North‐South trade and female labour in manufacturing: An asymmetry

A simple method of measuring the impact of North‐South trade on the female intensity of manufacturing is applied to data for developed and developing countries. The results confirm that growth of exports has increased the relative demand for female labour in the South. However, there does not appear to have been a general counterpart reduction in the relative demand for female labour in Northern manufacturing, even among blue‐collar workers. There are several possible reasons for the apparent conflict between these findings and other evidence that in Northern manufacturing females have been disproportionately displaced by trade with the South.     

Fear of Islam in Greece: migration,terrorism, and “ghosts” from the past

The article explores the “fear of Islam” through a specific series of political debates about Islam and the future of the Greek-Orthodox national identity. The analysis is based on the method of qualitative content analysis, which makes use of thematic categories and draws on the proceedings of the Greek parliament. The main questions the article will try to address are: How have Greek political parties reacted to public demand for the construction of a mosque? What have been the rhetorical tropes they use? How have they capitalized on current and old fears about Islam? What have been the implications of this discourse on state policies toward Islam? Have there been any differences in this discourse over time? The analysis highlights the role of historical interpretations of Greek national identity and contemporary problems related to new waves of migration due to Greece’s place on the border with Turkey and with the broader Islamic world.     

Horror and Hope: (re)presenting militarised children in global North–South relations

Elite planners in the Eastern Caribbean sub-region pin their hopes of economic viability on tourism, a vibrant offshore financial (and other) services sector and an increase in export activity from companies operating out of industrial parks. Framed against the perception of an inevitable globalisation process underway, with limitations posed to high-level or diversified manufacturing, power holders have sought to concentrate on the promotion of 'export services' as a viable cover against new competitive challenges. This article argues, however, that this state of affairs betrays a crisis-of-mission within the ruling class on how to reconstruct political economies marked by the hegemony of merchant capital. Rather than a move towards what are globally the most remunerative factors of production--high-level manufacturing and services--a rather curious consensus has emerged which proclaims a solid future for export services without roots and/or ganglia to local manufacturing. The success of such an 'export services' model anywhere in the Eastern Caribbean will not turn as much on the quality of human resources as it will on overcoming the short-term horizon of local politicians, and the low-risk predilections of the wealthy planter-merchant elite. The latter's conscious 'opt out' strategy on the question of manufacturing diversity has made for a strikingly conservative enterprise culture. More specifically, merchant capitalist societies like those in the Eastern Caribbean insufficiently display the sociocultural attributes required for the creation of high-level services: innovation-mediated risk, research and development competence, and affinities to industrial processes and networks.     

Perceptions,identities and interests in South–South cooperation: the cases of Chile,Venezuela and Brazil

The relevance acquired in recent years by South–South cooperation seems to be connected with deeper structural transformations occurring in the international system. However, the variety of cooperation models promoted by new providers in the South requires the identification of complementary factors to help explain current patterns. A set of socio-cognitive elements, related to each country’s perceptions, identities and interests, can yield greater understanding of the variety of South–South cooperation models. Such an approach is here applied to the cases of Chile, Venezuela and Brazil – three important providers from the South – in order to explore their different cooperation models.     

Latin America: Looking North or South?: Erasing the Border of Time

The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes' newest book is Laura Diaz. He spoke with NPQ is late November.     

A genealogy of EU discourses and practices of deliberative governance: Beyond states and markets?

The article offers a genealogy of ‘deliberative governance’ in the EU—an important contemporary discourse and practice of ‘throughput legitimacy’ within that setting. It focuses on three key episodes: the late 1990s ‘Governance’ reports of the European Commission's in‐house think‐tank, the Forward Studies Unit (FSU); the Commission's 2001 White Paper on Governance; and the EU's ‘Open Method of Coordination’, which emerged in the 1990s and was widely studied in the early and mid‐2000s. The genealogy serves to highlight the particular intellectual lineages and political contingencies associated with such a discourse and in so doing points to its exclusive potential in both theory and practice. In particular, the article argues that it excludes, on the one hand, those championing the enduring sociological and normative importance of the nation state and an associated representative majoritarianism and, on the other hand, those (excessively) critical of a functionalist, neoliberal, market‐making status quo.     

South–South cooperation and the future of development assistance: mapping actors and options

International development cooperation is undergoing fundamental changes. New – or often re-emerging – actors have gained importance during the past two decades, and are increasingly challenging the traditional approach to development cooperation associated with the members of the Development Assistance Committee of the oecd. Their supposedly alternative paradigm, ‘South–South cooperation’ (ssc), has been recognised as an important cooperation modality, but faces contradictions that are not too different from those of its North–South counterpart. ssc providers are highly heterogeneous in terms of policies, institutional arrangements, and engagement with international forums and initiatives. This article contributes to current debates on ssc by mapping the diversity of its actors – based on illustrative case studies from the first and second ‘wave’ of providers – and by presenting and discussing some possible scenarios for the future of ssc within the international aid system.     

Crossing borders: development,learning and the North – South divide

While the validity of categories like ‘First’ and ‘Third’ World or ‘North’ and ‘South’ has been increasingly questioned, there have been few attempts to consider how learning between North and South might be conceived. Drawing on a range of perspectives from development and postcolonial scholarship, this paper argues for the creative possibility of learning between different contexts. This involves a conceptualisation of learning that is at once ethical and indirect: ethical because it transcends a liberal integration of subaltern knowledge, and indirect because it transcends a rationalist tendency to limit learning to direct knowledge transfer between places perceived as ‘similar’. This challenge requires a consistent interrogation of the epistemic and institutional basis and implications of the North – South divide, and an insistence on developing progressive conceptions of learning.     

“Ain't Making It in America”: The Economic Characteristics of African Immigrants in North Carolina,USA

This study interviewed 350 African immigrants in North Carolina (NC) to shed light on their economic conditions. It focused primarily on their labor force participation and incomes for the period 2004–2014. The findings showed that both structural changes in NC's economy and prejudicial experiences within the labor force were the most important forces that undermined the economic ambitions of the Africans. The study also yielded a complex picture and raised some questions about the resettlement outcome of African immigrants in the United States.     

Exploring the “Root Causes” of Terrorism

This article attempts to clarify what is meant by “root causes” and considers if their analysis helps to explain and describe how, where, and why terrorism occurs. In attempting to explore—but not definitively resolve—these challenges, the article will attempt to delineate “root causes” into qualitative and quantitative variables that can be empirically tested in relation to contemporary terrorist activity. In so doing, it considers the relative merits of different methodologies for approaching “root causes.” The article concludes that indirect and underlying sources of conflict are significant to understanding specific incidents of terrorism and certain categories of terrorism; that “root causes” are less helpful in describing and explaining terrorism as a general phenomenon; and that root causes are of analytical use only in conjunction with precipitant factors.     

New localism or fuzzy centralism: policymakers’ perceptions of public education and involvement in education

This research examines local authority involvement in education as a function of local policymakers’ perceptions of education as a public service – namely, whether public education is for the benefit of society as a whole, or for individual students and parents. Perceptions of education and involvement in education were assessed through 107 questionnaires returned by mayors and heads of local education departments in Israel. The results show that (1) local policymakers tend to perceive public education as a general public service, and (2) the relationship between this perception and involvement in education varies with the locality’s centre-periphery status. In peripheral localities, perceiving education as a general public service and an understanding of ‘society’ as the local community leads to greater involvement in education. In central localities, involvement rose with a more individualised perception. Implications of the findings are discussed in line with viewing education in the spirit of new localism.     

Latin America: Looking North or South?: The United States and Latin America at Century's Turn

This article is adapted from a longer essay prepared at the invitation of Politica Externa in Rio de Janeiro and draws on the Astor Lecture Dr. Lowenthal delivered at St. Anthony's College, Oxford.     

Policy Coherence for Development and Securitisation: competing paradigms or stabilising North–South hierarchies?

Often treated as separate paradigms, the security-development nexus and the aid effectiveness agenda are analysed here instead as a continuum of aid policy responses that attempt to stabilise power relations in a contested and unstable international arena These responses are informed by a common commitment by western donor governments to neoliberal logic since the early 1980s. The article focuses on the discourse of policy coherence for development promoted by the DAC (Development Assistance Committee) of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), analysing it as the common vector of the two dimensions – effectiveness and security - of donor aid policy. By examining the emergence and transformations of the concept of coherence over the past two decades, it underlines the predominance of continuity over rupture in three successive phases of stabilisation (economic, political, security).