Hybrid Actors,Tactical Variety: Rethinking Asymmetric and Hybrid War

Wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan should be understood as hybrid wars, wars in which elements of ethnic or tribal conflict, ideologically based insurgency, factional squabbling, and organized crime are inextricably intertwined, with the same actors playing multiple and partially conflicting roles. Hybrid war is inherently transnational, featuring transnational crime networks, “migrant warriors,” transnational diaspora links, legitimate international trade, and foreign intervention. It takes place in hybridized states reliant on local warlords and other actors whose power prevents effective state-building. In this context, while counterinsurgency doctrine prescribes appropriate military strategy and tactics, the core problem is more political than military. Since a hybridized client state is not likely to be politically reformable even if a foreign ally achieves military success, outside allies like the United States should generally refrain from boots-on-the-ground intervention, pursuing instead a diplomatic solution, even though such a deal is likely to be unpalatable.     

Birth Registration and Protection for Children of Transnational Labor Migrants in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Policies on transnational labor migration do not consider workers' needs as parents or the rights and welfare of their children, including a child's right to an official identity through birth registration. A study of birth-registration decision making by migrant parents in Lombok, Indonesia underscored the need for targeted responses to uniquely challenging circumstances and priorities of migrant parents. Free birth registration through birthing and health centers and village-level leaders can overcome problems of decentralized implementation of national strategies and an exploitive registration brokerage industry, mitigating risks of de facto statelessness for children and a multigenerational pattern of undocumented and unsafe migration.     

The multidimensional roles of food and culture-centered entrepreneurship among Ethiopian and Eritrean migrants: Ethnographic case studies in Washington,D.C.

This paper examines business experiences among Ethiopian and Eritrean transnational migrants in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. It primarily draws from ethnographic and entrepreneurial case studies to explain how Ethiopian and Eritrean entrepreneurs establish food and culture-centered businesses, such as the flatbread (Injera) and the coffee ceremony (Bun/a) entrepreneurship (e.g., with limited business training, limited financial capital, and coming from subsistence agricultural economic systems), in Adams Morgan and the U Street Corridor.

The paper describes the positive and multidimensional roles (cultural, social and economic) of the Ethiopian and Eritrean food and culture-centered businesses in the area. It argues that these restaurants, cafes, and grocery stores use an “ethnic entrepreneurship niche” model to conduct business with a focus on the re-creation of ethnic identities in a specific geographic area, building at the same time a transnational space, but with the intention of doing business with their migrant communities, host societies, and tourists alike.     

Child Development and Migrant Transnationalism: The Health of Children Who Stay Behind in Ghana and Nigeria

This paper examines the relation between parental migration and children’s health in Ghana (N = 2760) and Nigeria (N = 2168) and considers four dimensions of parental migration: the type of separation, parental migration and the caregiver, stability of care arrangements, and the availability of remittances. By employing an ordered scale of children’s self-rated health, we found that children with international migrant parents who are divorced/separated are less likely than children in non-migrant families to have good health. The magnitude of the effects are higher in Nigeria, attesting for a greater vulnerability of Nigerian children in divorced migrant families. Among children with parents living abroad who are stably married, specific dimensions of children’s transnational life are associated with negative health, while others are not. This study highlights the sensitivity of results to the context of parent-child separation and to the transnational dimension being measured.     

Re-crossing a different water: colonialism and Third Worldism in Fiji

This article will discuss the idea of the Third World in Fiji by analysing the internal tensions of the term and the plurality of trajectories emerging from the transnational spaces in which Fijian society must reconstitute itself after decolonisation and the coups of 1987 and 2000. The ethnic issues in Fiji have led to the employment of a number of strategies by both the indigenous and the Indian communities. Some consist of networking within transnational spaces and negotiation with external political and cultural flows, while others are more inward in their everyday strategies. This situation offers a non-reductive way to think about decolonisation, cultural transformation and notions of autonomy and Third World solidarity. The article assumes that cultural forms will always be made, unmade and remade. Communities can and must reconfigure themselves, drawing selectively on remembered pasts. The relevant question is whether, and how, they convince and coerce insiders and outsiders, often in power-charged, unequal situations; for example, the issues of indigenous versus migrant rights to land and franchise in Fiji. Thus, what is lost and rediscovered in new situations becomes part of the realm of normal political or cultural activity.     

Peripheral states and conformity to international norms: the dilemma of the marginalised

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand the seemingly paradoxical behaviour of states of the Global South, which on one the hand conform to transnational norms in order to integrate into the international society and on the other hand (sometimes simultaneously) differentiate themselves from them. To that end, this article develops the dilemma of the marginalised in order to show that conformity and differentiation become two paradoxical strategies for marginalised actors to pursue the same goal: equality with powerful states. The transformation of the Organisation of African Unity to the African Union, where significant changes in Africa’s policy vis-à-vis global powers took place, serves as a case study to illustrate how marginalised actors struggle between conformity and differentiation in order to claim their place in the international arena. It also shows how the dilemma of the marginalised can be compelling to help us understand the predicaments of marginalised actors across vastly different situations of structural inequality. Acknowledging the dilemma helps us understand their behaviour rather than to dismiss it as irrational, thereby recognising Third World agency in shaping the international system.     

Ethiopian returnee women from Arab countries: challenges of successful reintegration

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the Ethiopian female migrant’s change, sustainability of gains, and problems of adjustment and reintegration upon return from the Middle East. Data was gathered from 87 returnees. The income they earn is contributed to their households. However, remittance management and saving strategies were ineffective to bring remarkable changes. Much of the remittance sent home was spent on basic needs. Savings at home and in the Middle East were insignificant. Employment and involvement in investments in the post-return period were limited, and most were leading lives either similar to before or lower level than prior to their departure. Using a methodological classification ‘success’ or ‘failure’, one-third of them achieved relative success. Efforts should be made to develop pre-migration awareness via media such as telecom alerting radios, televisions, and posters. Interventions in skills training and counseling should also be the norm.     

Bole to Harlem via Tel Aviv: networks of Ethiopia's musical diaspora

ABSTRACT

One of the fastest growing sources of domestic labor in the Global North is Ethiopia, whose female population travels to North America, Europe, and the developed Middle East to work for remittances to send home. Once these migrants settle in cities such as London, Abu Dhabi, Tel Aviv, Rome, or Toronto, they organize themselves into cultural enclaves that navigate their positionality, namely the state, religious practice, and their bodies. While scholars are occasionally interested in the explicit security ramifications of absorbing these migrant workforces, they pay less attention to the cultural forces propelling citizenship, and to migrants' relationship with their home culture. This gap in knowledge is counterproductive, because scholars and policy-makers will have trouble assessing the Ethiopian migrant population's perspective through interview material alone. The Ethiopian values of honor and respect for authority dictate a hesitance to criticize explicitly, so the population's feelings about marginality rarely emerge in discussion about labor. This taboo curtails the effectiveness of typical ethnographic methods (e.g. interviewing). Rather, this article examines Ethiopian music as a prism through which migrant musicians navigate the complex web of religious, ethnic, national, and embodied identities in their new surroundings. In this article, I present findings based on participant-observation of Ethiopian live music in North American and Middle Eastern diaspora cities (New York, Washington, DC, Tel Aviv, and Dubai), and argue that the populations are linked through the multidirectional cultural influences of Ethiopian diasporic popular music. I will argue that Ethiopian migrants' music offers a stable, alternative form of political discussion to more overt discussions of contested identities, and that these discussions reshape cultural boundaries. By considering performance techniques such as choice of language for lyrics, and the incorporation of Ethiopian or local dance style into music videos that are distributed over the Internet, one begins to understand how the rapidly expanding transnational network of Ethiopian migrants conceptualizes itself as an emerging global source of labor in cosmopolitan urban centers.     

Transnational processes,development studies and changing social hierarchies in the world system: A Central American case study

Globalisation is bringing about changes in social hierarchies in the world capitalist system which traditional categories and frameworks in development studies and macro-sociologies are unable to capture. Under globalisation processes of uneven accumulation are unfolding in accordance with a social and not a national logic. The increasing subordination of the logic of geography to that of production and the rising disjuncture between the fortunes of social groups and of nation-states, among other processes, demand that we rethink development. The social configuration of space can no longer be conceived in the nation-state terms that development theories posit but rather as processes of uneven development denoted primarily by social group rather than territorial differentiation. Social polarisation, the fragmentation of national economies, and the select integration of social groups into transnational networks, suggest that development may be reconceived not as a national process, in which what 'develops' is a nation, but in terms of developed, underdeveloped and intermediate population groups occupying contradictory or unstable locations in a transnational environment. The shift to flexible accumulation worldwide and from an international to a global division of labour result in an increasing heterogeneity of labour markets in each locale. Labour market participation becomes a key determinant of new social hierarchies and of development conceived in social groups terms. Local and national labour markets are themselves increasingly transnationalised, part of a global labour market, in which differentiated participation determines social development. This article applies these propositions to a case study of Central America, examining the changing fortunes of one particular region under global capitalism and the lessons it offers for changing social hierarchies in the world capitalist system and for a renewal of the sociology of development.     

Transnational Capital,the US State and Latin American Trade Agreements

This paper examines the role of US-based transnational corporations in advancing trade, investment, regulatory and intellectual property rights provisions within NAFTA and DR–CAFTA. I explore the linkages between US firms, the US state and investment patterns in Mexico, Central America and the Dominican Republic in order to develop a framework for understanding the political economy of these regional trade agreements. I locate the timing of each of these agreements within the context of the goals of a transnational interest bloc that includes US-based transnational firms, US state officials and regional business interests and state bureaucracies in Latin America, with each trying to utilise regional agreements as a substitute for failed multilateral initiatives as well as a springboard for advancing a more aggressive set of protections for investors within bilateral investment treaties. In order to determine the extent to which transnational firms based in the USA have influenced these trade agreements, I explore three interrelated aspects of business influence: the extent to which transnational firms with investment interests in Mexico and Central America were involved in organisations that had regular access to key US policy makers; the historical development of a transnational interest bloc that has linked US firms and the US state to transnational capital and state bureaucracies in Mexico, Central America and the Dominican Republic; and the extent to which the same group of transnational firms has been attempting without success to advance a policy agenda in the WTO that incorporates many of the provisions of NAFTA and DR–CAFTA. The failure of this transnational interest bloc to effect substantial changes in WTO policies has led the bloc to rely on regional trade agreements to pursue its interests.     

An historian writes Poetry

The territory of this new European state is crossed by strategically important passes, the lowest in the entire Alps, leading from the Danubian basin to the Mediterranean (Italy). Thus, the Slovenes had been under cultural, civilizational and political domination of centers from these two parts of Europe until 1918. Because the mountainous land forms, dissected also by valleys and basins, were prone to processes of diffusion rather than fusion, the Slovenes became a national and political subject of their own as late as the nineteenth century. From 1918 to 1990 they were joined to Yugoslavia, a South‐East European state, and learnt, to their cost, all the differences between the cultures of West and Central Europe on the one hand, and South‐East and Eastern Europe and the Near East on the other. Hence the plebiscite decision by the nation for an independent state.     

Occidentalism,Human Rights,and the Obligations of Western Scholars

Based on qualitative research methodologies, this article will focus on exploring and analyzing notions of witchcraft and evil amongst African migrant labourers in the midst of deportation and harsh economics, beginning in the 2000s. The analysis will suggest that juxtaposing family, social tension, stress, and witchcraft is significant in understanding the role of witchcraft, evil forces, and malicious spirits in the way African migrants experience the modern world. Finally, the article will explore how African migrants incorporated local Jewish religious powers into their understanding of evil and witchcraft, thus expanding the discourse on belief systems in the context of transnational migration globalization and modernity.     

Collective Remittances and Transnational Coproduction: the 3 × 1 Program for Migrants and Household Access to Public Goods in Mexico

Migrant hometown associations (HTAs) are mobilizing collective remittances to improve social welfare in their countries of origin. This paper assesses the effect of transnational coproduction of public goods in migrants’ places of origin by studying the 3?×?1 Program for Migrants. The 3?×?1 Program is a national social spending program in which the Mexican local, state, and federal government matches HTAs’ collective remittances to improve public services through cross-border public–private partnerships. The statistical analysis across municipalities that do and do not participate in the 3?×?1 Program shows that coproduction improves citizens’ access to public sanitation, drainage, and water, although not electricity. Moreover, a negative and statistically significant interaction term between 3?×?1 Program expenditures and family remittances reveals a substitution effect: in the presence of transnational coproduction, migrant households are less likely to improve public goods using family remittance resources, but in the absence of 3?×?1 Program participation they continue to improve their hometowns with family remittances. This research offers a theoretical mechanism and supporting empirical evidence of an important kind of intermediary institution improving social welfare in migrant places of origin.     

Subnational Economic Nationalism? The contradictory effects of decentralization in Peru

Across the third world, transnational corporations (TNCs) and subnational governments (SNGs) are coming into new forms of contact as a result of liberalization and decentralization. Despite scholarly expectations that subnational governments will respond by seeking out foreign direct investment, in much of Latin America these governments are confronting rather than courting transnational corporations. Conceptualizing this phenomenon as ‘subnational economic nationalism’, the article explores both how subnational governments are challenging neoliberalism and why these challenges often fail to subvert neoliberal outcomes. By examining two struggles against transnational capital that had different outcomes but that took place within a single subnational jurisdiction (Arequipa, Peru), the article argues that decentralization can work at cross purposes. While voters are increasingly demanding that elected subnational officials adopt nationalist positions vis-à-vis TNCs, these same officials often seek financial support from TNCs so that they can compete successfully in the subnational elections that have been introduced by political decentralization.     

State Weakness and “Vacuum of Power” in Lebanon

The conventional wisdom is that weak and failed states are at great risk of becoming havens for transnational terrorist and guerilla groups. The assumption is that lack of enforcement capabilities enables militant organizations to infiltrate and fill the “vacuum of power” that is created in the absence of a strong state. This article argues, though, that this is only one of the ways in which weak states are attractive to militant groups. It explores the various mechanisms through which the vacuum of power translates into opportunities for such groups. These mechanisms include the easiness of acquiring support and recruitment within refugees or marginalized populations; the ability of the violent non-state transnational organization to establish a “surrogate state” in supplying institutions and services that enhance its public appeal; the relations between civil or communal conflict and the success of such groups; and the use of transnational violent groups as proxies for other states. Using the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and Hezbollah in Lebanon as the primary cases, as well as two mini-cases from Central America and Africa, the paper illustrates the working of these mechanisms and contributes to our understanding of the relations between state weakness and transnational violent non-state organizations.     

Diaspora Mobilizations in the Egyptian (Post)Revolutionary Process: Comparing Transnational Political Participation in Paris and Vienna

ABSTRACT

This article sheds light on the patterns of diaspora mobilization in different settings by placing it in the transnational realm. The article does so by comparing Egyptian activism during the revolution and transformation period (2011–2013) in two European capitals, Paris and Vienna. I argue that different features—emigrant policies of the sending country, integration policies of the receiving country, and characteristics of the migrant group—influence the degree and form of diaspora mobilization.     

The Political Economy of Crisis Management in East–Central European Countries

The financial and economic crisis in the Central and East European countries raised the profile of economic policy themes that relate to the role of taxation and state spending. The key policy differences related to public budgets and support for a demand stimulus. Responses fall broadly into two categories that we link to a social-democratic and a neo-liberal response. The distinction indicates that the policy responses were linked to the party affiliation of the government on the left–right spectrum. There were some remarkable common trends that cannot be explained by the logical requirements of the economic situation alone. There are differences in timing and in severity, but every country has at some point moved towards a policy of balancing the budget by making cuts. In all cases there were cuts in benefits for marginal groups in society and a switch towards indirect rather than direct taxes. These carry clear distributional implications.     

Science and technology in the transition: A review article

David A. Dyker (ed.), The Technology of Transition: Science and Technology Policies for Transition Countries. Budapest: Central European University Press, 1997, ix + 292 pp., £37.50.

Mark Steven Frankel & Jane Cave (eds), Evaluating Science and Scientists: An East‐West Dialogue on Research Evaluation in Post‐Communist Europe. Budapest: Central European University Press, 1997, x + 226 pp., £37.50 h/b, £15.99 p/b.

Paul J. J. Welfens & George Yarrow (eds), Telecommunications and Energy in Systemic Transformation: International Dynamics, Deregulation and Adjustment in Network Industries. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer‐Verlag, 1997, xi + 501 pp., DM178.00.     

Twenty years after 1989: moving on from transitology

This article sets within a qualitative framework part of the social sciences research that has been carried out on Central and Eastern Europe since 1989. This qualitative study relies upon quantitative data from journal monitoring carried out on a number of thematic journals on post-Communist Europe. What the article demonstrates is that political science research on post-Communist Europe has advanced from the stage of transitology to methodological approaches more deeply entrenched within the European whole. Sociological research, on the other hand, has recently started to position the East European regional inside the European or global more emphatically.     

A Study of Transnational Communication Among Iranian Migrant Women in Australia

Through the analysis of 25 interviews with Iranian migrant women in Australia, this study shows how living in different communicative environments can affect transnational communication practices. The case of these Iranian transnational families indicates that the digital divide, in terms of information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure and communication capacity, may affect the technological quality of ICT-mediated communication. However, the digital divide does not significantly affect the frequency of communication among these families. The findings illustrate that the Iranian migrants in Australia and their family members overseas developed innovative communication practices and went to great lengths to maintain “ordinary” family interactions across national borders.