Scientific racism,race war and the global racial imaginary

Abstract

The premise of this paper is the elucidation of a different ontology of global politics and order of the nineteenth century. International relations theory takes for granted a largely ahistorical state-centric ontology, which reifies a specific Eurocentric state and state-system as the embodiment of global politics. Instead, I focus on an alternative ontology of race, racial hierarchy and racial difference as significant for defining the content of an imperial global politics and order. My paper places into context the emergence of scientific racism and social Darwinism as key intellectual elements in defining a political imaginary that influenced the politics of difference and violence. What I show is that this intellectual history reveals a global order that was fundamentally racialised and that global violence was understood and practiced as race wars.     

Examining the Effects of Race/Ethnicity and Race Relations on Public Opinion about the Overrepresentation of Black People in U.S. Prisons

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to determine whether persons of different racial/ethnic backgrounds differ in their perceptions of the role racial discrimination plays in the overrepresentation of Black people in the U.S. prison system. The paper also tested the gradient hypothesis of comparative conflict theory, which predicts Black people perceive the greatest amount of racial discrimination, followed by Latinx and white people, respectively. This study also tested whether perceptions of race relations between Black, Latinx, and white people influenced the role participants thought racial discrimination played in Black people’s overrepresentation. Nationally representative Gallup Poll data were used. Results partially supported the gradient hypothesis. Black people were more likely than Latinx and white people to perceive racial discrimination to explain Black people’s overrepresentation in prison, but Latinxs’ views did not differ from whites’. Participants who perceived poorer relations between Black, Latinx, and white people were more likely to consider racial discrimination to explain Black people’s overrepresentation. Findings suggest Black people and those who perceive poorer race relations are most likely to support criminal justice reform efforts aimed at reducing racial disparities in the criminal justice system.     

EXIT,VOICE, AND DISAPPOINTMENT: MOUNTAIN DECLINE AND EU COMPENSATORY RURAL POLICY IN SPAIN

The article analyses the Spanish experience of EU compensatory rural policy in order to contribute to broader debates on the effectiveness of this kind of policy and the role of agriculture in the definition of European rural policies. In the case of Spain, compensatory allowances to mainly mountain farmers had little effect on economic trajectories or social cohesion because of the small sums involved, the exclusion of those with very small farms, and the decreasing role of agriculture in the rural economy. Other, more structural, instruments of rural policy focused on small‐scale promotion of business growth but were ill‐equipped to challenge some of the territorially defined items of living standard gaps. A historically grounded analysis suggests that the main changes in the social trajectory of Spain's mountain areas in the last decades have little to do with compensatory policy and are related to ordinary economic dynamics.     

Civil society in Mozambique: NGOs,religion, politics and witchcraft

Our aim is to problematise the dominant discourses and practices around civil society from a Southern perspective. We first examine critically, from a broadly Gramscian perspective, the way in which the concept of civil society has been deployed in development discourse. This highlights its highly normative and North-centric epistemology and perspectives. We also find it to be highly restrictive in a post-colonial Southern context insofar as it reads out much of the grassroots social interaction, deemed ‘uncivil’ and thus not part of duly recognised civil society. This is followed by a brief overview of some recent debates around civil society in Africa which emphasise the complexity of civil society and turn our attention to some of the broader issues surrounding state-society relations, democracy and representation in a Third World context, exemplified through our case study research in Mozambique, Inhassunge district (Zambézia Province). The privileging of Western-type Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as drivers of democracy and participatory development in Mozambique have considerable implications for current debates around good governance, civil society strengthening and social accountability programmes and strategies.     

Anxiously Awaiting the Future of Restorative Justice in the United States

Abstract

The problems of mass incarceration and other criminal justice system failures in the United States—such as racial disparities, wrongful convictions, and high recidivism rates—have reached a tipping point. For the first time in decades, coalitions of politicians on the left and right are seeking criminal justice reform. What is the place of restorative justice in these efforts? What is the depth and breadth of restorative justice implementation? How familiar is the American public with restorative justice? How successful is the restorative justice movement? In this article, we seek answers to these questions as we try to assess the future of restorative justice in the United States.     

Exploring Social Capital Debates at the World Bank

This article explores the ways in which discussions of social capital have emerged within the World Bank, and how they interacted both with project practices and with larger debates in the institution. These debates are understood as a ‘battlefield of knowledge’, whose form and outcomes are structured but not determined by the political economy of the Bank. Understanding the debates this way has implications for research on the ways in which development discourses are produced and enacted, as well as for more specific discussions of the place of social capital in development studies. The article concludes with a reflection on implications of these debates for future research, policy, and practice.     

US foreign policy,intersectional totality and the structure of empire

Debates about US empire have subsided somewhat in the aftermath of the George W Bush presidency but the issues underlying such debates have not gone away. In arguing that the history of the United States is an imperial one, this article proposes that US empire is the expression of an intersectional totality, one shaped by various vectors of power but reducible to none. To make this case, the article presents a sketch of US imperial history in order to show how this intersectional totality has evolved over time. Such an exercise can give useful context to the foreign policy initiatives of the Barack Obama administration, one that differs from that of its immediate predecessor but is not outside the structure of imperial history’s longer duration.     

The moral purpose of US power: neoconservatism in the age of Obama

The ‘neoconservative moment’ is widely assumed to have come and gone with the George W. Bush administration. This article argues, however, that the hope that the neoconservative chapter in US foreign policy will be definitively closed under Barack Obama's administration is unlikely to be realized in practice, owing to the continuing influence that neoconservatives are able to exercise over national debates regarding the ‘moral’ use of US power in order to shape the international environment. While the moral agenda of the ‘neocons’ is often misconceived as simply a mask for the naked pursuit of the United States' material and strategic interests, this article demonstrates that this misrepresents the rationale that underpins the neoconservative perspective. Exploring the re-articulation of morality in neoconservative thought reveals the nexus that both links the neoconservative domestic agenda for political change to its foreign policy goals and also provides a framework for understanding the ‘staying power’ that neoconservatism continues to exhibit. Although the Obama presidency is widely heralded as a repudiation of this agenda, the neoconservative conception of the United States as a moral power is deeply rooted in US foreign policy traditions and is domestically allied to traditional expressions of social conservatism, which enables neoconservative ideas to continue to resonate in US foreign policy debates.     

Terrorism,Crime, and Transformation

This article argues that some of today's terrorist groups have transformed into transnational criminal organization (TCO) who are more interested in profits than politics. This dynamic has important implications for policymakers as some traditional, politically motivated terrorist groups further profit-minded agencies under a political banner. The author argues that there are different degrees of transformation; some terrorists commit criminal acts to support political operations, while others view profit-driven criminal acts as their end game. The articles further argues that unlike some observers suggest, TCOs and terrorist groups will not cooperate with each other to advance aims and interests, instead utilizing their "in-house" capabilities to undertake criminal or political acts.     

Ex-Offenders, the Labour Market and the New Public Administration

Policy makers are increasingly recognizing the importance of helping ex-offenders into employment. This article outlines the disadvantages faced by those with a criminal record in the labour market and evaluates several approaches to meeting the needs of ex-offenders seeking work. It finds that, despite recent policy developments, the changing nature of British public administration is undermining the ability of practitioners to respond appropriately to the needs of ex-offenders. The article concludes that the real concern of policy makers is to show that they are doing something about the social context of criminal behaviour while at the same time drawing attention away from the increasingly centralized and authoritarian nature of our public agencies.     

POLITICAL RECRUITMENT BEYOND ELECTIONS: AN EXPLORATION OF THE LINKAGE BETWEEN PATRONAGE,DEMOCRACY, AND DIVERSITY IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

Flowing out of wider debates regarding representative democracy, the diversity of political institutions has gained salience. Normatively, it is suggested that it is simply unfair for white, middle‐aged males to dominate decision‐making structures. Instead it has been argued that representative diversity can enhance the legitimacy of political institutions and processes, whilst improving the quality and inclusivity of policy‐making. Although most of these arguments have been applied to elected institutions and their bureaucracies, they are also germane in the context of appointments to the boards of public bodies, as the work of these bodies and the decisions made by their board members impacts upon the everyday lives of citizens. Drawing upon original research conducted in the UK, this article argues that the capacity of political actors to make appointments to public boards offers an as yet unrealized democratic potential by offering more opportunities for social engagement and participation in public governance.     

Social Sustainability in Agriculture: An Anthropological Perspective on Child Labour in Cocoa Production in Ghana

Based on historical sources and ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana, the article presents child labour in cocoa communities as the outcome of a complex myriad of micro-level factors. It argues that many policy initiatives to address this problem have been hindered by a lack of understanding of the social and historical context impacting child rights in cocoa-producing communities. It also argues that by enabling a more grounded and gender-sensitive understanding of the household dimension of poor labour practices and of the plurality of factors underlying them, ethnography makes an important contribution to debates on unfree labour.     

The spectre of Haiti: structural antiblackness,the far-right backlash and the fear of a black majority in Brazil

Abstract

This article situates the far-right backlash in Brazil within the larger Latin American context, including its colonial legacy, leftist governments’ failure to deliver promises of inclusion, and the US–China geopolitical dispute over the region’s strategic natural resources. By situating Bolsonaro’s electoral victory within these dynamics, our analysis presents an alternative to two common perspectives. First, studies of the region’s political moment and of Brazilian society in particular do not pay enough attention to institutional and everyday racism, and instead focus mostly on comparative analysis of governmental policies and social class dynamics. Second, critical perspectives that take into account racial inequalities are often not attuned to structural dynamics of gendered antiblackness, and instead present racism as a broad set of practices that negatively affect non-white people in related manners. Our context-specific analysis of the electoral reemergence of the far right in Brazil aims at contributing to an understanding of persistent dynamics of racial inequality within the region as part of a long, enduring and foundational odium of Black people.     

Space,discourse and environmental peacebuilding

The concept of environmental peacebuilding is becoming increasingly prominent among peacebuilding scholars and practitioners. This study provides a brief overview about the various discussions contributing to our understanding of environmental peacebuilding and concludes that questions of space have hardly been explicitly considered in these debates. Drawing on discourse-analytic spatial theory, I discuss how the social construction of scale, place and boundaries are relevant for environmental peacebuilding processes and outcomes. This theoretical approach is then applied to the Good Water Neighbours project, which aims at improving the regional water situation and at building peace between Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians. The results suggest that discursive constructions of space are important in facilitating, impeding or shaping environmental peacebuilding practices. Analyses of environmental peacebuilding, but also of peacebuilding more general, are therefore encouraged to draw more strongly on the findings of spatial theory.     

The Politics of Time on the Frontline: Street Level Bureaucracy,Professional Judgment,and Public Accountability

This article reports on a study carried out on the impact of quality assurance mechanisms on street-level bureaucrats in Northern England (teachers, nurses and social workers). A key aim of the research was to explore the ways in which these mechanisms negotiate the much older regulatory function of time. The findings suggest that these mechanisms contribute to forms of time compression across professional activities, time compression in turn having consequences for professional judgement. The study explores the mechanisms via which this occurs, while also examining the implications of the research for debates about democracy, political regulation, and public sector management.     

Globalisation masculinities,empire building and forced prostitution: a critical analysis of the gendered impact of the neoliberal economic agenda in post-invasion/occupation Iraq

Adopting a transnational feminist lens and using a political economy approach, this article addresses both the direct and indirect consequences of the 2003 war in Iraq, specifically the impact on civilian women. Pre-war security and gender relations in Iraq will be compared with the situation post-invasion/occupation. The article examines the globalised processes of capitalism, neoliberalism and neo-colonialism and their impact on the political, social and economic infrastructure in Iraq. Particular attention will be paid to illicit and informal economies: coping, combat and criminal. The 2003 Iraq war was fought using masculinities of empire, post-colonialism and neoliberalism. Using the example of forced prostitution, the article will argue that these globalisation masculinities – specifically the privatisation agenda of the West and its illegal economic occupation – have resulted in women either being forced into the illicit (coping) economy as a means of survival, or trafficked for sexual slavery by profit-seeking criminal networks who exploit the informal economy in a post-invasion/occupation Iraq.     

Freedom of Speech and Democracy in Malaysia

This article seeks to understand the situation of political speech in Malaysia, the argument in favour of restrictions on political speech, and the problems that prevent political speech from being practised effectively. For example, two particularly sensitive issues—ethnic rivalry and religion—are considered taboo and discussion of these issues is severely restricted. Article 10 of the Malaysian Constitution, in reflecting the sensitiveness of these issues, specifies a list of restrictions, which limit the right of free speech on the grounds of guarding political stability and racial harmony. Furthermore, freedom of political speech and the political rights of individuals are secondary to the goals of national prosperity and national development, and the government is predisposed to impose some form of political discipline in order to serve the greater social good. However, the Malaysian government has taken a step further to control not only hate and racial speech, but also any political speech that seriously challenges the government. In this respect, the Malaysian government can be accused of being less democratic for its restriction on political speech.     

Social Impact Bonds: Implementation,Evaluation, and Monitoring

Traditional approaches to public policy increasingly fail to resolve social challenges, particularly in the field of criminal justice. High rates of juvenile recidivism, for example, are often linked to inequality in education and persistent, long-term unemployment—factors which, while complex, are nonetheless conducive to preventative strategies.

Social impact bonds (SIBs) are “pay-for-success” programs that attract private-sector, upfront funding for social interventions. If the program achieves agreed targets, taxpayer funds repay the investor. If the program fails to meet agreed targets, investors take the loss.

This innovative form of social finance through public–private partnership has helped spur efficiencies and improvements in the provision and outcomes of criminal justice services. However, the success of a SIB depends on careful implementation, evaluation, and monitoring.     

Democracy and Development in a Globalized World: Thinking About Latin America from Within

The choice among paths that countries should follow has been a staple of political debates in Latin America and, over the past 40 years, Fernando Cardoso has brought his analysis to bear on these debates. This article summarizes and then assesses Cardoso’s argument about the choice of paths faced by Latin American countries, the consequences for democracy and development of following different paths, and the political position that is supported by this analysis of choices and their consequences. Though Cardoso explicitly supports the path of globalized social democracy over an anti-globalization option in the current period, I suggest that the current state of knowledge does not offer unequivocal support for the argument that choosing to follow the path of globalized social democracy—or that of anti-globalization—is the best political option for all countries in Latin America. Different countries might very well be doing what is best for them, given their circumstances, by following different paths.     

Grasping the Syrian War,a view from Albanians in the Balkans

Reactions to the brutal Syrian War from European governments and Europe’s Muslims have been diverse and subject to many shifts over the past few years. This paper focuses on how Albanian political and Islamic religious figures living in the Balkans have come to interpret the war. I focus on discourse, the ways in which these different agents communicate with their audience, and the wider contexts they evoke. Government sources and religiously themed lectures delivered by prominent imams on the social networking site YouTube are used to assess these trends. The most obvious aspect of these debates is the ways in which these agents use the war to press their own agendas, the government to affirm their commitment to the “West” and an ethnicized view of Islam, while Islamic religious leaders use it to reconnect their audiences to a more cosmopolitan vision of their past. War thus becomes a catalyst for a resurgent contestation between different groups vying for control over what it means to be “Albanian” and “Muslim” in the twenty-first century.