Environmental security and development

The development policy community has recently awakened to the importance of security as an important dimension of development policies and a basic pre-condition for their success. This paper seizes the opportunity to highlight the linkage between human security and development, and environmental security. It argues that the link is particularly strong in developing countries where human security is closely tied to peoples' access to natural resources. Drawing on a number of case studies where communities have increasingly endured hardships linked with environmental deterioration and resource scarcity, the author points to the fact that, any efforts to better the lives of peoples may be unsuccessful if they fail to conserve and enhance essential resources and life support systems.1 ?1. See, Khagram, Clark and Raad Khagram, Sanjeev, Clark, William C. and Raad, Dana Firas. 2003. From the Environment and Human Security to Sustainable Security and Development. Journal of Human Development, 4(2): 44–76.  [Google Scholar], ‘From the Environment and Human Security’. View all notes While the security literature often tones down environmental threats as soft, the author points out that they often emerge as major threats in certain contexts where, like wars, they may have detrimental and enduring impacts on peoples' security and development. This paper recommends a broader approach to security that recognises the significance of environmental threats to human security and legitimises its firm integration within the current development policy agenda. Given the crosscutting and trans-boundary nature of environmental threats, the author concludes that any development policy actions designated to mitigate environmental threats may maximise their impacts if they transcend institutional and regional boundaries, and are embedded in broader institutional collaboration.     

Challenging international law: a dilemma of private security companies

Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a marked increase in the sale of military services by private security companies (PSCs).1 ?1. The term private security company is used throughout the article instead of private military companies or private military firms. View all notes These companies sell anything from combat support for government military operations to military training and assistance, logistical support and more conventional security protection services. They have undertaken operations in countries as diverse as Sierra Leone, Croatia, and Columbia and now Iraq and Afghanistan. The presence of these companies on the international stage raises fundamental questions about the way war is now being fought. Unfortunately, the legal issues raised by their presence in conflicts have not yet been properly addressed. This article sets out to examine the suitability of international law in defining and controlling the activities of PSCs on the battlefield. It then goes on to discuss the problems associated with national regulation. Here the focus is on the attempts by the United States (US), South Africa, and United Kingdom (UK) governments to introduce effective legislation to control the industry.     

Evaluating Spain's Reparation Law

The Reparation Law1 This article follows Aguilar, Balcells, and Cebolla in referring to the Law of Historical Memory as the Reparation Law. Although Aguilar et al. do not specify why they choose this terminology, the term is used here as it better denotes the law's content. Aguilar, Balcells, and Cebolla, ‘Determinants of Attitudes Towards Transitional Justice’, 3. View all notes approved on 26 December 2007 is the latest link in a chain of reparatory measures from the earliest days of Spain's transition to democracy to deal with the legacy of the Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship. Numerous articles have analysed the historical memory movement2 See Encarnación, ‘Reconciliation After Democratization’; and Gálvez Biesca, ‘El proceso’. View all notes and the reasons behind the timing and scope of Spain's reckoning with the past.3 See Encarnación, ‘Reconciliation After Democratization’; Aguilar, ‘Justice, Politics and Memory’, Barahona de Brito, Gonzaléz-Enríquez, and Aguilar, The Politics of Memory; and Blakeley, ‘Digging Up Spain's Past’. View all notes This literature presents the case of Spain as a counterpoint to the received wisdom of the transitional justice literature that successful democratization requires reconciliation. This article contributes to the specific literature on Spain, and the wider transitional justice literature, by focusing on an area which has not yet been analysed: the ‘co-construction’ and content of the Law. Through a comparison of the draft bill and the final Law, this article fills this gap.     

Youths in the interface of development and security

This article interrogates the link between youth, security and development in Africa and argues that the central determinant in the link is ‘governance’, especially as this implies the ability of the state to harness the productive potential of youths and to meet their demands on a number of issues. The article also asserts that the reality of a youth bulge in many African countries presents challenges (as opposed to crises), as much as opportunities for national socio-economic transformation. Besides, youths in many developing countries have been the victims of developmental experiments often tele-guided by international financial and development agencies. In its conclusion, the articles argues that efforts to address the challenges posed by youths must move from platitudinous wish-list into formulation of coherent policy agenda that is consistent with the socio-economic and political realities of individual countries; in which youths themselves active agents; and one which must be incorporated into the wider governance framework of nation-states.

The issue of youth and violent conflict concerns more than youth, it is a reflection of society in crisis and hence of development itself. If a society's values, norms, customs, practices, structures and institutions are under threat and such changes in turn threaten the development of its children into youth and then adults, then that society cannot sustain itself.1 ?1. UNDP, Youth and Violent Conflict, p.12. View all notes

The state … the economy… are predicated on notions of adulthood; they all require the participation of adults in order to function. If youth are unable to fully make this transition to the minimal conditions of adulthood, then such structures are unsustainable and will either fracture or mutate in unforeseen ways. An understanding of the intersections between youth, violent conflict and society is a way of re-examining development and developing societies. Youth, those who engage in violence and especially those who do not, are located at the junctures between development, security, peace and conflict.2 ?2. UNDP, Youth and Violent Conflict, p.13. View all notes     

Informal institutions,forms of state and democracy: the Turkish deep state

Democratization studies have proven that the main difference between autocracy and democracy is, counter-intuitively, not the basic regime structure, but rather, the function and validity of democratic formal institutions defined as rules and norms.1 For the institutionalist turn in democratization studies, see O'Donnell, ‘Delegative Democracy’; O'Donnell, ‘Another Institutionalization’; O'Donnell, ‘Polyarchies’; Lauth, ‘Informal Institutions’; Merkel and Croissant, ‘Formale und informale Institutionen’; Weyland, ‘Limitations’; Helmke and Levitsky, Informal Institutions. View all notes In ‘defective democracies’,2 Merkel, ‘Embedded and Defective’. View all notes or in the grey zone between authoritarian regimes and consolidated democracies, formal institutions disguise specific informal institutions which are usually ‘the actual rules that are being followed’.3 O'Donnell, ‘Illusions About Consolidation’, 10. View all notes Moreover, scholars have investigated the issue of stateness: ‘without a state, no modern democracy is possible’.4 Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition, 17. View all notes This article sheds light on this grey zone, particularly, on the type of state whose coercive state apparatus is autonomous. Its autonomy results primarily from the interplay between formal and informal institutions in post-transitional settings where ‘perverse institutionalization’5 Valenzuela, ‘Democratic Consolidation’, 62. View all notes creates and fosters undemocratic informal rules and/or enshrines them as formal codes. If the military autonomy reaches a threshold ranging from high to very high, constitutional institutions become Janus-faced and can enforce a sui generis repertoire of undemocratic informal institutions. Thus, the state exerts formal and informal ‘domination’,6 Weber, Economy and Society. View all notes Herrschaft in a Weberian sense. This modality of dual domination is what I call ‘deep state’.     

Mayhem,Myths, and Martyrdom: The Shi'a Conception of Jihad

The article examines the perception of jihad in Shi'a Islam. It first provides an overview of the understanding of jihad in Islam at large, and then examines the reflections of four central Shi'a thinkers on jihad. More so than the traditional Sunni approach to this concept, the Shi'a understanding of jihad is heavily influenced by perceptions of historical suffering, placing an emphasis on injustice, tyrannical rule, indignity, humiliation, and resistance. In recent decades, Shi'a and Sunni notions of jihad have become more closely aligned, as Salafi-Jihadists, who increasingly monopolize the Sunni discourse on jihad, persistently frame jihad as a response to the oppression by Western “infidel” regimes and tyrannical “apostate” regimes in the Arab and Muslim world.     

Narrating the cultural trauma of 3/11: the debris of post-Fukushima literature and film

Abstract

Images of debris dominate our understanding of the 3/11 triple disaster – earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown – that took place in Japan on 11 March 2011. They have been effectively used to rewrite the story of individual suffering into one of collective tragedy. In this article, debris is a locus for examining the construction of the narrative of 3/11 as cultural trauma. The article analyzes three texts that deal directly with images of 3.11 debris: Fujiwara Toshi's documentary film No Man's Zone and two short stories: Murakami Ryū's ‘Little eucalyptus leaves’ (Yūkari no chisana ha, 2012 Murakami, Ryū, 2012b. Yūkari no chisana ha. In: Sore de mo sangatsu wa, mata. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 245–60. [Google Scholar]) and Saeki Kazumi's ‘Hiyoriyama’ (2012) Saeki, Kazumi, 2012a. Hiyoriyama. Trans. Jeffrey Hunter. In: Elmer Luke and David Karashima eds. March Was Made of Yarn. New York: Vintage Books, 163–81. [Google Scholar]. Fujiwara interrogates the position of the viewer via images of destruction, Murakami connects 3/11 to the multidirectional memory of other global traumas like Auschwitz, and Saeki constructs a local narrative that contrasts the personal experience of the disaster with a televisual or filmic representation. These texts are engaged in the cultural work of constructing 3/11 as collective trauma. They create a collective identity, a ‘we’, for this trauma that speaks both for and against the national narratives of recovery. This article examines images of debris around the one-year anniversary of 3/11 and speculates on the concurrent lack of images of bodies.     

Pierre Bourdieu and the Birth of European Defense

This paper uses an analytical framework derived from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology to explain the genesis of the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP). Long-term social and institutional processes at work in the making of ESDP are addressed through an emphasis on the institutionalization of social fields, the impact of structural crises, and the socialization of policy makers into specific schemes of perception and action (habitus). Two arguments follow from this framework. First, the paper shows that the creation of ESDP after 1998 would have been impossible without the prior institutionalization of two transgovernmental arenas: (1) the European foreign policy field, wherein EU diplomats vie for influence over EU policies; and (2) the international defense field, centered upon military relations within NATO. Second, ESDP results from the strategies of a number of diplomats and military leaders who, following the end of the Cold War, perceived that they faced important organizational crises in their respective fields. This sociological framework provides a more nuanced account of ESDP's creation than that proposed by the two dominant explanations in international relations theory—realism's balancing and constructivism's strategic culture convergence. Combining structural and ideational factors, it elucidates three empirical puzzles: the lack of opposition to ESDP when it was launched, the motives of policy makers who proposed ESDP, and the disappearance of alternative options for the European security architecture.     

The problem of peace: understanding the ‘liberal peace’

To remember Hiroshima is to commit oneself to peace. Pope John Paul II, 1 ?1. Pope John Paul II, 25 February 1981. View all notes 1981

Pax Invictis2 ?2. ‘Peace to the undefeated’ or the victor's peace. Inscribed on the Tomb of the Unknown Solider in St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney, Australia. View all notes

Virtue runs amok. Attributed to G.K. Chesterton     

Power-sharing and political party engineering in conflict-prone societies: the Indonesian experiment in Aceh

Establishing legitimate political leadership through non-violent means is an essential step in the rebuilding of post-conflict societies. For this reason the successful holding of democratic elections is often seen as the crowning achievement of the peace process. In recent years, however, it has become clear that elections do not always guarantee the peace, and may in fact, make societies more dangerous.1 ?1. Collier Collier, Paul. 2009. Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places, New York: Harper Collins.  [Google Scholar], Wars, Guns and Votes; Brancati, Peace by Design. View all notes This has prompted political scientists to look more closely at other dimensions of the transition from violent conflict to democratic politics, including the role of political parties. Political parties play an essential role in all democracies, but their importance is magnified in conflict-prone societies. While some scholars have argued that political parties may help to consolidate peace by forming coalitions between groups formerly in conflict, more recent research suggests that such parties may also entrench social cleavages, especially if party formation is based along former conflict fault lines. This article considers these arguments in the case of Aceh, Indonesia, where an historic peace agreement allowed former Acehnese rebels to form their own political party—one based along both ethnic and former conflict lines.     

Borderlands and the transformation of war economies: lessons from the DR Congo

Border towns bring out the worst in a country… 1 ?1. Charlton Heston ‘Vargas’ in Touch of Evil, 1958. View all notes     

The post-Aum films of Kurosawa Kiyoshi

The films of Japanese director Kurosawa Kiyoshi in the late 1990s and early 2000s capture the malaise of the ‘lost decade’ (ushinawareta jû-nen) of the 1990s, a period characterized by the end of an economic boom that propelled Japan through two decades of unprecedented prosperity. Facing the decline of high-growth, the country for the first time in two decades could no longer ignore the things that it had suppressed to realize progress: the failure of Japan's radical movements of the 1960s and early 1970s and their de-evolution into extremism. As the haze of prosperity dissipated in the early 1990s, Japan was again stunned by a violent uprising more than two decades after the collapse of the student movements – the Tokyo subway gassings in 1995, an event that many associated with the radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s. The attacks served as a reminder of the deep-seated social dissatisfactions that existed among the activist generation and the violence that results from extremism. Utilizing trauma theory, this paper will examine the way Japan's radical past is re-experienced in Kurosawa's films in the years following the gassings. Through an analysis of the cinematic style of Charisma (Karisuma 1999 Karisuma, 1999. DVD. Directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi. Nikkatsu Studio. [Google Scholar]), Pulse (Kairô 2001 Kairo, 2001. DVD. Directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi. Tokyo: Daiei Studio. [Google Scholar]), and other cinematic works in light of their narrative references to radicalism, this article will flesh out the layered process through which Kurosawa's films engage the past while coping with the trauma of post-Aum Japan.     

Presidential Leadership on Foreign Policy,Opinion Polling,and the Possible Limits of “Crafted Talk”

The strategy of “crafted talk” (or framing) suggests that a politician uses public opinion to anticipate the most alluring, language to convince the public to follow a politician's own preferred policy (Jacobs & Shapiro, 2000 Jacobs, L. R. and Shaprio, R. Y. 2000. Politicians don't pander: Political manipulation and the loss of democratic responsiveness, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  [Google Scholar]). This manipulatory behavior by presidents has important consequences in the realm of constructing foreign policy, especially if the policy involves military service personnel, international prestige, or foreign conflict. However, no scholar has investigated White House archival data to examine the theoretical nuances of presidential “crafting” talk when constructing arguments for foreign policy. This article examines three case studies using internal polling memoranda and focus group results concerning the Vietnam War under President Johnson, the signing of the INF Treaty with the Soviet Union under President Reagan, and the Gulf War under President Bush. In each of the three cases, public opinion places serious constraints on presidential framing of foreign policy. Implications for the effectiveness of political framing and the limits of presidential persuasion are discussed.     

Post-9/11 counterterrorism in popular culture: the spectacle and reception of The Bourne Ultimatum and 24

This article examines the representation of counterterrorism in contemporary film and television and surveys its reception among active online audiences. Contemporary counterterrorism fiction like The Bourne Ultimatum (2007 The Bourne ultimatum. 2007. Film. Directed by Paul Greengrass. Produced by Doug Liman, Henry Morrison and Jeffrey M. Weiner. USA.  [Google Scholar]; Film. Directed by Paul Greengrass) and the TV series 24 (2001–2010; Television series. Created by Robert Cochran and Joel Surnow), present viewers with conventional hero-driven narratives wrapped in a spectacle of high-tech surveillance technologies. As counterterrorism is an inherently covert exercise, the widespread popularity of these Hollywood franchises raises questions about how the public understands the capabilities and ethics of counterterrorism. These questions are addressed through an analysis of the generic and aesthetic features of the texts along with a survey of audience responses on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).     

Malaysia – towards a topology of an electoral one-party state

For the first time in 51 years of independence, Malaysia's ruling coalition Barisan Nasional (National Front, BN) under the weak leadership of Abdullah Badawi was denied its customary parliamentary two-third majority in the 2008 elections. The three major opposition parties, which formed the Pakatan Rakyat (The People's Alliance, PR) after the elections, increased the number of opposition-held state governments from one to five. The opposition had never held more than two state governments at any one time.1 Chin and Wong, ‘Malaysia's Electoral Upheaval’. Parts of this paper were used in a research project organized by the Malaysian Strategic Research Centre. View all notes For many practitioners and students of Malaysian politics, the 2008 poll means the birth of a long overdue ‘two-party system’, where two multi-ethnic coalitions contest for power and alternate in running the country. After all, two similar attempts to build a Malay-dominated second coalition to rival the ruling coalition dominated by the ethno-nationalist United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) were made in the 1990 and 1999 elections by former UMNO leaders who lost in their party in-fighting. Sadly, the coalitions built did not survive even the next elections. We argue that such optimism may be misplaced due to a failure to appreciate the ‘electoral one-party state’ nature of Malaysia.2 Wong and Norani, ‘Malaysia at 50’. View all notes Despite having held 13 national elections without failure, and having almost no incidence of in- or post-election violence, neither a military coup nor ‘people's power’, Malaysia has never been anywhere close to being a ‘consolidated democracy’, 52 years after joining what Huntington called the second wave of democratization.3 Huntington, The Third Wave. View all notes For Linz and Stepan, a consolidated democracy requires not only a government with de facto authority to generate policy and exclusive de jure power, but also that ‘this government comes to power that is the direct result of a free and popular vote’. In other words, democracy has to become ‘the only game in town’.4 Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition, 5. View all notes     

THE PARABLE OF THE METAL: DEPLETED URANIUM,NATO, AND THE ISSUE OF “ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY”

In this article, we present a parable about how a metal, depleted uranium (DU), became linked both with a security organization, NATO, and a security concept, “environmental security,” and did so in a most dramatic, if short-lived, manner during late 2000 and early 2001. A parable involves the telling of a story for didactic purpose. It might even be considered a kind of “continued metaphor,” to use the expression sometimes reserved for that related device, allegory. By this is implied that we resort to parable when we want to get across a message, one that seems, on the surface, to be about something else altogether. ¹ 1. H.W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 2nd ed., rev. Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 558. Partly we do this for the dramatic effect produced; partly we do it because it is an economical way of expressing meaning. As a variant of metaphor, parable enables us to see what might otherwise have been obscured, because as the philosopher Earl Mac Cormac reminded us, “explanations without metaphor would be difficult if not impossible, for in order to describe the unknown, we must resort to concepts that we know and understand, and that is the essence of metaphor—an unusual juxtaposition of the familiar and the unfamiliar.” ² 2. Earl R. Mac Cormac, A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor (Cambridge. MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. 9.      

Economic aid to post-conflict countries: a methodological critique of Collier and Hoeffler

In the past five years, research sponsored by the World Bank on the economic aspects of civil war1 ?1. The project was titled the Economics of Political and Criminal Violence. View all notes under the research directorship of Oxford economist Paul Collier has had an extraordinary influence on the subsequent study of violent conflict and civil war and on international policy. The research project has now turned its attention to the problem of countries emerging from civil war and what Collier and his co-author, Anke Hoeffler, call ‘a first systematic empirical analysis of aid and policy reform in the post-conflict growth process.’2 ?2. First reported in a World Bank Policy Research Working Paper circulated in October 2002, their article, ‘Aid, Policy, and Growth in Post-Conflict Societies,’ the paper was in 2003 posted on the website of the Centre for the Study of African Economics, Oxford University until it was published in 2004 in the European Economic Review. There are some minor differences between the two versions of their work, but the conclusions are identical. In the present article, the paper version will be referred to as Collier & Hoeffler (2003) and the published version as Collier & Hoeffler (2004). View all notes Building on the influence of their earlier research and the lively interest currently in knowledge about and policy on post-conflict strategies, this work is likely to be equally influential on research, thinking, and policy. It is all the more important, therefore, to subject the research to critical examination before it becomes established as conventional wisdom. This note reports one such attempt to analyze some major methodological problems with the study and argues that the research cannot sustain the conclusions they draw or the resulting policy recommendations.     

In defence of intra‐disciplinarity: ‘European studies’, the ‘New Regionalism’, and the issue of democratisation

This article argues in favour of an intra‐disciplinary rapprochement between ‘EU studies’ and those working in the ‘new regionalism’ (NR). I take the issue of democratisation as an example of how scholars of both the EU and NR could usefully learn from each other. European Union studies has recently undergone a ‘normative turn’, through which inter/intra‐disciplinarity has received a fillip; I argue that at both conceptual and empirical levels, new regionalist studies would benefit from a similar mainstreaming of democracy issues and a similarly open approach to inter/intra‐disciplinarity. Moreover, EU studies scholars would benefit both conceptually (an escape from the ‘N=1’ problem that has plagued integration theory, the adoption of a clear critical theory perspective) and empirically (further cases in which to test hypotheses and generate data) from such a rapprochement.1 I would like to thank the three anonymous referees who made such supportive and helpful comments on the first draft of this article. View all notes