Debt crisis of the less developed countries and the transfer debate once again

In the perspective of substantial amount of net transfers from the debtor less developed countries (LDCs) to the creditor developed countries (DCs) in the recent debt crisis years, there is a renewed debate (that started in the context of German reparation payments after the First World War) on the question of transfer burden of debt. The present study assembles some evidence to show that the LDCs in general expanded their export‐volumes and faced losses in their export unit values in the process of their debt repayments. Many LDCs faced this transfer burden of debt irrespective of whether their export drive was in the field of primary products or manufactures. Thus the Keynesian analysis for German transfer problems seems to be relevant in the context of the present experience of the LDCs. For some debtor countries, the ‘insoluble’ transfer problem mentioned by Keynes exists as they are facing ‘Fisher's paradox’: The more the debtors pay, the more they owe.     

Civil Society under the Law ‘On Foreign Agents’: NGO Strategies and Network Transformation

Abstract

This essay analyses how the ‘foreign agent’ law has been interpreted and implemented by the Russian authorities and examines diverse NGO survival strategies in response to the ‘foreign agent’ label. The foreign agent law has disrupted and transformed resource mobilisation strategies and transnational NGO networks. Based on qualitative research on environmental NGOs, we offer a typology of NGO responses to the foreign agent law, providing examples to show how the organisations attempt to ensure their survival.     

‘We Are All Poor Here’: Economic Difference,Social Divisiveness and Targeting Cash Transfers in Sub-Saharan Africa

While the central thrust of Michael Lipton's work has been the crucial role of productivity gains in small farm agriculture for rural poverty reduction, in many sub-Saharan African countries this desirable outcome has stubbornly refused to materialise, and growing numbers of rural poor people are found persistently to fail to secure even minimal acceptable levels of food consumption. A social protection policy response is to target social cash transfers to the chronic extreme poor. This article focuses on the level of cash transfers relative to income differences between households in the bottom half of the income distribution, and the social tensions that arise from beneficiary selection and exclusion. It is found that cash transfers to target groups such as ‘the poorest 10 per cent’ or the ‘ultra-poor labour constrained’ must be set low, even below the welfare levels they seek to achieve, if they are to avoid socially invidious reshuffling of the income distribution. The article identifies critical trade-offs between the cost and coverage of different types of social transfer, their social acceptability and their political traction, helping to explain the reluctance of governments to adopt scaled-up poverty-targeted transfers as the preferred form of social cash transfer to those most in need in their societies.     

Knowing Me,Knowing You: Media Portrayal of the EU in Kazakhstan

Abstract

The dichotomy of Self/Other prevails in shaping identity. This article asks how and to what extent the elements of the EU’s image produced by media discourse shape the national identity of Kazakhstan. It contends that a state’s identity can be formulated not in opposition—that is, not ‘Us against Them’—but rather, ‘Us as One of Them’. It argues that, in the case of Kazakhstan, the predominantly positive media discourse about the EU ‘Other’ contributes to a positive formulation of the Self via the legitimisation of the domestic regime on the national and international levels.     

War,Violence and the Making of the Stalinist State: A Tillyian Analysis

Abstract

Defining the state as ‘organised violence’, based on the emergence of the modern European national state system, Charles Tilly identified four essential war-driven, state-building activities: ‘war-making’; ‘state-making’; ‘protection’ of elite ‘clients’; and ‘extraction’ of resources. Drawing on Tilly's primary categories of analysis, this essay considers the ways in which war, or the threat of war, real or imagined, shaped the Soviet state, particularly in its Stalinist manifestation. This essay argues that Tilly's warfare-state paradigm, judiciously deployed, brings into high relief facets of Soviet state-making that few other paradigms do.     

Disrupting civility: amateur intellectuals,international lawyers and TWAIL as praxis

Abstract

This paper is a reflection on the role of intellectuals in engaging with Palestinian solidarity movements and liberation discourses, and on the place of international lawyers specifically within that context. The paper considers ‘the question of Palestine’ as a rigorous test for intellectuals in the Global North today, and examines particular debates over free speech, civility and balance that unfolded in the wake of Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza. It considers the interventions of international lawyers in these debates with reference to Edward Said’s ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ intellectuals, and explores ways in which anti-colonial international lawyers (as amateur intellectuals) can transcend prevailing professional orthodoxies to deploy language, arguments or tactics that rupture liberal legal processes and narratives on Palestine.     

Is the PDS Already a Cash Transfer? Rethinking India’s Food Subsidy Policies

Abstract

Critics argue that India’s mismanaged Public Distribution System (PDS), which sells subsidised cereals to poor families, should be replaced by cash transfers. Others fear cash may be misused. Using National Sample Survey data, this article demonstrates that families treat additional PDS subsidies wholly as a source of cash – exactly like a cash transfer. More worryingly, cereal consumption has not increased, despite higher real subsidies. Moreover, neither the PDS nor cash transfers are likely to raise total food expenditure in poor families. Finally, therefore, the paper explores how higher food consumption and other objectives of PDS subsidies may be achieved.     

Restrictive Institutions and Critical Resources: Non-Profit Organisations and Volunteer Resources in the Russian Federation

Abstract

Resource management is essential for any organisation’s success. For non-profit organisations (NPOs) volunteers are a key resource. In this article, we examine how NPOs recruit, mobilise and manage volunteers in a challenging institutional and operational context. By drawing on a qualitative study of Russian health NPOs, our study highlights that the operational and institutional environment encountered by Russian NPOs leads to ‘management by network’ to acquire necessary volunteer resources. This pragmatic approach, whilst ensuring an organisation’s short-term survival, ultimately limits the type of volunteer recruited by Russian NPOs. The implications of these findings are also explored.     

The Politics of Anti-Corruption Campaigns in Putin’s Russia: Power,Opposition, and the All-Russia People’s Front

Abstract

The beginning of Vladimir Putin’s third term was characterised by the politicisation of corruption. Opposition forces focused on corruption and criticised the regime for tolerating it. This article explores how the regime reacted to opposition criticism. The regime encountered a dilemma: it could not ignore the opposition but promoting anti-corruption reforms was risky for the regime. This study focuses on the regime’s use of the All-Russia People’s Front (Obshcherossiiskii Narodnyi Front—ONF) and concludes that it functioned as a ‘parastatal’ anti-corruption movement, enabling the regime to deflect the blame without directly involving itself in the process.     

The Entitlement Approach – A Case for Framework Development Rather than Demolition: A Reply to Rubin

Abstract

This is my response to Olivier Rubin's critique of my paper ‘Entitlement failure and deprivation: a critique of Sen's famine philosophy’. I have examined his criticisms in the light of Hume's philosophy of human knowledge and consider them weak in logical content.     

National in Form,Putinist in Content: Minority Institutions ‘Outside Politics’

Abstract

Over the past three decades, Russia has developed a set of institutions for the management of ethno-linguistic diversity based on the principle of ‘national cultural autonomy’. This article examines the positioning of these institutions within Russian society, arguing that while state-endorsed discourses locate them within the culture sphere—treated as distinct from political processes—there is in fact an interpenetration of ‘politics’ and ‘culture’. The article identifies why these institutions position themselves within the ‘cultural sphere’ while also supporting the country’s meta-narratives on inter-ethnic tolerance and, effectively, the political status quo. Soviet legacies of inter-ethnic relations continue to be socially embedded, yet within this framework some dissenting voices are also discerned.     

‘For you were strangers’: Jewish ritual,black musics,and commemorative politics in Tel Aviv’s Refugee Seder

ABSTRACT

Each Passover since 2009, hundreds of East African asylum seekers and Israeli activists have gathered for ‘Refugee Seder’, a public event to support Sudanese and Eritrean communities in Israel. Featuring a ceremonial seder meal, storytelling, speeches, and a dance party, Refugee Seder draws on age-old Jewish rituals and contemporary global black pop musics to symbolize Africans as members of the Israeli national collective. This article explores Refugee Seder’s modified commemorative practices, which engage dual narratives of Jewish nationalism and cultural cosmopolitanism. I show how seder rituals enable African participants to temporarily embody a Jewish spiritual identity, and how black pop musics help publicly reframe Africans’ ‘blackness’ as a cultural asset instead of a political liability. Ultimately, I argue that Refugee Seder distills larger ideologies of identity and belonging that are deeply rooted in Israeli collective consciousness, and which shape the trajectories of ‘refugee issue’ politics and policy-making.     

An Alternative Internationalism: The Main Lines and Legacies of Polish Sovietology,Promethean Orientalism and the Soviet ‘Southern Borderlands’, 1926–1939

Abstract

‘Prometheism’ was an interwar movement of borderland nationalists from the former Russian Empire who envisioned the division of the Soviet Union into independent nation-states. This article argues that ideological affinities and diasporic connections made the Promethean cause an attractive ‘alternative internationalism’ to the Soviet system for exiled thinkers hailing from the so-called ‘southern borderlands’ of Crimea, the Caucasus, the Volga region and Central Asia. In the 1930s, Prometheism drew intellectuals from these regions to Poland, where the movement’s thinkers formulated ambitious visions of Eurasian liberation from Soviet power.     

Leaving Europe,Aspiring Access: Racial Capital and Its Spatial Discontents among the Euro-Maghrebi Minority

Abstract

This article explores the emigration of tertiary-educated EU citizens with North African heritage to Dubai. Longitudinal ethnographic data suggests that leaving Europe was a mobility strategy for dealing with a sense of ‘racial stuckedness’ at home, a status concern undergirding their stagnant socio-economic position. By ‘transnationalizing’ Bourdieu’s seminal conceptual tool kit of the ‘forms of capital’, it contrasts the conversion yields of timely achieved educational credentials, marked by racial friction at home but significantly higher returns after transgressing into more favorable status zones overseas. This differently structured outcome suggests the analytical productivity of an altogether distinct value form, ‘racial capital.’     

The Rise and Fall of a Crimean Party Boss: Nikolai Vasil’evich Solov’ev and the Leningrad Affair

Abstract

This essay focuses on the career of N. V. Solov’ev, a prominent Stalin-era official and little-known victim of the 1949 Leningrad Affair. When treated as a case study, Solov’ev’s life and times illustrate a variety of important things about Stalinism as a whole. Most obviously, Solov’ev’s rapid ascent into the party nomenklatura during the interwar years exemplifies the dramatic trajectory that many in party service enjoyed during this period. Once in office, Solov’ev promptly embraced the Stalinist political culture that had promoted him there, at times even emulating the general secretary himself. Finally, Solov’ev’s postwar disgrace and ruin reveal much about the broader functioning of this political system, particularly in regard to Joseph Stalin’s concerns about the USSR’s emergent party elite.     

Victims,Villains, or Geopolitical Tools? Representations of Donbas Displacement in Ukrainian and Russian Government Media

Abstract

This essay examines how the Ukrainian and Russian government-owned newspapers, Uriadovyi Kurier and Rossiiskaya Gazeta, represent people displaced by the war in Donbas, analysing the political goals revealed by these publications’ attitudes towards the displaced. While the Ukrainian publication delimits the nation by distinguishing ‘real’ internally displaced people (IDPs) deserving help and ‘fake’ IDPs guilty of siphoning Ukrainian taxpayers’ money to rebel-held areas, the Russian paper foregrounds the Russian state's competence in managing displacement while silencing the displaced themselves.     

Promoting neoliberal ideology in Finnish rural community development: the creation of new moral actors

ABSTRACT

Today’s political ambitions are based on the neoliberal aspiration to diminish the state’s role and responsibilities, and to transfer those responsibilities to local communities and individuals in ways that idealise those communities, promising to ‘give power to the people’. Instead of highlighting individualism, neoliberalism now celebrates communities and participation. This article deals with the effects of this ideology with regard to Finnish rural policy objectives. Drawing on Finnish village action programmes as data, we argue that these ideological views aim to transform individuals and create new moral actors. Our research indicates that Finland’s rural policy objectives invoke actors that are responsible for their communities, have an ‘enterprising spirit’, and are change-friendly and innovative. However, the ideology disregards the economic and social preconditions and resources necessary for building affluent communities and villages, which are difficult to attain when there is less government involvement. Thus, rural communities face increasing demands and less government involvement.     

Confounded but Complacent: Accounting for How the State Sees Responses to Its Housing Intervention in Johannesburg

Abstract

The South African state’s ‘will to improve’ poor people’s lives through free home-ownership is unsettled by subsequent unauthorised housing usage and adaptions. Despite insight into and empathy for these non-compliant activities amongst some state housing practitioners, the dominant state position is to denounce them without analysing their drivers and significance. This position is enabled by the state’s selective use of knowledge, confidence in the housing project as is, and avoidance of discomforting signals. The ‘will to improve’ is not matched by a deep ‘will to know’, in part because the capacity to act under difficult circumstances is argued to depend on a form of ‘not knowing’.     

Civil Society, ‘Traditional Values’ and LGBT Resistance to Heteronormative Rights Hegemony: Analysis of the UN Universal Periodic Review in the Russian Federation

Abstract

This study of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights in the Russian Federation uses frame analysis of civil society input into the UN Universal Periodic Review. It reveals a stark state–civil society ‘disconnect’ reflecting oppressive government practices, including Law No. 135-FZ on ‘non-traditional sexual relations’. This raises wider questions about the efficacy of the review system, not least because issues of performativity and legitimation can be seen to facilitate authoritarian resilience. This allows the ruling elite to continue to dissemble by espousing universal rights yet strategically framing them as heteronormative, integral to the protection of ‘traditional values’ and inimical to identity-based rights claims.     

Aid,the Real Exchange Rate and Why Policy Matters: The Cases of Morocco and Tunisia

Abstract

Every form of foreign-exchange inflow, including aid, can potentially cause real-exchange rate appreciation, with adverse consequences for the production of tradables (‘Dutch Disease’). Whether it does so depends on the policy response to the inflow. This paper investigates the issue for Morocco and Tunisia, over 1980–2009. We find that aid led to a real appreciation in Morocco, but had no effect on Tunisia’s real exchange rate. This confirms the importance of the macroeconomic framework in which aid is provided, and the key role for infrastructure and other supply-side improvements in determining the final real-economy impact of aid and other inflows.