Reconsidering the ontological foundations of international energy affairs: realist geopolitics,market liberalism and a politico-economic alternative

Accounts of international energy affairs often present a divergence between geopolitical/realist and liberal market-based approaches. This article suggests that this state of affairs reflects the (often implicit) legacies of realist and rationalist international thought in the study of energy affairs and the corresponding political and economic ontological hierarchies of analytical frameworks employed in different accounts of energy politics. Consequently, this article recommends a greater explicit attention to scientific ontological foundations in studies of energy relations and, in line with the calls of Keating et al. and Strange, suggests an approach based in the literature on I/GPE, which merges political and economic ontological axioms, as most apposite for the study of energy affairs. Building on this framework, and giving particular examples from the context of Eurasian energy politics, this article then outlines a number of politico-economic heuristic models (structural diversity, territorial non-coincidence, milieu-shaping and market-authority bargains) that are particularly useful concepts in helping to explain the intricate interactions of international energy relations.     

Money-laundering in Southeast Asia: liberalism and governmentality at work

This article discusses the diffusion of a regulatory system against money-laundering in Southeast Asia. To this end, the article reconstructs how the Financial Action Task Force has securitised the issue of money-laundering into a global problem requiring a global solution and how this has spread to developing nations. The article seeks to demonstrate how these international norms and practices spread and are transformed into national law within Southeast Asia. The article further shows that these transformations reflect an increasing level of multilateral cooperation within the region and that this phenomena can be better understood as the articulation of a global expression of governmentality where a set of strategies and policing techniques emerges to effect control.     

Testing the liberal subject: (in)security,responsibility and ‘self-improvement’ in the UK citizenship test

The recent debate over the changes to the ‘Life in the UK’ citizenship test offers another opportunity to reflect on the testing of would-be citizens in liberal democracies. The citizenship test has often been understood as part of the ‘strengthening’ of national borders: set within a discourse of fears over high levels of migration and the risk to cultural homogeneity. Furthermore, it has been viewed as an illustration of the death of multiculturalism and presented as an illiberal strategy of cultural assimilation. I propose that whilst the notion of ‘testing’ is built out of fears regarding ‘threatening’ difference and ‘community cohesion’, what the UK testing process presents is an explicitly liberal strategy of governing. Drawing on the history of the test, I suggest that it is not purely a mechanism of restriction but that it also relies on strategies of responsibility, empowerment and ‘self-improvement’. The citizenship test, alongside other recent border strategies, may be better understood as representing a fascinating nexus between advanced liberal ideas of governing and concerns regarding (in)security. I argue that studying the test in this way offers up vital questions about how community and political membership continues to be shaped in late modernity.     

The Dual Use of an Historical Event: ‘Rwanda 1994’, the Justification and Critique of Liberal Interventionism

This essay places the 1994 genocide in Rwanda in the context of the academic and political rise of liberal interventionism since 1990. It argues that this historical event is important for the debate about ‘humanitarian interventions’ in two different ways: on the one hand, as a signifier, ‘Rwanda 1994’ has been used (or, for that matter, misused) in order to justify an almost unlimited international agenda of liberal interventionism and social engineering; on the other, the genocide that could arguably have been prevented represents the exceptional case where military intervention can indeed be justified—but precisely because it is not in need of a specifically liberal justification. What would have made a military-based prevention of genocide justifiable in this particular case is precisely the aim to prevent something that is universally agreed to be unacceptable (genocide). The liberal twist in the justification narrative, in contrast, tends to emphasize the difference between the (liberal) ‘us’ and the non-liberal ‘them’, consequently claiming the legitimate right for the ‘us’ to decide about the use of force exclusively, that is, without the ‘them’. The continuation of the narrative into answering the post-intervention question ‘what now?’ then leads consequently into the necessity of imposing one's own system of rule as a general norm without due attention to the specifics of the situation ‘on the ground’. The exceptional features of ‘Rwanda 1994’ (the empirical event) thus point in a critical way to all those cases where ‘Rwanda 1994’ (the signifier) has been used to make the case for an ever-expanding agenda of liberal (‘just’) war.     

新自由主义与国际经济法

全球性经济危机的危险性使人们对新自由主义产生了质疑,某些现行国际经济法制度的缺陷也日渐显露。WTO体制内各国保护主义可能抬头,国际金融体系的破绽使得加强监管和完善体制成为当务之急,从而弱化了自由主义色彩。国际经济法律秩序面临重组,这给各国提出了新的课题。但是在全球性经济衰退到来之际,新自由主义所体现的国际经济自由和开放仍然十分重要,其制度性的缺陷可以通过在危机之际建立国际经济合作机制得以修正。由于中国对外开放是在新自由主义的国际大环境下进行的,所以金融危机对新自由主义的冲击,对于中国也是一场严峻的挑战。但是,以中国的经济规模和成就,中国在国际经济法律制度和秩序的重组中也获得参与国际经济规则创制的难得机遇。     

论淫秽物品犯罪的惩罚根据与认定标准——走出法益理论一元论的独断

在我国有关淫秽物品的刑事立法中，无论是道德主义、家长主义、自由主义还是女权主义，仅凭一己之力都无法解释复杂的立法现象，多元主义具有相对的合理性。有关淫秽物品的刑事立法是在冒犯原则的基础上考虑禁止剥削理论和软家长主义，法益理论中的损害原则无法为立法提供合理的说明。淫秽物品具有诲淫性的正向特征，没有科学价值或艺术价值的反向特征，这两个正反特征都应主要根据冒犯原则进行理解。     

Accommodating toleration: on Balint’s classical liberal response to the multiculturalism challenge

ABSTRACT

Peter Balint identifies three challenges to toleration, one of which is the multiculturalism challenge. This is the charge that liberal toleration fails to accommodate minorities adequately, which requires positive recognition rather than negative toleration. I discuss his response to the multiculturalism challenge and its connection to a classical liberal view of toleration. This involves Balint’s claim that liberal neutrality should be understood as reflective and ‘difference-sensitive’, which should be realised by the state being ‘hands-off’ in the sense of withdrawing support for privileged ways of life. I argue that Balint’s classical liberal view that the state needs to be ‘hands-off’ is in need of specification and that it does not fit well with his claim that neutrality needs to be reflective and difference-sensitive.     

The simplicity of toleration

ABSTRACT

Toleration is one of the core elements of a liberal polity, and yet it has come to be seen as puzzling, paradoxical and difficult. The aim of the present paper is to dispel three puzzles surrounding toleration. First, I will challenge the notion that it is difficult to see why tolerance should be a virtue given that it involves putting up with what one deems wrong. Second, I defuse the worry that the ideal of toleration is not fully realizable as toleration must necessarily be limited. Third, I take issue with the assumption that ‘true’ tolerance requires meta-tolerance, that is, that the issue of toleration must itself be approached in a ‘tolerant’ way.     

Toleration and modus vivendi

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to explore some connections between the ideas of toleration and modus vivendi, principally through a critical engagement with the work of John Gray. In particular, it argues that while Gray is right to see a connection between modus vivendi and a particular conception of toleration (here referred to as the ‘traditional conception’) it is both problematic and potentially confusing to tie either of these ideas, as he does, to a theory of value-pluralism. Instead, they should be viewed as distinct but partially overlapping and often mutually supportive ideas, the relevance of which are best explained in terms of the need or desire of people to live together under conditions of conflict about the worth of different ways of life, and motivated by a variety of pragmatic and principled concerns. The paper also offers a modest defence of the traditional conception of toleration against some of its critics, arguing that such a practice of toleration, if supported by a modus vivendi, can provide a peaceable means of accommodating differences in a way that is broadly accepted, although neither ideal nor necessarily uncontested, by both tolerators and the tolerated.     

“自由”与“不自由”:高科技跨国公司的政治化与国家化

由于高科技或新技术本身具有一定的公共产品特性,并且决定着一个国家的综合国力,因此高科技的发展与一国内部政治及国家间竞争的关联度逐渐加大。一方面,企业利益进一步与国家利益重合,高科技跨国公司在开展跨国业务时愈发受到母国与东道国“政治正确”的规制;另一方面,在逆全球化背景下,国家对技术的理解形成了较为明确的技术主权观念,高科技跨国公司与母国之间的“捆绑”由此亦愈发明显。在此背景下,随着西方排他性技术同盟的形成,非西方的高科技跨国企业遭受打压的态势在中短期内并不会缓解,国家间、企业间的技术合作将极大受阻,全球技术进步的成本和门槛也将因此显著提升,最终影响人类的整体利益。对中国而言,一方面,要继续扩大开放,坚持技术多边主义,积极推动跨国技术合作;另一方面,仍需凸显技术进步过程中的国家角色,建构国家引导下的以高科技跨国企业为主体的技术创新体系,最终实现关键核心技术的自主可控。