Large-scale land acquisitions,state authority and indigenous local communities: insights from Ethiopia

The convergence of diverse global factors – food price volatility, the increased demand for biofuels and feeds, climate change and the financialisation of commodity markets – has resulted in renewed interest in land resources, leading to a rapid expansion in the scope and scale of (trans)national acquisition of arable land across many developing countries. Much of this land is on peripheral indigenous peoples’ territories and considered a common property resource. Those most threatened are poor rural people with customary tenure systems – including indigenous ethnic minority groups, pastoralists and peasants – who need land most. In Ethiopia large areas have been leased to foreign and domestic capital for large-scale production of food and agrofuels, mainly in lowland regions where the state has historically had limited control. Much of the land offered is classified by the state and other elites as ‘unused’ or ‘underutilised’, overlooking the spatially extensive use of land in shifting cultivation and pastoralism. This threatens the land rights and livelihoods of ethnic minority indigenous communities in these lowlands. This article argues that recent large-scale land acquisitions are part of state strategy for enforcing political authority over territory and people. It examines the implications of such strategy for indigenous ethnic minority groups, focusing particularly on the Benishangul-Gumuz region.     

FANTASY OR FICTION: MARCHING OF THE DRAGON IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA

This article looks at the South China Sea dispute and its impact in international relations. It analyses why the Southeast Asian states are highly sovereignty sensitive, and how such sensitivity has made non-intervention the bedrock of managing their foreign policies. China has long viewed the near seas as regions of geostrategic interest, and thus the SCS is not an exception. On the one hand it brings hope and prosperity, and on the other uncertainty and threat. At the end, the article argues whether China’s assertive position regarding other countries’ sovereignty claims in the Arctic might undermine its own position in contested areas like the SCS, and suggests that China will at least have to learn how to share and bear (term coined by the author) as a member of the international community.     

A Cold War before the Cold War: Early Soviet Relations with the West

The field of international relations has seen considerable debate about the reasons for conflict between revolutionary states and status quo powers. The two works reviewed here deal with the early years of the Soviet regime. The material presented indicates that tensions were largely the result of Bolshevik attempts to “export the revolution.” This indicates that it is the nature of a revolutionary state and its desire to challenge the international status quo that leads to tension with other powers.     

Comparing China’s frontier politics: how much difference did a century make?

In response to foreign demands for concessions and territories, China’s last imperial court in the early twentieth century executed reforms to strengthen fiscal, personnel, military, and cultural control over its frontier regions. However, in so doing, it provoked an awakening of the national consciousness of the elites of non-Han ethnic minorities there. Much has changed over the past 100 years regarding the governance of China’s frontier territories of Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang, with the diffusion of nationalist claims among increasing numbers of the ethnic minority populace, heightened focus of foreign actors on the humanitarian and rights situations of the ethnic minorities, and greatly extended reach and firmer grip of the central government. What remained unaltered is the “state integration” purpose of Chinese regimes, as manifested in the practices of “internal colonialism” or “ethnic assimilation,” which has led to grievances and resistance by China’s ethnic minorities against the Chinese state.     

The Political Economy of the Growth of the Liberian Public Sector

Using a political economy approach, this study examines the nature, dynamics, and causes of the expansion of the Liberian public sector. The findings show that the major causes for the expansion of the Liberian public sector did not fit those provided by the literature—citizens’ demands for new services, and other issues that emerge from state-building. Instead, the politico-economic interests of the Liberian ruling class (both the internal and external wings) are the major causes for the increase in the size of the government. These interests include serving the interests of corporate capitalism, and the private accumulation of wealth.     

Mayoral scalar strategies and the role of the central state after the financial crisis

Much has been written about state rescaling, politics of scale and the rise of cities and regions in Europe. Little is known, however, about the impact of the financial crisis on these processes. By taking the view of city mayors, this paper presents a comprehensive and timely re-evaluation of central tenets of this literature in the turbulent aftermath of the financial crisis. The analysis shows the variegated pathways of state rescaling before and after the financial crisis, the multifaceted scalar strategies with which mayors have responded in different countries and cities, and the impact of such strategies on their perception of a centralisation towards the national state. The paper concludes by emphasising the continued dominance of the central state, whereas potentials for the rise of cities are rather to be sought at subnational than at European or global scales.     

Maintaining disorder: the micropolitics of drugs policy in Iran

Abstract

This article analyses the ways in which the state ‘treats’ addiction among precarious drug (ab)users in Iran. While most Muslim-majority as well as some Western states have been reluctant to adopt harm reduction measures, the Islamic Republic of Iran has done so on a nationwide scale and through a sophisticated system of welfare intervention. Additionally, it has introduced devices of management of ‘addiction’ (the ‘camps’) that defy statist modes of punishment and private violence. What legal and ethical framework has this new situation engendered? And what does this new situation tell us about the governmentality of the state? Through a combination of historical analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, the article analyses the paradigm of government of the Iranian state with regard to disorder as embodied by the lives of poor drug (ab)users.     

China: an East Asian alternative to neoliberalism?

The political-economic evolution of post-Mao China has been portrayed as a historically inevitable embrace of neoliberalism; as an exemplification of the East Asian developmental state and as an extension of Soviet New Economic Policy-style state capitalism. This paper evaluates these portrayals through a broad historical and geographical framework. It examines the position of China as a new state after 1949. It then places the shifting logics of socioeconomic regulation in China in relation to (1) the global neoliberal hegemony since the 1980s and (2) the concomitant shifts in the economic policies of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. In so doing, the paper demonstrates how the Communist Party of China creatively adapted and re-purposed regulatory logics from the Washington Consensus and East Asian policies to consolidate its own version of Leninist state-led development.     

Beyond binaries: analysing violent state actors in Critical Studies

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the importance of including the voices of violent state actors in critical research about security and terrorism. Critical Studies tend to avoid narrative research about such actors or to give them “face” and place. However, to understand violence, scholars should listen to, and explore, the narratives of those who are committing violence. The article seeks ways to produce emancipatory knowledge and to be critical without being exclusionary. It discusses the difficulties in deciding who merits the researchers’ listening and research focus, and who does not. These issues are explored and contested by presenting an analysis of women combatants’ experiences.     

When and why politicians do not keep their welfare promises

Although the welfare state is a core theme in most national elections in Western democracies, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the causes of welfare state pledge‐breaking. This article presents an argument that explains when governments do not do what they promised and tests it using an innovative research design with data covering four decades and 18 countries. The argument is able to account for several important but, until now, undescribed phenomena. First, nowadays, governments, on average, deliver less welfare than they promised, whereas in the 1970s they used to deliver more than promised. Second, the pledge‐breaking of governments has become highly dependent on the parliamentary opposition's position on the welfare issue. When the opposition favours fiscal and economic responsibility, governments’ tendency to deliver less welfare than promised is amplified. In contrast, when the opposition emphasises the positive benefits of generous welfare, such as equality and social justice, governments become more prone to keep their promises. Third, this conditional effect of the opposition is a recent occurrence that only emerged after the number of potential swing voters increased as class‐based voting gradually declined from the 1970s onwards.