Indian Response to Iraq War:Lessons and Implications

The September 11 terrorist attacks and America’s military intervention in Iraq have catalyzed major changes in the Middle East and had far-reaching implications for Asia. This paper seeks to examine India’s readjustment on the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and explain how Indians perceive and respond on the Iraq war, and what lessons India has learned or obsorbed from the war.     

Emancipative values and democracy: Response to Hadenius and Teorell

This article demonstrates that Axel Hadenius and Jan Teorell’s attempt to disprove a causal effect of emancipative mass orientations on democracy is flawed in each of its three lines of reasoning. First, contrary to Hadenius and Teorell’s claim that measures of “effective democracy” end up in meaningless confusion of democracy and minor aspects of its quality, we illustrate that additional qualifications of democracy illuminate meaningful differences in the effective practice of democracy. Second, Hadenius and Teorell’s finding that emancipative orientations have no significant effect on subsequent measures of democracy from Freedom House is highly unstable: using only a slightly later measure of the dependent variable, the effect turns out to be highly signficant. Third, we illustrate that these authors’ analytical strategy is irrelevant to the study of democratization because the temporal specification they use misses almost all cases of democratization. We present a more conclusive model of democratization, analyzing how much a country moved toward or away from democracy as the dependent variable. The model shows that emancipative orientations had a strong effect on democratization during the most massive wave of democratization ever—stronger than any indicator of economic development. Finally, we illustrate a reason why this is so: emancipative orientations motivate emancipative social movements that aim at the attainment, sustenance, and extension of democratic freedoms.     

The Hijab and Work: Female Entrepreneurship in Response to Islamophobia

This article focuses on the emerging phenomenon of Muslim women’s entrepreneurial networks in France. It seeks to illustrate a causal relationship between a sociopolitical context where state secularism (laïcité) has been abusively interpreted as a blank check to enforce religious neutrality in France, which has therefore inadvertently encouraged these entrepreneurial networks. As such, this article positions these networks as form of empowerment to overcome the sense of humiliation, isolation, and exclusion produced by the current context of state secularism in France, rather than solely an illustration of an independent entrepreneurial spirit. The labor market appears as a field in which social and political practices regulating religious visibility have been enacted within a context of religious tensions in French society rising since the late 1980s (Baubérot 2000). This occurs between the pre-eminence of individual freedoms in secularism and the anticlerical tendencies that can be inferred from recent decisions made by French courts. Based on observations of participants in two women’s entrepreneurship networks made as part of my doctoral research on the impact of la nouvelle laïcité on the lives of Muslim women in France, this article also draws on qualitative interviews with over 30 Muslim women entrepreneurs and dozens of participants involved in professional network initiatives. Because these networks are rapidly evolving and relatively new, my fieldwork data addresses a significant gap in the literature concerning this particular aspect of the debate concerning laïcité. This study makes it possible to observe how in a key part of the private sector—that of entrepreneurial self-employment—the question of the place of religion and its expression in society is a consequence of a particularly French shift away from a common-sense duty of religious neutrality, the result of mounting layers of political debate over the hijab at schools, universities, and hospitals. The Baby Loup case legally confirms the gradual prohibition of public displays of religion outside of the public-sector work environment.     

The Canadian Government Response to Africa's Refugee Problem

La Côte d’Ivoire a longtemps fait figure de pays marginal et d’importance secondaire sur la scène islamique ouest-africaine, du fait notamment du statut minoritaire de l’Islam — une réalité qui se situe désormais moins au plan démographique qu’au plan politique — et de la discrétion des ordres soufis. De manière contrastée, depuis les années 1990, la société musulmane ivoirienne et sa culture religieuse “réformiste,” portée par une élite “moderne” centrée sur Abidjan, gagnent progressivement en influence dans la sous-région et au-delà. Cet article explore les processus socioéconomiques, politiques et culturels à l’oeuvre dans cette transformation, ainsi que l’interface entre le local et le global dans l’Islam ivoirien. Les migrations internationales vers la Côte d’Ivoire sont l’objet d’une attention particulière, dans la mesure où les nombreux immigrants ouest-africains, pour la plupart musulmans, ont pu jouer à l’étranger un rôle de traducteurs culturels dans la transmission des idées et du modus operandi propres aux réformistes ivoiriens. L’émigration de musulmans ivoiriens en Occident et en particulier aux Etats-Unis est aussi prise en compte. L’article se demande en outre pourquoi l’élite réformiste ivoirienne s’est efforcée de nouer des contacts avec des organismes islamiques internationaux basés hors du monde arabe et de l’Iran et comment les échanges avec les musulmans d’Occident ont marqué son développement de manière décisive et originale. Ces mouvements d’hommes et d’idées ont contribué au dynamisme local de l’Islam ivoirien et à son rayonnement transnational en Afrique de l’Ouest francophone et dans les milieux de la diaspora africaine musulmane aux Etats-Unis. La conclusion situe cette mondialisation de l’Islam ivoirien dans une perspective historique.     

Russia's Response to Crisis: The Paradox of Success

Russia's recovery from the deep economic crisis it experienced in 2008–2009 did not deliver clear political dividends for the Russian leadership. This is because of the context in which the crisis occurred and the way that the leadership, particularly President Medvedev, and many of its critics described the crisis. The oil-fuelled boom that preceded the crisis had the effect of deepening it. Economic recovery based on rising energy prices looks like a failure, rather than a success, and highlights the underlying structural problems of the Russian economy. Arguments about the need for modernisation from within government exacerbated this perception. This seems to have weakened the connection between approval for the leadership and economic growth, a staple of pre-crisis politics.     

Export Response to Technical Barriers to Trade: Firm-Level Evidence from Pakistan

This study empirically examines the responses of trade margins to a battery of technical barriers to trade (TBT) and explores the mechanism, drivers and speed of adjustment. It uses a highly-disaggregated transaction-level dataset of mango-exporting firms from Pakistan and exploits a quasi-natural experiment in the identification strategy. It finds that, following the application of TBT measures, exports increased along the intensive margins. The process of adjustment took around four years, and larger quantities as well as higher prices drive this effect. Moreover, firms shrink their client base in destination markets but ship large quantities to a few big retailers.