Righting the Resource Curse: Institutional Politics and State Capabilities in Edo State,Nigeria

Abstract

The poor record of liberal reforms sponsored by the international community in postcolonial settings underscores the real politik of institutional change. What we call a ‘new normal’ in development policy and practice foregrounds the role of agency – leadership, networks of connectors and convenors, entrepreneurs and activists – but it has less to say about the political and economic conditions of possibility in which agents operate. The putative powers of agency seem most challenged in contexts of extreme resource dependency and the resource curse. The particular case of Edo, a state in the oil rich Niger delta region of Nigeria, illustrates the intersection of agency and structural conditions to show how ‘asymmetric capabilities’ can emerge to create, constrain and make possible particular reform options.     

INSTITUTIONAL AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP DIMENSIONS OF CASCADING ECOLOGICAL CRISES

While some of the future impacts of global environmental change such as some aspects of climate change can be projected and prepared for in advance, other effects are likely to surface as surprises – that is situations in which the behaviour in a system, or across systems, differs qualitatively from expectations. Here we analyse a set of institutional and political leadership challenges posed by ‘cascading’ ecological crises: abrupt ecological changes that propagate into societal crises that move through systems and spatial scales. We illustrate their underlying social and ecological drivers, and a range of institutional and political leadership challenges, which have been insufficiently elaborated by either crisis management researchers or institutional scholars. We conclude that even though these sorts of crises have parallels to other contingencies, there are a number of major differences resulting from the combination of a lack of early warnings, abrupt ecological change, and the mismatch between decision‐making capabilities and the cross‐scale dynamics of social‐ecological change.     

“Illiberal Spaces:” Uzbekistan's extraterritorial security practices and the spatial politics of contemporary authoritarianism

Research on comparative authoritarianism has tended to neglect spatial approaches to the politics of non-democratic states. This article argues that spatial theory offers a useful framework for exploring extraterritorial security practices designed to counter political opposition among migrant and exile communities. A case study of Uzbekistan explores how the state responded to the perceived security threats posed by rapidly growing communities of labor migrants and the activities of many political and religious activists in exile. The security services developed a network of extraterritorial intelligence and security mechanisms – including surveillance, detention, interrogation and forced returns – to pre-empt or respond to any perceived threats to the regime emanating from abroad. These security practices extended the state in complex ways beyond its borders, resulting in new “state spaces” that reproduced elements of domestic repression in other jurisdictions. The article suggests that such extraterritorial practices are typical of contemporary authoritarian regimes, as such states seek to manage the spatial challenges produced by mass global migration, international financial flows, and transnational processes of knowledge production.     

The transnational state and the BRICS: a global capitalism perspective

It is commonplace for observers to see the increasingly prominent role of the BRICS in international economic and political affairs as a Southern challenge to global capitalism and the power of the core Trilateral nation-states. Extant accounts remain mired in a tenacious realist debate over the extent to which the BRICS are challenging the prevailing international order. I suggest that we shift the paradigmatic focus in discussion of the BRICS phenomenon towards a global capitalism perspective that breaks with such a nation-state/inter-state framework. Global integration and transnational capitalist class formation has advanced significantly in the BRICS. BRICS protagonism is aimed less at challenging the prevailing international order than at opening up space in the global system for more extensive integration and a less asymmetric global capitalism. The article examines agricultural subsidies, US–China relations and international trade agreements as empirical reference points in arguing that the concept of the transnational state provides a more satisfying explanatory framework for understanding the BRICS phenomenon than the variety of realist approaches. By misreading the BRICS critical scholars and the global left run the risk of becoming cheerleaders for repressive states and transnational capitalists in the South. We would be better off by a denouement of the BRICS states and siding with ‘BRICS from below’ struggles of popular and working class forces.     

Mugabe at war: The political economy of conflict in Zimbabwe

This paper employs a 'political economy of conflict' approach to explore the recent deterioration in the governance of Zimbabwe. It argues that this analytical approach, which has been applied by scholars such as William Reno to highly dysfunctional and/or collapsed states like Liberia and Sierra Leone, is appropriate for understanding the current actions of the Zimbabwean government as well, and especially their relation to the military's unpopular intervention in the recent conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While Zimbabwe's current crisis has been aptly described by various scholars as a failure of leadership, this paper argues that such failures of national governments in Africa need to be understood within the broader context of international political economy. Zimbabwe's lapses in governance extend beyond the state and the national border to features that have non-state and informal as well as international and transnational dimensions.     

How irresponsible are rising powers?

Rising powers like Brazil, China and India have recently made significant gains in their capabilities as states. Therefore many IR scholars are claiming that these powers must now contribute more to the provision of global public goods like a clean environment, free trade and human rights. This article will argue that reasonably democratic international political discourses are another global public good whose greater supply is sorely needed and that rising powers are having a positive impact on the creation of such discourses. Thus rising powers are not behaving as irresponsibly as many IR scholars assume.     

Convergence as political strategy: social justice movements,natural resources and climate change

Abstract

Critical scholars and activists have now been contending with a widely recognised convergence of global crises for a decade. The issues have intersected decisively, with staple food sources proving inaccessible for the world’s poor, banks foreclosing on the most vulnerable, fuel sources causing war and impacting migration, and climate change-related instabilities shaking low-income communities to their core. At the same time, agrarian, environmental, indigenous and fishers’ movements – among others – have used this moment to converge in their own right. This article explores this intertwining of social justice movements with an eye on such interrelated challenges. Its overall objective is, on one side, to provide some broad empirical brushstrokes on the intertwining of transnational social justice movements at the local, national and regional scales as they work with and trade frameworks of food sovereignty and climate justice. On the flip side, this article offers a set of tools to analyse and understand the politics of convergence as political strategy – as a means of advancing global social justice – against the rising tide of climate-related resource grabs.     

Political economy of land grabbing inside China involving foreign investors

China tends to be a dominant figure in the literature on global land grabbing. It is either cast as a major land grabber in distant places such as Africa, or as a key player in crop booms elsewhere because it provides for massive market demand, such as for soya from South America. These are all important issues and are well covered in the literature. However, the crop booms inside China that involve transnational capital and investors – and have provoked conflict around land politics – have been overlooked. Spotlighting the issue of land grabbing inside China reminds us that capital accumulation is principally interested in geographies and settings where it can generate profit – regardless of nationalities, boundaries, structural or institutional conditions. This paper hopes to contribute towards a more refined picture of global land grabbing.     

The Transnational Debt Architecture and Emerging Markets: the politics of paradoxes and punishment

The Argentine default at the end of 2001 highlighted the ongoing problems plaguing the existing transnational debt architecture, namely the tensions between creditor rights and human rights. While these debates have thrown important light on what needs to be done in terms of improving the transnational debt architecture, few studies have actually attempted to evaluate critically the manner in which transnational debt has been managed since the outset of the Bretton Woods system in 1944. I argue that the postwar informal arrangement governing transnational debt architecture not only helps augment the power of credit to serve as an effective form of social discipline, but that it is also profoundly contradictory. Through an historical survey, spanning the beginning of the Bretton Woods system to the recent Argentine default, I demonstrate that the informal nature of the transnational debt architecture, coupled with the mounting power of global financial capitals over debtor states, has played a major role in bringing about increased levels of volatility and vulnerability in the international credit system.     

Autonomous peasant struggles and left arts of government

I argue that self-organisation cannot account for how grassroots struggles can pursue transnational political change. I develop an account of some ‘left arts of government’ through which resistance is facilitated and organised without reintroducing oppressive and hierarchical forms of rule. I do so by focusing on the practices of autonomous peasant mobilisations. Land occupation movements facilitate the ability of people to engage in ongoing resistance on their own behalf. They organise resistance through horizontal communication and through transnational networks involving representative structures. Finally, peasant mobilisations engage with states and international institutions to solidify gains made.     

Conspiracy and statecraft in postcolonial states: theories and realities of the hidden hand in Pakistan’s war on terror

This paper is a cautiously sympathetic treatment of conspiracy theory in Pakistan, relating it to Marxist theories of the state, structural functionalism and Machiavellian realism in international relations. Unlike moralising mainstream news reports describing terrorism in terms of horrific events and academic research endlessly lamenting the ‘failure’, ‘weakness’ and mendacity of the Pakistani state, conspiracy theory has much in common with realism in its cynical disregard for stated intentions and insistence on the primacy of inter-state rivalry. It contains a theory of the postcolonial state as part of a wider international system based on class-conspiracy, wedding imperial interests to those of an indigenous elite, with little concern for preserving liberal norms of statehood. Hence we consider some forms of conspiracy theory a layperson’s theory of the capitalist state, which seeks to explain history with reference to global and domestic material forces, interests and structures shaping outcomes, irrespective of political actors’ stated intentions. While this approach may be problematic in its disregard for intentionality and ideology, its suspicion of the notion that the ‘War on Terror’ should be read morally as a battle between states and ‘non-state actors’ is understandable – especially when technological and political-economic changes have made the importance of impersonal economic forces driving towards permanent war more relevant than ever.     

Understanding Policy Transfer: A Multi-Level, Multi-Disciplinary Perspective

At the same time that comparative and international political scientists have been confronting the problems of analysing state behaviour under conditions of uncertainty, state-centred political scientists are attempting, somewhat belatedly, to deal with the increasing complexity and uncertainty which underpins modern governance. Yet despite similar research agendas these disciplines have continued to speak past each other. This article contends that policy transfer analysis can provide a context for integrating some key concerns of these disciplines. Further, we argue that the process of policy transfer should be examined through a structure and agency approach with three dimensions: global, international and transnational levels, the macro-level and the interorganizational level. This three-dimensional model employs the notion of a policy transfer network as a middle-range level of analysis which links a particular form of policy development (policy transfer), microdecision making in organizations, macrosystems and global, transnational and international systems. It is hoped that this approach will stimulate an empirical research agenda which will illuminate important policy developments in domestic and world politics.     

Tracing connections between comparative politics and globalisation

This article focuses on connections between globalisation and comparative political analysis. Traditionally the latter is concerned with domestic political actors, especially states. Globalisation, on the other hand, emphasises the variable significance of a variety of border-crossing, including transnational, actors. I argue that since the end of the Cold War five key developments—a large number of new countries; widespread political changes, especially in the Third World; global entrenchment of capitalism; increasing regional economic integration; and the growth of transnational civil society—collectively underline the importance of globalisation for comparative political analysis. It is now difficult plausibly to argue that what goes on politically within countries is unaffected by globalisation. The article is structured as follows. First, I trace the traditional (domestic) concerns of comparative political analysis and argue that, because it neglects the impact of globalisation, it is analytically inadequate. Second, I examine four key aspects of globalisation: technological, political, economic and cultural globalisation, and suggest how they influence comparative political analysis. Third, to assess differing views of how globalisation affects domestic politicalÐeconomic terrains, I examine competing arguments of the hyper-globalisationist, globalisation sceptic and structural dependency approaches.     

Place-Based Leadership and Public Service Innovation

This article discusses two matters that are becoming increasingly important in debates about local government: place-based leadership and public service innovation. The troubling international economic outlook means that many local authorities are focusing on ‘efficiency savings’ and the prevailing mantra in public policy circles is ‘do more with less’. This article questions this approach. It aims to contribute to what one chief executive described to us as ‘more with more’ thinking. This approach strives to release the community and business energies of a locality. If this can be achieved the total resources available to improve the local quality of life can be increased, even if state spending is shrinking. A conceptual framework for studying place-based leadership is presented. This distinguishes three, overlapping realms of leadership in any given locality – political leadership, managerial/professional leadership, and community and business leadership. It is argued that the areas of overlap between these realms can be viewed as innovation zones – spaces in which established approaches can be questioned and new trajectories developed. These zones can, however, also become conflict zones with little learning and exchange taking place. Place-based leadership can influence whether such political spaces are used to promote creative problem solving or whether they become arenas for dispute and friction between sectional perspectives. By drawing on a study of the current Digital+Green initiative in Bristol, UK, the article suggests that an imaginative approach to place-based leadership – one that accepts intelligent risk taking – offers potential for improving the local quality of life as well as strengthening local democracy.     

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.     

Political responsibility and global health

Globalising dynamics have had wide-ranging and pervasive impacts on nearly every form of human relatedness, which now include the bases upon which states calculate and express their political responsibilities. As the ‘reach’ of practical and normative pressures extends and their demands intensify, the compass of state responsibility is becoming a key pressure point for facing the challenges and mediating the tensions of our globalised and still globalising world. This theme is examined from a global health perspective. The general disposition of states toward their acknowledged political responsibilities is unlikely to change, but the combination of legal, normative, political and practical dynamics impinging on them have already begun to register, as both states and the international system adjust to a politics that now have global dimensions.     

A changing world: is the UN development system ready?

This article examines five contemporary areas of development concern that have become major drivers of global transformation since the turn of the millennium: the plight of fragile states; the emergence of new powers and new development funds in a changing aid landscape; the need for developing countries to manage the growing resources at their disposal; encroachments on the political sovereignty of states; and new global challenges that demand global action, including climate change, migration, and food security. These drivers of change call for responses from the UN – and in particular its development system of some 30 organisations. The ongoing protracted debate on the future UN development agenda should take cognisance of these changes if the system is to remain relevant after 2015. But the signs are not promising that either the agenda or the UN development system are up to the task.     

The resilient state: new regulatory modes in international approaches to state building?

‘Resilience’ has quickly risen to prominence in international security and development circles. In recent years it has found its way into political discourse on state building and state fragility, triggering a vast but often conceptually indistinct examination of the subject. Given its meaning in policy publications and guidelines, ‘resilience’ tends to eschew a static conceptualisation of statehood, turning instead to a more dynamic, complex and process-oriented rendering of state–society relations. This illustrates a conceptual shift from ‘failed states’ to ‘fragile states and situations’. It also transforms the concept of ‘failed state’ as a mere threat perception – with ‘stability’ as its logical other – into ‘fragility’ as a particular form of social and political risk. This paper analyses the concepts in 43 policy papers, focusing on the nexus of ‘resilience’ and ‘fragility’ in international state building, and assesses potential consequences. What does ‘resilience’ – as the opposite vision to ‘fragility’ – in fact mean? What is the practice derived from this chimerical state of states?     

Reinterpreting India's Rise through the Middle Power Prism

Abstract

India's spectacular rise in recent years has been the source of hyperbolic theorising and speculation on its major power status. Middle power theory offers a set of dynamic analytical parameters which allow for re-evaluating India's global influence and identifying both strengths and weaknesses of its power projection and resources. Placing emphasis on themes of Third World leadership, good international citizenship, multilateral activism, bridge-building diplomacy, and coalition-building with like-minded states, the middle power concept can encapsulate key aspects of India's contemporary agency and account for structural dynamics which constitute a reformist world-view through the reconfiguration of the Indian state within the existing world order. Overall, middlepowermanship delineates fundamental continuities in India's foreign policy tradition, epitomises India's existing position in the neoliberal world order, while providing a good indication of the directions India will take on the global stage in the short and medium-term.     

Internationalisation,global capitalism and the integration of Iran

Abstract

There is a common tendency to observe a process of homogenisation when the current international structure is analysed. However, the globalisation process embraces heterogeneities and contradictions stemming from the integration of different states into a single global structure. This article explores the role and motivations of domestic social classes in creating variations in the form of integration of their states into the global whole. It takes one of the odd cases at the centre of inquiry and particularly concentrates on the emergence of alternative forms to the neoliberal globalisation in the process of Iran’s integration into the global capitalism. The accumulation strategies adopted by the dominant class factions in Iran are investigated in order to reveal their dialectical relationship with the international capitalist structure. Their role in the international political economy of Iran demonstrates how social agents through their strategic activities create variations in the forms of integration into the global capitalism. The article compares the Iranian case to the varieties of integration of lately capitalised but not peripherised BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) states. This aims to reveal that whilst these countries have truly integrated into the global capitalist system, the internationalisation of their states contradicts the accumulation strategies of their dominant classes.