Caught in a bad romance: displaced people and the Georgian state*

After years of frenetic cross-border movement, in 2014, a mother and daughter live in post-Soviet Georgia as practically stateless noncitizens. Recognizing the advantages of citizenship, they commit their limited resources to obtaining citizenship documents. Through an analysis of their attempts to make citizenship claims and build stable lives, this paper argues that the contemporary Georgian citizenship regime fosters a relationship that further destabilizes the lives of already vulnerable non-citizens. It does so by drawing them in with the promise of citizenship – only to deny them. Yet, Georgian citizenship law is neither uniquely malicious nor indifferent; its form of ‘inclusive exclusion’ is an inherent feature of the reigning paradigm of global citizenship. In this context, far from being passive subjects, non-citizens facing consistent official refusals and seemingly flagrant obfuscation actively attempt to both maintain their relationship with the state and transform it in their favor.     

Is the state social or the computer inhuman? Claims for state support and citizenship in post-socialist Georgia

In the discussions of citizenship in post-socialist Georgia, the topic of social entitlements predominates. Soviet social citizenship, which granted the full range of social rights, significantly shaped the people's current expectations of social rights in Georgia. In order to address the external and internal pressure for poverty alleviation, the Georgian government started reforming the social support system of the country. The cornerstone of Georgia's current social policy is a new social assistance programme, the main principle of which is to provide social benefits to the poorest families as identified by an evaluation system. This paper explores the enactment of the ‘targeted social assistance’ (TSA) programme in a village in north-western Georgia. By participating in the TSA programme, Georgian citizens exercise social citizenship as a practice of bargaining for universal social rights that at present are not achievable for all as the state provides social security only to extremely needy families. The category of social citizenship described by T.H. Marshall helps us to understand the claims of Georgian citizens for state support. The discrepancy between social security and social citizenship causes people to misunderstand the goals of the TSA programme and this ultimately leads to dissatisfaction among Georgia's citizenry.     

When the exception becomes the rule: borders,sovereignty, and citizenship

Borders are a unique political space, in which both sovereignty and citizenship are performed by individuals and sovereigns. Using the work of Agamben and Foucault, this article examines how decisions made at the border alienate each and every traveler crossing the frontier, not simply the ‘sans papiers’ or refugees. The governmentality at play in the border examination relies on an embedded confessionary complex and the ‘neurotic citizen’, as well as structures of identity, documentation, and data management. The state border is a permanent state of exception that clearly demonstrates the importance of biopolitics to the smooth operation of sovereign power.     

Democracy or Good Governance? Globalization,Transnational Capital,and Georgia's Neo-liberal Revolution

Western aid donors merge democracy and good governance in theory and practice. Yet, since the 2003 Rose Revolution, Georgia's governance indicators have soared while its democracy scores have plummeted. The good governance–democracy merger constitutes an attempt by the transnational capitalist class to cultivate consent for its hegemonic project of neo-liberal globalization. This article highlights the personal and institutional networks connecting Georgian elites with the organizations involved in globalizing governance and democracy. It shows how these organizations are dominated by the representatives of transnational capital. Finally, it shows that Georgia, as an undemocratic but effective ‘governance state’, is not an exception.     

Transforming (but not transcending) the state system? On statist cosmopolitanism

Can states become committed and competent agents of cosmopolitan justice? The theory of ‘statist cosmopolitanism’ argues that they can: their citizens can be turned towards a commitment to cosmopolitan principles and actions by moral entrepreneurs constituting a ‘cosmopolitan avant-garde’, and can be sustained in their commitment to those principles by their pre-existing attachment to the state as a political community. Taking cosmopolitan principles as axiomatic, this paper subjects statist cosmopolitanism to critique. First, I question the scale of the transformation that a cosmopolitan avant-garde can engender given the complexity of the causal chains the avant-garde seek to elucidate, as well as the countervailing potency of the state itself which reinforces particularistic attitudes in its citizens. Second, I argue that even if, contra my preceding argument, the cosmopolitan avant-garde were to be successful, states would find it desirable to federally integrate in order to be better able to realise their cosmopolitan commitments. Such integration is compatible with statist cosmopolitanism’s motivational theory, even if not its institutional vision. Finally, I re-characterise the cosmopolitan avant-garde as agitators for the transcendence, rather than just transformation, of the state system.     

The Western secret services,the East German Ministry of State Security and the building of the Berlin Wall

The main reason for the closure of the East–West sectoral border in Berlin on 13 August 1961, and the ensuing construction of the Berlin Wall, was to prevent refugees from fleeing the German Democratic Republic and so keep the Communist state in being. However, new evidence shows that the border was also closed for security reasons, as the Communists claimed – they called it ‘the securing of the state border’ (‘die Sicherung der Staatsgrenze’). The open border with the West in Berlin was the main cause of the GDR's intense security crisis in the 1950s and its closure gave the state greater stability. The security advantages to the Communists of closing the border were so obvious that the Western secret services had long feared that they would do precisely this. In particular, the West's spy chiefs saw that Khrushchev's ultimatum of November 1958 over Berlin was in part designed to put an end to their operations. Although they did not see precisely what action would be taken, they expected some measure or other to deprive them of their base in West Berlin; they saw also that the closure of the sectoral border was a distinct possibility. Far from being unanticipated, the security measure taken by the Communists in August 1961 was one of the most long-expected and carefully-prepared-for events of the twentieth century.     

Accommodating toleration: on Balint’s classical liberal response to the multiculturalism challenge

ABSTRACT

Peter Balint identifies three challenges to toleration, one of which is the multiculturalism challenge. This is the charge that liberal toleration fails to accommodate minorities adequately, which requires positive recognition rather than negative toleration. I discuss his response to the multiculturalism challenge and its connection to a classical liberal view of toleration. This involves Balint’s claim that liberal neutrality should be understood as reflective and ‘difference-sensitive’, which should be realised by the state being ‘hands-off’ in the sense of withdrawing support for privileged ways of life. I argue that Balint’s classical liberal view that the state needs to be ‘hands-off’ is in need of specification and that it does not fit well with his claim that neutrality needs to be reflective and difference-sensitive.     

Global IR through dialogue

This article aims to address how to ensure a two-way ‘dialogue’ across ‘the West/non-West distinction’ in international studies. To this end, I first discuss three different approaches to dialogue, the Socratic, the Habermasian, and the Weberian, and clarify what kind of thing dialogue should be if it is to overcome the ‘West-non-West divide’ and transform the current ‘Western-centric’ IR into a global discipline. I argue that dialogue should be understood as reciprocal feedback from different perspectives for mutual learning. In order to achieve this goal (i.e. mutual learning), I call for an ‘instrumentalist’ approach to dialogue. To elucidate this point, I offer an empirical illustration. The focus here is on dialogue as mutual learning between Western-centric IR theory, more specifically constructivism, and the indigenous experience and knowledge of East Asia.     

Renormalizing citizenship and life in Fortress North America

The relation between the concepts of sovereignty and citizenship are being rearticulated through what is popularly referred to as ‘Fortress North America’. The ‘War on Terror’ has amplified previously emerging shifts in governance, control and surveillance. One significant consequence is the development of increasing border harmonization schemes between the United States of America and Canada. This development has led to newly emerging technologies of citizenship in both Canada and the USA. This paper pays particular attention to the shifts that are taking place with regards to the revocation of citizenship, the creation of new categories of citizenship through programs such as ‘Nexus’ and the proposed introduction of bio‐metric ID cards in Canada and the introduction of the discourse of the ‘new normal’. Through new border harmonization programs established in the ‘Smart Border Declaration’ citizens and non‐citizens in both Canada and America will be organized, controlled and subjected to new forms of state surveillance. The discourse of the ‘new normal’ is meant to signal a shift in our expectations of daily life. Whether we are experiencing the ‘new normal’ due to disease, fear, risk, loss of faith or security, we are being called into place as subjects of this discourse. The ‘new normal’ is used in reference to the need for greater control, the expectation of greater security and surveillance of cells, microbes, bodies and society. This paper will explore the logic that is embedded within the discourse of the ‘new normal’.     

Public administration reform in Vietnam: problems and prospects

Public Administration Reform (PAR) in Vietnam is an ambitious programme that seeks to implement ‘rule by law’ within a centralized, state management framework. It is a political strategy by the key party and state officials with the aim of institutionalizing and legitimizing the transition to the ‘socialist market economy’ through creating a dependable system of rule‐bound public administration. This programme has received extensive donor support. In the content and trajectory of PAR, external models and technical assistance are influential but the political struggle over control of state resources shapes the process. This is seen in the attempts to constitutionalize the powers of state organs and to distinguish them from the party; to separate owner and manager roles and to replace political with economic criteria in the operation of state owned enterprises; to combat corruption in ‘street level’ decision making; to rationalize the machinery of government; to create a centrally managed, professional civil service; and to reform the system of public finances. In each of these areas, there is resistance to reform proposals and evidence of implementation gaps. In these circumstances, concentration of donor support on the centrally managed PAR programme is a high risk strategy. Continued support for local, ‘bottom‐up’ reform initiatives could help sustain the demand for reform. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Semi-legality and belonging in the Obama era: the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals memorandum as an instrument of governance

While the effects of the Deferred Actions for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) executive order have been analysed by a number of scholars, little attention has been paid to the ways in which this program has functioned as a technology of governance. Drawing from content analysis of political discourse regarding the 2012 DACA executive memorandum, this paper offers new directions for thinking about one of the key legacies of the Obama administration. It contextualizes DACA within a global proliferation of variegated legal statuses and argues that DACA discourses allowed state actors to re-invigorate notions of US exceptionalism and humanitarianism, while deeming ‘illegality’ an objective fact existing outside of the state’s control. In doing so, notwithstanding the DACA memorandum’s limitations in alleviating conditions of ‘illegality’ even for eligible subjects, dominant discourses surrounding the program functioned to legitimise state practices and normalise the bounds of national belonging and ‘good citizenship’ in the face of contradicting global realities.     

Republican democracy and compulsory voting

In this article, I focus on Chapters 4 and 5 of On the People’s Terms, chapters that deal with democratic influence and control. I take an applied political science approach to how Pettit’s republic might be practically achieved by exploring the under-appreciated capacity of elections to mobilise the resistance-prone, contestatory public upon which his republicanism depends. Whereas Pettit tends to focus on public contestation between elections and only demands that the public has the opportunity to vote when elections are held, I argue that they should be given a more prominent role within his republic and further, that access to voting is not enough: rather, citizens should actually vote. In order to ensure that participation is socially inclusive and that the public’s attempts at influence are ‘individualised’, ‘unconditioned’ and ‘efficacious’ in the manner Pettit desires, I suggest that compulsory voting should be a major pillar of his republicanism.     

Did You Spot an Alien? Voluntary Vigilance,Borderwork and the Texas Virtual Border Watch Program

In 2008, the US launched an Internet site, the Texas Virtual Border Watch Program, which shows real-time video from the US–Mexico border. With this site, anyone can participate in US border control. In this article, the programme is discussed in relation to contemporary theories of border studies: the relocation of borders, borderwork and the bordering process. The programme is described as part of a widespread voluntary vigilance and as a continuum of the technological control over the border. Based on an analysis of the media, three discourses have been identified: the vigilant citizens, the reassuring authorities and the sceptical critics. These reveal the advantages and risks of the programme from different perspectives. It is argued that the programme remains ‘cosmetic’ border control and that this echoes the dilemma between economic wellbeing and security issues.     

Machinery of government and standards in public service: teaching new dogs old tricks

Abstract

For much of the last thirty years the main leitmotif animating Civil Service reform in the UK has been that efficiency and effectiveness in public services can be achieved by adapting management methods and practices derived from commercial enterprise. In the process of making the dreams and schemes of that plural singularity we have come to call ‘managerialism’ operational though, something valuable appears to have been lost, and that something is the Civil Service as a unified ‘constitutional bureaucracy’. In this article I explore some of the unfortunate governmental and administrative consequences of these managerially minded reforms. In particular, I seek to highlight the continuing relevance of what have been routinely characterized as outmoded and anachronistic machineries of government, and to stress the importance of the increasingly forgotten core business of public administration: the running of a state and of a constitution.     

Impossible protest: noborders in Calais

Since the closure of the Red Cross refugee reception centre in Sangatte, undocumented migrants in Calais hoping to cross the border to Britain have been forced to take refuge in a number of squatted migrant camps, locally known by all as ‘the jungles.’ Unauthorised shanty-like residences built by the migrants themselves, living conditions in the camps are very poor. In June 2009, European ‘noborder’ activists set up a week-long protest camp in the area with the intention of confronting the authorities over their treatment of undocumented migrants. In this article, we analyse the June 2009 noborder camp as an instance of ‘immigrant protest.’ Drawing on ethnographic materials and Jacques Rancière's work on politics and aesthetics, we construct a typology of forms of border control through which to analyse the different ways in which the politics of the noborder camp were staged, performed and policed. Developing a critique of policing practices which threatened to make immigrant protest ‘impossible’, we highlight moments of protest which, through the affirmation of an ‘axiomatic’ equality, disrupted and disarticulated the borders between citizens and non-citizens, the political and non-political.     

‘The dead are coming’: acts of citizenship at Europe’s borders

This article combines the research agenda of the acts of citizenship literature with reflections on emancipatory theatre. I examine the Centre for Political Beauty’s activity-based artwork ‘The dead are coming’ which problematizes the cruelties of the European border regime in symbolically charged spaces in the German public. Focusing particularly on the roles available to ‘actors’ and ‘spectators’, and the directionality of the message conveyed through the artwork, I examine how the performance subverts the ‘sites’ and ‘scales’ of citizenship. My analysis indicates that the artwork’s subversive potential emerges not only from the political vision conveyed by the artist collective, but also from the way in which others become involved in the performance. Acts of political beauty thus most extensively challenge instituted citizenship’s orientalist anchoring, reverse status-based role allocations and subvert the structural violence of borders when the performance enables the enactment of novel forms of political agency and solidarity.     

Political theory in historical context. Reflections on Democratic Justice and the Social Contract by Albert Weale

In Democratic Justice and the Social Contract, Weale defends a contractarian theory of social justice following what he calls the ‘empirical method’, which consists in grounding ethics and politics on the observation of concrete examples of social contracts, rather than abstract speculations. In this paper, I will make three critical remarks. First, the empirical method is open to the same objections usually raised against more abstract approaches to social contract theory: by an appropriate choice of the starting point, one can justify any ethical or political position. Second, Weale’s focus on the societies that were successful in managing common pool resources appears arbitrary: other social organizations (e.g. hunters and gatherers societies) would be a more obvious choice. Finally, in following the empirical method, philosophers must be willing to import into ethics and politics the same problems of interpretation one encounters in theoretical social sciences. As an example, I will show that Weale’s position on the welfare state depends on the interpretation he gives of some practices observed in the societies he chooses as models. Different interpretations of the same practices would induce Weale to revise his positions.     

Public affairs,issue management and political strategy: methodological issues that count — a different view

In the preceding article, Doug Schuler makes two challenges to scholars in the areas of public affairs, issues management and corporate political strategies to advance the state of empirical knowledge: (1) to make use of more sophisticated methodology, and (2) to adopt a grand theory to guide our empirical efforts. This paper is a commentary on these challenges. In it, I agree that our field of inquiry requires additional sophistication in methods, measures and statistical tools. However, I disagree that a grand theory would aid us in advancing our field. Instead, I propose that advancement is more likely to occur with the acceptance of a common dependent variable to guide our efforts. I propose that until we agree why we study what we do, we will have difficulty building a coherent stream of knowledge that speaks to the managerial audience. I advocate adopting firm performance as our ultimate dependent variable and defining our area of inquiry as ‘What makes some firms outperform others in the nonmarket environment?’ and ultimately, ‘How does non‐market performance affect overall firm performance?’ Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

Telangana and the politics of State formation in India: Recognition and accommodation in a multinational federation

This article examines the politics of State formation in India by taking up the case of Telangana. Drawing from the emerging literature on the politics of recognition and territorial accommodation in multinational federations, I argue that territorial accommodation of Telangana was made possible by the convergence of strategic interests and role of multiple actors to recognize Telangana’s distinctive territorial identity and accommodate its Statehood demand when an opportune ‘political opportunity structure’ emerged in the late 1990s till 2014. It extends the insights of ‘actor-centred’ institutionalism and contributes to an emerging literature which emphasizes the ‘multi-centred origins’ of border change and State formation in India in particular, and in multinational federations in general. By underscoring State formation as a complex process, this article cautions against a simplistic reading of the politics of State formation in India as an act of one-upmanship whereby the Centre can unilaterally make or break State borders.