Turkey's Emergence as a “Center Power” Is a Game Changer

The world is rapidly evolving on many fronts. Brazil, Turkey and other emerging powers are taking their own initiatives and building their own global links outside the old frameworks of the G‐8, the United Nations Security Council and NATO. The “third way” politics of Tony Blair that embraced globalization from the left of center in Britain has given way to the Tory party once again. Just as recovery from the financial crash seemed on the horizon, Europe's sovereign debt crisis has erupted. The historically unprecedented pace and scale of urbanization in China is transforming the politics of the Communist Party. President Lula of Brazil, former US treasury secretary Henry Paulson, Singapore's foreign minister George Yeo and others take stock of these manifold developments.     

Protectionism Against China Is No Answer to America's Woes

The world is rapidly evolving on many fronts. Brazil, Turkey and other emerging powers are taking their own initiatives and building their own global links outside the old frameworks of the G‐8, the United Nations Security Council and NATO. The “third way” politics of Tony Blair that embraced globalization from the left of center in Britain has given way to the Tory party once again. Just as recovery from the financial crash seemed on the horizon, Europe's sovereign debt crisis has erupted. The historically unprecedented pace and scale of urbanization in China is transforming the politics of the Communist Party. President Lula of Brazil, former US treasury secretary Henry Paulson, Singapore's foreign minister George Yeo and others take stock of these manifold developments.     

Brazil and Turkey Shift Global Politics

The world is rapidly evolving on many fronts. Brazil, Turkey and other emerging powers are taking their own initiatives and building their own global links outside the old frameworks of the G‐8, the United Nations Security Council and NATO. The “third way” politics of Tony Blair that embraced globalization from the left of center in Britain has given way to the Tory party once again. Just as recovery from the financial crash seemed on the horizon, Europe's sovereign debt crisis has erupted. The historically unprecedented pace and scale of urbanization in China is transforming the politics of the Communist Party. President Lula of Brazil, former US treasury secretary Henry Paulson, Singapore's foreign minister George Yeo and others take stock of these manifold developments.     

The BRICs Come of Global Age

The world is rapidly evolving on many fronts. Brazil, Turkey and other emerging powers are taking their own initiatives and building their own global links outside the old frameworks of the G‐8, the United Nations Security Council and NATO. The “third way” politics of Tony Blair that embraced globalization from the left of center in Britain has given way to the Tory party once again. Just as recovery from the financial crash seemed on the horizon, Europe's sovereign debt crisis has erupted. The historically unprecedented pace and scale of urbanization in China is transforming the politics of the Communist Party. President Lula of Brazil, former US treasury secretary Henry Paulson, Singapore's foreign minister George Yeo and others take stock of these manifold developments.     

China's Megacity Mandarinate

The world is rapidly evolving on many fronts. Brazil, Turkey and other emerging powers are taking their own initiatives and building their own global links outside the old frameworks of the G‐8, the United Nations Security Council and NATO. The “third way” politics of Tony Blair that embraced globalization from the left of center in Britain has given way to the Tory party once again. Just as recovery from the financial crash seemed on the horizon, Europe's sovereign debt crisis has erupted. The historically unprecedented pace and scale of urbanization in China is transforming the politics of the Communist Party. President Lula of Brazil, former US treasury secretary Henry Paulson, Singapore's foreign minister George Yeo and others take stock of these manifold developments.     

The Rise and Fall of New Labour

The world is rapidly evolving on many fronts. Brazil, Turkey and other emerging powers are taking their own initiatives and building their own global links outside the old frameworks of the G‐8, the United Nations Security Council and NATO. The “third way” politics of Tony Blair that embraced globalization from the left of center in Britain has given way to the Tory party once again. Just as recovery from the financial crash seemed on the horizon, Europe's sovereign debt crisis has erupted. The historically unprecedented pace and scale of urbanization in China is transforming the politics of the Communist Party. President Lula of Brazil, former US treasury secretary Henry Paulson, Singapore's foreign minister George Yeo and others take stock of these manifold developments.     

Pushing the frontiers of state audit: political auditing by Israel's state comptroller

Israel's State Comptroller has audited the political behaviors of elected officials and private citizens, in what are departures from its own traditions and those of other state auditors. Political auditing seems likely to appear among other auditors, sooner or later. Auditing is likely to attract more attention from political scientists, and the politics of auditing is likely to become an increasing topic of inquiry, as politics becomes more prominent on the auditor's agenda. The criticism directed at Israel's State Comptroller can be read to suggest the problems inherent in this expansion of audit activity.     

The devil's in the theory: A critical assessment of Robert Chambers' work on participatory development

The practice orientation of Robert Chambers' work on Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), which aims at enabling local people and communities to take control over their own development, has received much attention in development circles. This article attempts to shift the emphasis away from PRA's practice towards its theoretical underpinnings. The article argues that PRA's practice/empiricist orientation causes it to be insufficiently theorised and politicised. As a result, questions about inclusiveness, the role of PRA facilitators, and the personal behaviour of elites overshadow, or sometimes ignore, questions of legitimacy, justice, power and the politics of gender and difference. The article draws on arguments and debates involving Habermasian 'deliberative democracy' and post-structuralist notions of power.     

The Current State of Japanese Research on the History of Chinese Women (1900-1949)

Abstract

Based on recently available new evidence, this study revisits the Gao Gang affair in the early 1950s, with an emphasis on Mao's role in manipulating elite politics as a way of strengthening his charismatic leadership. The CCP elite politics in the early 1950s were in essence "court politics" centered on and manipulated by Mao. Afraid of being sidelined by Beijing's "managerial elite" in economic reconstruction, Mao promoted Gao and other regional leaders, while stripping powers from Liu, Zhou, and their associates. By the end of 1953, Mao started to suspect Gao's loyalty and Gao's promotion backfired. Mao quickly abandoned Gao and isolated him, Gao's downfall was as quick and sudden as his rise. Mao's chief concern was none other than the enhancement and strengthening of the belief in his infallibility, which was the foundation of his charismatic authority.     

The European Union as a Regional Normative Hegemon: The Case of European Neighbourhood Policy

This article analyses the European Union's European Neighbourhood Policy in the context of the European Union as an actor employing normative power in international politics. The European Neighbourhood Policy can be seen as a substitute for the Union's enlargement that has previously been the main vehicle for the Union's normative power in Europe. By relinquishing enlargement, the EU is in danger of losing its capacity for effectively stabilising its nearest neighbours as well as losing its legitimacy and justification in their eyes. The article discusses whether the European Neighbourhood Policy can be seen as a fruitful way out of the Union's present conundrum. It concludes that at least in its present form the Neighbourhood Policy is far from a panacea. It suffers from a lack of legitimacy as a result of its inability to answer the neighbours' calls for full political and institutional belonging in Europe.     

Financial crises as catalysts for regional cooperation? Chances and obstacles for financial integration in ASEAN+3, MERCOSUR and the eurozone

This article compares and analyses the different answers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations+3 (ASEAN+3), Mercado Común del Dur (MERCOSUR) and the eurozone on financial crises in their respective regions. All three regions were hit by economic turmoil between 1997 and 2012, but whereas ASEAN+3 and the eurozone answered with establishing regional liquidity arrangements (RLAs) in order to fight future crises, financial cooperation did not take off in MERCOSUR. Thus, the paper asks why some regions establish RLAs in cases of crisis and others do not. It argues that the variance of regional financial integration in different world regions is due to different interests of regional powers in their respective regions. The regional powers of ASEAN+3 and the eurozone are institutionally and/or economically highly embedded within their respective regions, but this is not the case for Brazil in MERCOSUR. China and Japan suffered from negative externalities of the Asian crisis, and, consequently, have had an interest to stabilize their neighbours’ economies after the crisis. In contrast, Brazil was able to follow a beggar-thy-neighbour strategy at the turn of the millennium, which externalized some of the costs of Brazil's own economic crisis towards Argentina. As a result, Brazil has had no interest in providing liquidity for its regional neighbours after the crisis. France and Germany are not only economically but also institutionally highly embedded in the eurozone because they share a common currency with their regional neighbours. Thus, the stability of the eurozone is a vital interest for Europe's regional powers, and they devote significant resources to stabilize the economies of the eurozone's periphery.     

Intellectuals,International Relations and the Constant Emergency

In this essay, I return to Hans Morgenthau's and Hannah Arendt's writings on the Vietnam war and US foreign policy, which explored questions of bureaucracy, technology, emergency. On one level the essays they wrote illustrate the extent to which the discipline of International Relations (IR) has now caught up with the analyses of politics and war that they were developing in the 1960s and 1970s. We begin to see how lines of thought in Morgenthau's writing connect directly with the work of a younger generation of scholars interested in the work of intellectuals like Giorgio Agamben on the dangers of a security-obsessed politics in a ‘state of emergency’ or ‘state of exception’, or how Arendt's and Morgenthau's work on bureaucracy and war is explored in contemporary work; from a pedagogical perspective, drawing out these connections creates the possibility of a different, potentially more subversive, way of introducing students to the discipline of ir.     

A Question of Agency: Africa in international politics

Over recent years African states have become increasingly prominent actors in high-level international politics. This article makes the case for studying Africa's international relations from the point of view of agency. The article outlines contemporary contexts within which questions of African agency have come to the fore and argues a need to think conceptually about agency in international politics in a way that accommodates the range of different agencies at work. The article outlines three elements as foundations for the analysis of African agency: first, a conceptualisation of different dimensions of agency; second, a recognition of the importance of sovereignty in differentiating between state, or state-enabled agents, and others; and third, a temporally embedded approach to agency that historicises contemporary agency. Combined, these elements suggest that future work on African agency would be able to engage seriously with the continent's role in international politics in a way that presents Africa as actor not just acted upon, historical agent not just history's recipient.     

‘LADIES A YOUR TIME NOW!’ Erotic politics,lovers' rock and resistance in the UK

‘Lovers’ rock' is a largely overlooked genre of ‘Black British’ reggae music that emerged in London during the 1970s through Caribbean nightclubs and ‘pirate radio’ stations. Lovers’ rock was an integral part of the reggae music scene of that period. However, lovers rock became gendered as genre that appealed particularly to the romantic aspirations of black teenaged girls growing up in ‘Thatcher's Britain’. Within the political context of the dancehall scene, both lovers rock and roots reggae are seen as binary opposites of each other – lovers being ‘soft’ feminised reggae concerned with romantic love, and roots as masculinised ‘serious’ reggae concerned with black oppositional politics. Using black feminist theories on love and the erotic, this paper challenges the gendering of lovers' rock by suggesting that the genre was part of a much broader and complex political expression of love and rebellion amongst Caribbean communities in Britain. Indeed, while the gendering process is highly problematic, this paper also argues that Caribbean communities had also used the erotic and political intersection of both genres to reconfigure racist and sexist representations of their identities. As such Caribbean males and females had created their own ethic of ‘loving blackness’ as a way of restoring and validating their experiences within Britain's often hostile urban centres.     

Contextualized violence: politics and terror in Dagestan

Despite the escalating terrorist actions, there is no polarized constellation in the Islamic politics of Dagestan. Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) officers regard the corrupt Dagestan authorities to be significantly responsible for the massive conversion of youths to terrorism, and began to contact with moderate Salafis to isolate the “forest brothers” (armed Salafis) in 2010. Exploiting the FSB's soft strategy, secular intellectuals requested to reform the Muslim Spiritual Board of Dagestan by electing a legitimate mufti. Having seen the incompetence of intra-Sufi opposition (non-Avar sheikhs) in the War on Terror, the Spiritual Board jumped on the bandwagon of dialog strategy in 2012. The secular authorities of Dagestan, indifferent to intra-Muslim politics, limit their activities to the call for dialog between the secular authorities and the forest brothers. In this way, political actors hijack the master narrative of the “War on Terror” and these narratives are imported to local politics.     

THE THIRD SECTOR AND IMMIGRANT ABSORPTION: LESSONS FROM THE ISRAELI EXPERIENCE

This paper deals with the role of two third sector organizations in immigrant absorption in Israel during the mid-1980s through 1993. The Jewish Agency, a non-governmental, voluntary, non-profit “public institution” funded by Diaspora Jewry had responsibility for immigrants during their first year in the country. It represented world Jewry and Israeli political parties. A second third sector institution, the quasi-public party controlled state religious school system played a significant role in the education of Ethiopian immigrant children.

The paper evaluates their impact on the absorption of immigrants. To what extent did these third sector agencies pursue their own agendas and or serve the immigrants? The paper also examines the influence of Israel's political-administrative systems on the third sector. How unique is the Israeli experience? Hopefully the findings will shed new light on the politics of collaboration with the third sector in contemporary Israel.

Evidence presented here suggests that third sector absorbing agencies often pursued their own interests at the expense of the immigrants. The paper also reveals the complexity of the political and administrative character of Israel's third sector. Finally, the analysis shows the importance of political-administrative systems for understanding third sector collaboration in Israel.     

Islamism and Democracy in the Modern Maghreb

The literature on state autonomy has typically argued that the developmental state's weakness is accounted for by the relatively greater power of societal forces. The postulation of conflict between the state's purposes and partisan societal forces has been unable to shed much light on the enduring nature of the state-society duality. The literature on communitarianism has drawn attention to the multi-layered identities which underlie developing country politics and has underlined the efficacy of developmental action at the level of non-state actors. This article suggests that the community perspective can contribute towards a richer understanding of the state-society relationship than has been possible within the neo-statist paradigm. Without substituting community for the state, we need to modify at a broadly theoretical level the kind of macro-perspective, typical in comparative developmental studies, which adopts the physical boundaries of the state and its self-given developmental idiom, as the discipline's own conceptual boundaries.     

Know thy enemy: Hizbullah, ‘terrorism’ and the politics of perception

The labelling career of the Lebanese armed group and political party Hizbullah is an interesting case with which to investigate the epistemological consequences of the politics of naming. Having found itself since its inception in the mid-1980s on the receiving end of mainly US and Israeli policy makers' and analysts' scorn for being an archetypical terrorist organisation, Hizbullah has been surprisingly successful in achieving its stated aims and in enduring the verbal and military onslaught against it. Although it is not the intention here to reduce explanations for Hizbullah's durability to discursive politics, this article suggests that both the labelling of Hizbullah as terrorist and, conversely, its identification as a ‘lebanonised’ political force that is about to make its conversion into an unarmed political party are misleading and incapable of grasping this organisation's complexities. In fact, both ‘terrorist’ and ‘lebanonised’ labels produce a quality of knowledge inferior to that produced by Hizbullah's own conceptualisation of its enemies. But most importantly, the debate on Hizbullah's alleged terrorist nature has obscured several of its traits that many should register before passing judgement on it. Our analysis shows that the variety of institutions Hizbullah has been carefully elaborating and readapting over the past two decades in Lebanon operate today as a holistic and integrated network which produce sets of values and meanings embedded in an interrelated religious and political framework—that of the wilayat al-faqih. These meanings are disseminated on a daily basis among Shi'a constituencies through the party's institutionalised networks and serve to mobilise them into ‘the society of the Resistance’ (mujtamaa’ al-muqawama), which is the foundation of the hala al-islamiyya (Islamic sphere) in Lebanon. Accordingly, any prospect of Hizbullah's transformation away from armed ‘resistance’ should be firmly placed in an analysis of its hegemony among the Shi'a of Lebanon and of the tools it uses to acquire and sustain this status.     

Multiple Dimensions of Social Assistance: The Case of Peru's ‘Glass of Milk' Programme

Social assistance has attracted renewed interest in countries where economic growth is doing too little on its own to address high levels of income inequality and poverty. Research into the material effects of such programmes is important but can be misleading if it fails to capture their full meaning to intended beneficiaries and other stakeholders. This is illustrated by a case study of Peru's ‘glass of milk’ programme, drawing on mostly qualitative evidence of its material, social and cultural dimensions. The programme is found to be well adapted to diverse contexts, but in a way that enhances its efficacy as a gendered instrument of mass patronage rather than as a means of addressing Peru's structural inequalities. The paper also suggests that a switch to conditional cash transfers is unlikely, on its own, to change this.     

Women's Participation and Representation in Politics: Perspectives from Ghana

This article discusses empirical findings on issues affecting women's effective participation in politics and the public sector of Ghana. It argues that women's involvement in public life and politics has steadily declined contrary to hopeful reportage that global empowerment campaigns have increased women's political participation across Africa. The article suggests that given the deep-rooted socio-cultural hindrances women face, affirmative action policies need to be revisited to complement women's agency in contesting for, winning, and participating in politics and public service more effectively.