individual and group capabilities; and broad participation is the major vehicle underlying the formation of solid capabilities.

“If you have come to help me you can go home again. But if you see my struggle as part of your own survival then perhaps we can work together.”

-Australian Aborigine Woman⁽¹⁾ (Manila 1991, p. 217)

What does it mean to “help” a person like this Aborigine woman in Australia, -- or a community, or line agency in Nepal, the Philippines, Thailand, or here in Calgary? One response to this question might be in terms of the intended outcomes of my “helping”. A second response could be to consider the means I use to help the other move in the direction of their intended outcomes. A third view is to include the concerns for outcomes and process with an interest in the mutual influence of the helper and the helpee on each other during the life of the dialogue.

What are some important influences that shape my view of “helping” at this point, that is, in November 1992? Four forces immediately come to mind: 1) my training in the planned change of human systems, 2) my recently completed involvement for five years with colleagues associated with the Health Development Project in Nepal as we struggled to strengthen the capacity of the government's health-related institutions and rural communities to improve the quality of life of the rural poor; 3) conversations with colleagues at the International Centre like Sheila Robinson and Tim Pyrch who are passionate (and articulate) in their views about development and participation, and 4) my relationship with my wife, Tana, which provides an experiential context for struggling with the issues embedded in the Aborigine woman's comment which introduces these reflections. These forces -- and others which will go unmentioned but are known to those who wrestle with the mysterious undercurrents of life -- have led me to increasingly think of “helping” in terms of three ideas: sustainable development as the ultimate goal of development; capacity building as the appropriate vehicle for pursuing sustainable development; and participation of all appropriate stakeholder groups as partners in the pursuit of sustainable development.

This reflection will clarify several features of my emerging theory of development by getting the jumbled and often incoherent whispers of suggested ideas in my head down on paper.     

Public administration theory a futurist vision

As the world becomes increasingly interdependent, Americans interested in public administration will begin to realize that it is a universal phenomenon and field of inquiry that attracts the attention of researchers and teachers in all countries of the world. This will lead them to stop equating American governance with Public Administration. They will come to see that, in a comparative frame of reference, American bureaucracy, its administrative practices and political functions are quite unique. Comparative Public Administration as a special focus of study will disappear because all administrative studies must be comparative, and “American Public Administration” will gain recognition as one of many parochial foci for research as a country-specific emphasis.

Before this shift in perspective can gain widespread acceptance in America, however, the relevant work of non-American scholars will have to become more generally read in America, and the distinctively American conditions that led to the origin of this field and its subsequent dissemination on a global basis must be recognized.

Among the specific points that this paradigmatic shift will highlight are the following: the reasons why bureauphilia and bureauphobia persist in a context marked by pressure to make administrative studies and performance non-political and to divorce “politics” from “public administration;” the vain effort to gain recognition for Public Administration as either a profession or a discipline; the institutional implications of this false dilemma; the effects of focusing on career civil servants while paying scant attention to other bureaucrats, namely military officers, partisan appointees, retainers and consultants; and the causes and consequences of the American bureaucracy's semi-powered status.     

Of oligarchs,orientalists, and cosmopolitans: how “Armenian” is rabiz music?

This paper examines the controversial music genre rabiz in relation to political and socio-economic developments in post-Soviet Armenia. Rabiz, an urban folk-pop genre characterized by melismatic singing and “oriental” embellishments, is a ubiquitous soundtrack to everyday life in the country, with lyrics commonly covering romance, male friendship, and family ties. Ethnographic observations suggest that its popularity draws on the affective appeal with which it captures common hardships and aspirations of post-socialist transition. In spite of this, rabiz is almost universally denounced by nationalist intellectuals and liberal citizens for foreign influences, sentimentality, consumerism, and conservatism. While for the cultured classes, the rejection of rabiz as “un-Armenian” is often an integral part of the construction of a virtuous self, the alternative conceptions of performers and fans reveal the polysemy of Armenianness as a moral category.     

Ready for the homeland? Ritual,remembrance, and political extremism in Croatian football

In the case of Croatia, sport has proved to be a highly politicized form of national expression, functioning as a salient social field in which its “national habitus codes” are most intensively articulated, debated, and contested. An incident emblematizing this argument occurred on 19 November 2013, when the Croatian national football team secured their qualification for the 2014 Football World Cup in Brazil. In front of the 25,000 people at Zagreb's Maksimir stadium, the national team player, Josip ?imuni?, grabbed the microphone and “greeted” all four stands with a loud chanting of Za dom (For the home(land)), to which the stands thunderously responded spremni (ready), the official salute of the Independent State of Croatia, a fascist WWII quisling-state. This paper argues that the issue extends beyond politically radicalized football hooligans and has to be understood from the standpoint of “social memory.” By focusing on football, the article scrutinizes debates in the Croatian public sphere dealing with the salute Za dom – spremni. Providing an insight into its complex and multi-layered nature, this paper illustrates that Croatian football has to be understood as a field in which social memory is prominently constructed, heatedly articulated, and powerfully disseminated.     

Economic agendas old and new and chinese administrative reform

Facing new agenda economic development issues, China like other developing states is forced to coordinate policies regionally. As need for decentralization “downward” stretches to include delegation “outward,” Beijing must find its best response to the new trend. Four tests reveal no reason for China to stay aloof from simple Membership in Pacific-Asian regional organizations. Three tests reveal no problem with China taking an Activist role in such regional organizations. Three final tests reveal potential costs China would pay for seeking a regional Leadership role, especially before Beijing's post-succession direction is determined.     

NEWS AS A WEAPON: HOLLINGTON TONG AND THE FORMATION OF THE GUOMINDANG CENTRALIZED FOREIGN PROPAGANDA SYSTEM, 1937–1938

Abstract

This article examines the process of the centralization of the Guomindang (GMD) foreign propaganda system during 1937 and 1938. The US-trained journalist Hollington Tong was the key person linking Chiang Kai-shek with the English-language press cohort. Based on his personal news network in the treaty ports, Tong extended the government’s propaganda network in the United States and Britain. He professionalized the propaganda institution and pursued a “hands off policy,” co-opting foreign journalists by offering them substantial assistance. This article challenges the perceived passivity of China’s foreign propaganda activities and argues that foreign propaganda was an important war strategy for the GMD government after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. Factionalism played an important role in expediting the centralization process. It was Chiang’s patronage that allowed Tong, a new member of the GMD, to lead the foreign propaganda system and pursue a liberal censorship policy.     

Art et artisanat en Afrique Noire: Problèmes d'une définition différentielle

In 1977, John Lonsdale published a review of William R. Ochieng's study APre-Colonial History of the Gusii of Western Kenya in the Kenya Historical Review. Entitled “When did the Gusii (or any other group) become a ‘Tribe’?”, the ten-page article was less a book review and more a treatise on the practice of history in Africa. Taking Lonsdale's question as a point of inspiration, this article provides a critical rethinking of the theories of “tribe”, ethnicity and identity politics that continue to dominate African scholarship by examining the particular case of the Luyia in western Kenya. Through the seemingly incongruous and stubbornly diverse accounting of Luyia political community, this study suggests that histories of ethnic identity remain trapped by their own constructivist logic, elevating the “inventors” of traditional accounts at the expense of the plural and dissenting voices that characterise the multiple forms of political imagination practised across Africa that, while diverse, continue to rely on the idiom of the “tribe”.     

Contextualizing Radicalization: The Emergence of the “Sauerland-Group” from Radical Networks and the Salafist Movement

This article proposes an analytical perspective on jihadist radicalization that focuses on the immediate social environment from which clandestine violent groups emerge, to which they remain socially and symbolically connected, and from which they receive some degree of support. Based on a detailed analysis of the “Sauerland-Group” it traces relational dynamics shaping individual pathways as well as processes of group formation within local Salafist milieus, the wider Salafist movement, and radical jihadist networks. It argues that one characteristic feature of “homegrown” jihadist groups is their simultaneous connection to and embeddedness in various different social contexts as well as the fluid, ad-hoc character of the clandestine group and its ambivalent relation with its supportive social environment.