The Soldier, The State, and The Clash of Civilizations: The Legacy of Samuel Huntington

The major military challenge that the United States faces today is the war in Afghanistan. The U.S. military is engaged in a grueling counterinsurgency campaign against the Islamist movement known as the Taliban, which is based among Pashtun tribes in Southeastern Afghanistan and Northwestern Pakistan, who have never been permanently subdued by a foreign military force. This challenge comes in the wake of that other grueling counterinsurgency war that the U.S. military has had to conduct in Iraq, where its chief adversary was the Islamist movement known as al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Moreover, the challenge in Afghanistan comes on what could be the eve of an impending military challenge, perhaps even a war, with Iran, as that Islamist state relentlessly moves toward acquiring nuclear weapons. In its entire history of two- and-a-quarter centuries, the United States has never been engaged in an unbroken succession of three wars, in three different countries. Together, the U.S. wars with or within Islamist countries add up to what is a “long war,” indeed.     

《小说神髓》的“文学冒险”

坪内逍遥《小说神髓》要展现的是一个庞大的帝国文化图景，其主要意图应置入近代日本社会“他者意识一民族主义一近代国民国家”这一思想观念流程中才能够被理解。它不仅呈现出作者根深蒂固的民族主义立场，而且反映出日本文化界在明治维新后积极谋求文化自立、自强与扩张的文化帝国主义图谋。     

The Dilemma of Nuclear Disarmament: The Case of North Korea

ABSTRACT

The Hanoi summit between the US and North Korea failed not because of North Korea’s brinkmanship strategy or its miscalculation of the US position on the denuclearisation talks, but because of a fundamental issue: a dilemma of how much to yield in giving up its military capabilities to expedite the lifting of sanctions. The leadership in Pyongyang has concerns about the ‘deliverability’ of its promises to its domestic audience to ensure deterrence capabilities and economic recovery. The two-level game model explains why both sides keep minimising the range of options for the negotiations, increasing the risk that the talks will break down.     

The Geography of the International System: The CShapes Dataset

Sceptics of globalization attribute the proliferation of light weapons to economic openness. Increasing globalization apparently weakens public authority, leading to social disarray, anomic violence, and general conditions that make handgun ownership and use more likely. Pro-globalists might argue contrarily that trade openness can raise the premium on peace as violence is bad for business. Moreover, greater interdependence allows the diffusion of anti-proliferation norms and facilitates cooperative behavior among trading partners for stemming the demand for and proliferation of small arms. Using a unique dataset on small arms imports, we find that greater openness to trade and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) lowers small arms imports per capita. A policy measure of economic freedom is associated with higher small arms imports, but this association seems to be explained entirely by the association between economic freedom and strong bureaucracies. States that are de facto more open to the global trading system are less likely to be inundated with these weapons, but richer, better-governed countries import more small arms. Global policy should pay closer attention to the seepage of these weapons from the relatively wealthy, who manufacture and buy them in larger quantities, to the poor, among whom the ‘problems’ associated with small arms are often manifested. Curbing those factors that encourage globalization, however, would be counterproductive to reducing the trade in small arms and light weapons.     

The Bush Doctrine: The Foreign Policy of Republican Empire

The dominant narrative concerning the Bush Doctrine maintains that it is a dangerous innovation, an anomaly that violates the principles of sound policy as articulated by the Founders. According to the conventional wisdom, the Bush Doctrine represents the exploitation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, by a small group of ideologues—the “neoconservatives”—to gain control of national policy and lead the United States into the war in Iraq, a war that should never have been fought. But far from a being a neoconservative innovation, the Bush Doctrine is, in fact, well within the mainstream of U.S. foreign policy and very much in keeping with the vision of America's founding generation and the practice of the statesmen in the Early Republic. The Bush Doctrine is only the latest manifestation of the fact that U.S. national interest has always been concerned with more than simple security.     

浅析印度经济增长的动力

中印是全球经济增长最快的两个发展中大国,但其增长模式却差异很大。印度的经济增长更具潜力和动力,因为推动印度经济增长的因素是:以信息产业为核心的服务业:低投入、高效率的增长模式和强有实力的私营企业。     

李光耀的政治哲学述评

李光耀建立了与新加坡经济和社会发展、对外政策相适应，儒家思想主导、跨越传统与现代的政治哲学，反映现代政治发展一般规律形成，构建具有现代性、现实性、开放性、功能性特征的现代政治的核心价值体系，实现理性政治视域下公民社会的要素组合和向现代国家的过渡，但其以家长式的精英政治为核心的政治哲学在新时期受到后现代思潮的严峻挑战，为当今发展中国家政治发展提供了借鉴和参照。     

世俗制度的矛盾以及融合性的国家权力

现代欧美国家的权力体系可以被看为世俗化过程的产品,政教分离的过程推动了现代国家制度和权力逻辑的改革。除了主权和民主体系的凝聚之外,国家和社会的分离以及对公民权利的保护更成为欧美自由主义的核心要义。人民在宗教自由的保护之下能够抵抗国家强迫人民接受特定教义的宣导,但是个人的自由却也让共同体认同逐渐流失。中立性让国家无法凝聚共同价值观,现代世俗国家因此陷入进退两难的窘境:世俗制度一方面给予多元社会和平生存的环境,但是另一方面也让国家体系受到社会瘫痪的威胁,自由国家在制度上给予平行社会生长的土壤。现代国家在面对恐怖主义和极端民粹思维时要重新考虑国家承担的政治责任问题,除了要掌握融合性的国家权力之外,更要在政治思想上重新创造共同的价值观。     

The Myth of the Multitude: The Endogenous Demise of Alter-globalist Politics

Approaches to protests at global economic institutions and Social Forum events have focused on their counter-hegemonic potential and the commonality articulated through such metaphors as “one no, many yeses” and “we are everywhere”, in which the diversity of activism is contained within a common understanding of the system to be rejected. Recent trends, however, suggest that these assessments are far from satisfactory, and oblivious to the fragility and precariousness surrounding such global subjectivity. This paper explores the existing literature supportive of such political activity, and introduces alternative approaches that question the claims of activists to global political significance, probing the pluralistic global subject imagined in images of a global multitude in a critical fashion. It then reports back to the notion of global society, considering how continuing injustices and difficulties within alter-globalist spaces prevent the creation of ethical identifications with marginalised peoples.     

The Dynamics of Diversion: The Domestic Implications of Presidential Use of Force

Several studies report evidence of diversionary behavior by presidents, while others dispute findings that suggest domestic politics are part of the use of force decision calculus. We argue that previous studies of U.S. force short of war have failed to articulate what diversion actually means. We approach this important debate from a perspective that brings to bear presidential agenda-setting theory. Rather than treating the use of force solely as a dependent variable, we assess whether the use of force diverts attention by modeling the percent of the American public identifying the economy as the nation's most important problem. We also include presidential approval in the model. We treat the public opinion measures as endogenous variables that may or may not affect the decision to use force. We employ Vector Autoregression (VAR) methods to evaluate the causal direction of force and public opinion while controlling for the state of the economy and war. VAR is a multiple-lagged time-series approach that allows us to test a variety of hypotheses derived from diversionary and agenda-setting theory. Our results indicate that uses of force by the president have a notable agenda-setting effect, shifting public attention away from the economy. The shift in attention also causes a long-term effect on the president's public-approval rating.     

The Political Economy of Intellectual Property Protection: The Case of Software

The end of the twentieth century was marked by a sea change in global governance in the realm of intellectual property rights (IPRs). Whereas countries historically retained substantial autonomy with regard to what they defined as intellectual "property" and the rights granted to the owners of intellectual property, the 1990s witnessed the establishment of new global obligations regarding national practices. This paper focuses on the case of software "piracy" to assess the mechanisms by which the new global obligations for the treatment of IPRs are transmitted from the international to the national levels. We first consider a set of national-level factors that many scholars have shown to be important determinants of IPR policy. We then supplement the standard emphasis on domestic factors with an analysis of new transnational factors: countries' multilateral obligations under the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and bilateral pressures from the United States to increase the protection of IPRs. Population-averaged panel data models are used to assess the effects of these national and transnational determinants on levels of software piracy in 80 countries from 1994 to 2002. Our results indicate that membership in the WTO and bilateral pressures from the United States—particularly pressures that offer reciprocal concessions—lead to substantial increases in levels of protection in rich and poor countries. There is, in short, a new international political economy of intellectual property.     

The election of women under proportional representation: The case of Malta

It has often been noted that women's opportunities for a legislative career are enhanced in countries using proportional representation. But in Malta, which uses a variant of proportional representation, there are fewer women in parliament than in any other Western democracy. A detailed analysis of voting data shows that what accounts for the paucity of women legislators in Malta is not a shortage of ballot positions; nor a lack of qualified women candidates; nor significant voter prejudice against female candidates. Rather, Malta's exceptional performance results from the unwillingness or inability of party elites to recruit a substantial number of women candidates, even though voting patterns create an incentive for political parties to maximize the number of candidates. Since the cause of this failure to mobilize more women candidates can be ascribed neither to the workings of the electoral system nor to voter behaviour, it will have to be sought in contextual factors that still work to stifle women's political careers. Malta's experience serves as a caution against optimistic expectations that the adoption of proportional representation will lead to greater legislative opportunities for women.     

The Civilization of Extremes

This essay makes a comparative assessment of two works dealing with contemporary India. Gupta explains why India has not taken off despite its impressive growth. Nilekani examines the ideas that have shaped the debate about India's development. The essay argues that Nilekani is more optimistic about India's future than Gupta. Gupta's book is a major work that will stand the test of time. Nilekani's book is novel in that he is an entrepreneur who became an author. These are contrasting works. Gupta asserts that growth in India has not led to development. Nilekani argues that India's growth has become more broad-based. Gupta says that the statistics behind India's success hide its underlying failures. Nilekani considers growth to have become more broad-based. Nilekani's moral vision is concerned with ideas, Gupta's is with people. The essay concludes that Indians may be too optimistic about their achievements, but India also has successes to show.