Urban political machines and student politics in “middle” Bangladesh: violent party labor in Rajshahi city

In response to the mostly Dhaka-centered research on student politics in Bangladesh, this article aims to understand political competition, the role of patronage networks, political organizations, violence, and student organizations in the provincial city of Rajshahi. The article explores how student politics in Bangladesh shapes (and is shaped by) the political dynamics in “middle Bangladesh.” Student groups in Bangladesh are closely affiliated to political parties and serve as their most important source for mobilization in a party-political regime commonly referred to as a “partyarchy.” Campus politics is deeply integrated into the urban party-political machine in Rajshahi. Controlling Rajshahi University (RU) provides a steady flow of party workers for the local party machine. Thus, the RU campus is a space for organizing political (and violent) labor as well as an important source of revenue for and the distribution of benefits by local party bosses. The urban party machine, however, is not mechanically held together merely by the dispensation of inducements – instead, it is more chaotic and contingent on a form of strategic ambiguity that disguises the structuring effects of patronage power that keeps members motivated and engaged.     

试论当代菲律宾国内的三种政治形态

菲律宾在向现代国家转变的过程中,形成了三种特殊的政治形态.一是传统庇护制与现代西方民主制相结合的政治庇护制,内部为垂直的金字塔式联结结构,主导其国内政治主流.二是南部以亲缘关系、地域分隔为基础的部族政治,其内部的分裂特质使其在与中央政治庇护制度碰撞结合时,极易诱发部族或家族间的大规模政治仇杀,2009年11月举世震惊的菲律宾政治大屠杀即为明证.三是以水平方向联结为特征的大规模民众政治运动,如三次"人民力量"运动及各种民众组织,由垂直政治庇护网络内部张力而致.分析这三种政治形态间的关系,可更加深入了解菲律宾国内政治全貌.     

Local elites,prokurators and extraction in rural Uzbekistan

Examining the politics of local-level extraction in Uzbekistan, this article identifies the emergence of two rent-seeking strategies among local prokurators. Using case study material from Samarkand Province and Navoii Province, it demonstrates how concentrated economic resources under rural elites and dense patronage ties to regional politicians determine the limits placed on rent seeking. As this analysis seeks to emphasize, state capabilities within Uzbekistan's territorial infrastructure, and their effects on extraction, are multi-faceted, highly fluid, and intimately local.     

‘The Cedar Revolution’: Lebanese Independence and the Question of Collective Self-Determination

The article rejects the notion conveyed by the expression ‘the Cedar Revolution’ that Lebanon has recently experienced radical political changes. On the basis of an empirical survey of recent developments, it identifies four elements of continuity; the confessional nature of Lebanese politics, the omnipresence of trans-national alliances, the confrontational nature of the political rhetoric and the continuation of foreign interventions in Lebanon's internal affairs. Making use of opinion surveys, it argues that some of these elements indicate the existence of an independence-integration cleavage in Lebanon which follows sectarian lines and which renders the conceptualization of Lebanese citizens as a collective actor able to exercise collective self-determination—either by gaining complete independence or establishing close ties with Syria—problematic. Finally, it argues at a theoretical level that the problem of collective agent and the ensuing problem of collective self-determination can potentially emerge in any polity where there is an independence-integration cleavage.     

The inverted cycle: Kabul and the strongmen's competition for control over Kandahar, 2001–2006

Afghan tribes and local communities have been exposed to foreign patronage since at least the 19th century, but the scale of patronage relative to Afghanistan's internal economy increased dramatically after the late 1970s. Inevitably, this had a major impact on Afghanistan's own internal dynamics and on the mechanisms of political legitimisation. This article focuses on the province of Kandahar, which occupies a privileged space in Afghan politics and history, having given origin to almost all of the country's ruling elites. It deals with three groups of tribal strongmen, who tried to use tribally based patronage systems to stake a claim to local power.     

No Future for Germany's Past? Collective Memory and German Foreign Policy

Like most aspects of German politics and society after 1945, post-war German foreign policy has traditionally been greatly influenced by the legacy of Germany's National Socialist past and the Second World War. The semi-sovereign and divided nature of the West German state along with the strong argumentative force of collective memory in foreign policy discourse ensured a strong presence of Germany's historical legacy in both institutional and discursive terms resulting in a foreign policy which was characterised by self-limitation, a strong commitment to multilateralism and a civilian foreign policy culture. This article will argue that the interpretation of German collective memory of the Holocaust and the Second World War underwent significant changes under the red–green governments between 1998 and 2005, in particular with regard to the use of force. Although German collective memory continued to be present during this period, it lost its predictability and was used in a variety of crises to justify a range of responses, including military action.     

A tribe and its states: Yemen’s 1972 Bayḥan massacre revisited

Across the Middle East, tribes and states have entered into different relationships. In many countries, tribes were confronted with massive attempts at interference by their respective states. The northern Yemeni Republic, in contrast, remained a weak state with little coercive instruments at its disposal. Its rule was rather based on indirect means: the politics of patronage, the politicization of development efforts, and the exploitation of tribal conflict. This article aims to look closer into state-tribe relations in Yemen by reviewing the power struggle between the Khawlan al-Tiyal tribe and the republican government. In 1972, the regional ramifications of this struggle culminated in the so-called ‘Bayhan massacre’ whose legacy continues to resonate across tribal Yemen today. The Khawlan case gives evidence of how power and legitimacy in republican Yemen remained, and still remain, largely contingent on the politics of co-optation and patronage, an endemic feature that comes at the expense of real institution building.     

Abstention and politicisation in nineteenth-century Spain: the Catalan case

This paper analyses the phenomenon of abstention in nineteenth-century Spanish politics, where the government had great influence over the electoral results and liberty of opinion was not entirely guaranteed. It focuses in particular on the Catalan case. The paper aims to show that the electorate was not, in fact, apathetic or indifferent, but rather self-aware and politically mobilised. Questioning the dominance of patronage over elections, it contributes to the recent studies that have revised the interpretations of nineteenth-century politicisation by exploring the different ways of participating in the political sphere. By looking at abstention as an example of voters’ political expression, it argues that this phenomenon should be seen as evidence of political mobilisation and social and political engagement.     

全球问题与全球治理

随着全球化的进展,全球问题也随之出现.全球问题具有其本身的特点,给人类社会的未来发展带来了严峻的挑战.由于全球问题的性质,造成了公用地的悲剧与集体行动的困境两种现象.解决全球问题,超出了单独一个国家的能力范围,需要国际社会共同协作加以解决,从制度上、理念到组织上等各方面进行全面的变革.针对全球问题,国际社会提出了全球治理的概念,本文探讨了全球政治的概念、治理的内涵、全球治理的含义、全球治理的构成因素以及全球治理结构等内容.     

ZANU PF politics under Zimbabwe's ‘Power-Sharing’ Government

Using informal network analysis to understand ZANU PF politics, the key significance of the Inclusive Government (IG) is twofold. First, competition between ZANU PF and the ‘opposition’ parties in the IG helps informal networks to cohere sufficiently to run a parallel government that effectively sabotages the IG. Second, the parallel government itself operates to a significant degree through informal networks, further entrenching this form of politics. Informal networks that rely on violence and patronage – or consent and coercion – capture the dynamic shaping contemporary politics in Zimbabwe.     

Resisting the Fall: The Single Dominant Party,Policies and Elections in Malaysia

Before Malaysia’s 2013 general election, one of the few remaining dominant coalitions in the world was aware it would struggle to retain power. A fledgling opposition coalition had inspired public confidence of its capacity to competently rule while public discontent with the ruling party was rife due to the ubiquity of patronage that had prevented the responsible implementation of policies. However, regime change did not occur. How does the protracted rule of Malaysia’s Barisan Nasional coalition, and the hegemonic party in it, the United Malays National Organisation, relate to debates over authoritarian durability, during a period when dominant parties struggle to sustain power? Malaysian elections have been free enough that the opposition has been able to obtain and retain control of state governments, so why has Barisan Nasional not lost power? This article reviews the 2013 election examining three issues: the significance of coalition politics; how policies have shaped voting trends; and the growing monetisation of politics. These perspectives provide insights into the institutional structure of coalitions and their conduct of politics, including clientelistic practices, forms of mobilisation and governance and the outcomes of policies introduced to address socio-economic inequities and drive economic growth.     

Issue framing and electoral violence in Ghana: a conceptual analysis

Ghana has conducted several successful elections since 1992, but the country continues to face many threats of widespread violence due to the recurrent nature of micro-level electoral violence and the existence of vulnerabilities such as political patronage, politics of exclusion, winner-takes-all electoral system and ethnic cleavages. While these factors have been used to explain the causes of electoral violence, issue framing by political elites and its connection to electoral violence have not been adequately examined. To better understand this phenomenon, this article draws on the concept of framing to underscore the argument that issue framing and reframing by political elites tend to shape micro-level electoral violence in Ghana.     

A Tale of Three Cities: Electoral Accountability in Indonesian Local Politics

In Indonesia, local government is endowed with important policy prerogatives and local politics is key to advance social welfare. The literature on Indonesian local politics has convincingly exposed serious limitations in local democratic practices, and it has questioned the ability of local democracy to promote genuine political change. This work, however, predominantly focuses on elite politics and specific forms of accountability based on patronage and clientelism. In this paper, we study democratic accountability in Indonesia from a different perspective. Drawing from the comparative literature on voting behavior, we hypothesize that Indonesian voters evaluate local politicians for their performance, and that they vote to reward or punish them for what they do in office. The analysis of three original surveys conducted in the cities of Medan, Samarinda and Surabaya offers partial support for this argument. While there is a positive relationship between evaluations of local government performance and support for incumbents, the strength of this link varies substantially across individuals and cities. The results shed new light on voter-politician linkages in Indonesia, suggesting that forms of accountability different from clientelism may emerge in this large and diverse country.     

Working-Class Identities in Europe, 1850s–1930s

This paper notes that the emergence of class-based politics preceded the advent of factory manufacture and that artisans or skilled workers continued to dominate the labour movement before 1914. It recognises that industrialisation alone does not explain the emergence of socialist politics and that working-class responses to the process have often been fragmented rather than characterised by solidarity. It first explains this in terms of the uneven nature of industrial growth between nations and within nations, and between and within industrial sectors. Hierarchies of pay and other employer strategies to divide the labour force made it even more unlikely that collective action and belief could result simply from common economic problems. Even where a repressive state, intransigent employers, as well as residential and cultural factors, did produce a large socialist movement, as in the German case, that movement did not monopolise working-class identity, which was fractured by issues of skill, gender, generation, religious confession and ethnicity. However, this does not mean that gender, generation, religious and ethnic identities necessarily obliterated the issue and awareness of class. Indeed these multiple identities often enjoyed a simultaneous existence.     

Food security as a political issue: the 2009 elections in Malawi

African electorates are expected to use non-evaluative rationales, like patronage and ethnicity, when casting their vote. In famine-struck countries like Malawi it is however worthwhile to investigate how a salient political issue like food security influences voters’ decisions. At the turn of the millennium Malawi went through a series of famines. In 2005 the government changed its famine prevention strategy and started to subsidise fertilisers. The fertiliser programme was a political success and is used to explain the outcome of the 2009 elections. Although this explanation seems plausible, such analyses should be grounded in thorough analyses of the origin and implementation of the food policy. Through archival studies and fieldwork, this study reveals the importance of the opposition in changing the food policy and the politics of the implementation process. Hence, even if food security increased ahead of the 2009 elections, the election cannot be interpreted as a ‘national referendum’ on the incumbent's fertiliser programme.     

Reign-seeking and the Rise of the Unelected in Thailand

ABSTRACT

This article develops the concept of “reign-seeking” to capture the unprecedented collective action of the Thai professional and official elite prior to the 2014 military coup and the establishment of a military regime. It argues that this phenomenon reflects broad and deep political dynamics, for which the dominant scholarship on authoritarianism and Thai politics cannot adequately explain. The changing incentives of these supposedly non-partisan actors are interwoven with neo-liberal governance reform driven by a desire for depoliticisation and the minimisation of rent-seeking. This idea has been rationalised in Thailand since the promulgation of the 1997 Constitution resulting in the rise of technocratic and judicial bodies designed to discipline elected politicians and political parties. However, such institutional reconfigurations have consolidated the incentive for people considering themselves to be prospective candidates to “reign” in these organisations. As evident in the 2014 coup, these unconventional political actors – academics, doctors and civil society leaders – made collective efforts to topple the elected government in exchange for gaining selection into the wide range of unelected bodies. Governance reform in Thailand has hitherto reinforced the status quo, although the article further argues that reign-seekers should be seen as contingent, rather than consistent, authoritarians.     

Payoffs,Parties, or Policies: “Money Politics” and Electoral Authoritarian Resilience

A key part of what sustains electoral authoritarianism over the long term is genuine popular support. Dominant parties, particularly in a developmental context (the primary setting for such regimes), and especially where elections are more than minimally meaningful, curry performance legitimacy and loyalty not just through skewed rules and coercion, but through material incentives: “money politics.” If challengers can find a way to de-emphasize support based on material inducements, they stand a chance of securing gains via elections, rather than relying on economic downturns to shrink patronage coffers. Drawing on extensive original ethnographic and survey data from electoral-authoritarian Malaysia, I explore campaign finance and distributions on both sides in the latest, most regime-threatening general election, which was held on May 5, 2013. Evidence suggests that it was by disentangling clientelist networks from the patronage they so often serve to disseminate, allowing a focus on more programmatic than particularistic appeals, that the opposition Pakatan Rakyat alliance so nearly bested the long-dominant Barisan Nasional regime. Persona – being known and seen among the electorate – still matters as much as before, but relies less consistently than in the past on targeted patronage as a premise for loyalty.     

Preauthoritarian Institutions and Postauthoritarian Outcomes: Labor Politics in Chile and Uruguay

The article argues that preauthoritarian institutions have strongly influenced postauthoritarian labor politics in Chile and Uruguay. The nature of preauthoritarian labor administration—state corporatist in Chile, pluralist in Uruguay—had a strong impact on postauthoritarian collective outcomes, whether or not they were modified by the dictators or the ideological disposition of the postauthoritarian governments. Variation in preauthoritarian labor politics between Chile and Uruguay gave historical foundation to different union fortunes in the postauthoritarian era. That result points to the contemporary influence of preauthoritarian institutions, with or without authoritarian modifiers.     

Explaining community mobilization in the city of Vilnius: a search for social capital

The article explores community mobilization in the urban environment. Specifically, it examines community organizations in Lithuania’s capital city of Vilnius. Engaging with social capital theory, the article illustrates the actual community mobilizations, their stories, collective action strategies, and reasons for mobilizing. It challenges the assumption that mobilizations rarely take place in the urban environment of Lithuania due to low civil society and a nonparticipatory culture. This article shows that when mobilizations do take place, they can be short lived but still achieve significant results.     

“Land Grabbing” in an Autocracy and a Multi-Party Democracy: China and India Compared

ABSTRACT

Both China and India have witnessed extensive land expropriation by the state from farmers for use in industrialisation and urbanisation projects. Land conflicts have ensued from these developments. This article poses two questions: (i) Why do we see a similar escalation of land dispossession in both countries, despite their distinctively dissimilar political systems, one being a one-party authoritarian regime, the other being a multi-party democracy?; and (ii) How does the different regime type affect the politics of dispossession? Despite their diverse political institutions, government officials have been given similar incentives to chase growth by developing land, but the institutions create diverging environments for aggrieved citizens to mobilise for collective action. While it is unsurprising that the interests of the poor and weak are not protected in an autocracy, democracy provides no automatic safety valve in defending marginalised citizens either.