“The world would just fall apart if there’s no respect at all”: children’s understandings of respect for diversity in a post-conflict society

The term ‘respect for diversity’ has gained prominence in many policy and curricular developments aimed at promoting reconciliation and pluralism. To explore the understandings of ‘respect for diversity’ held by children in a society that has both emerged from conflict and is increasingly multicultural, 15 group interviews were conducted with 7–11-year-old children in Northern Ireland. The behavioural aspects of respect for diversity articulated by the children were identified as: attention; offering time; equality of treatment; and acts of solidarity. Affective motivations for these actions were empathy and the pursuit of friendship; cognitive motivations were: a moral norm of inclusion; curiosity; internalised human rights principles; and egalitarianism (a belief that all persons are equal in fundamental worth or value). Findings are discussed in relation to theories of children’s prejudice development and moral development, and implications for the teaching and promotion of respect for diversity as part of peace education programmes are considered.     

Going Underground: the political economy of the ‘left turn’ in South America

This article argues that South America’s ‘revolutionary’ left turn can be best explained by its assertion of state property over natural resource extraction. The recent history of the leftist movements in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador relates to the failures of the neoliberal reforms applied in the region decades before, hence the dismantling of core orthodox policies has been critical for them once in power. This has been possible through the expansion of state action in the economy, but mainly through the governance of hydrocarbon extraction and the control of subsoil rents. Resource extraction has been central to the political economy of Andean left-wing revolutionaries, responsible for many of their successes but also their impending challenges. This rearticulation of underground governance is linked to global transformations that give prominence to emerging economies and reinforces these countries’ position in the world economy as providers of primary commodities.     

The 1950s—the triumph of the Soviet economy

The frequent assertions in both Russian and Western economic literature and the broader press that the command economy is not viable are based on data showing the inefficient use of material and labour resources in the pre-war period and the continuous decline in the rate of economic growth and the efficiency of resource use in the 1960s–1980s. Yet it is a long way from observing these facts to confirming the failure of the command economy. Before the political system of the USSR began to collapse in 1990–91 there had been no prolonged absolute fall in GDP nor, in the post-war period, in the standard of living of the population, nor had technical progress come to a halt as it did, for example, in the 1990s after the rejection of the command economy. Compared with the latter period it is justifiable to talk of the indisputable advantages of the command over the market economy in Russian conditions, if of course we do not consider (for which there are some grounds) the enormous difficulties of the Russian economy in the 1990s to be consequences of a protracted transformation crisis. I would like to draw attention to the fact that these advantages are evident even in comparison with the degenerate mid-1980s version of the command economy, which was very different from the classical model.     

The Things They Learned: Aspiration,Uncertainty, and Schooling in Rwanda’s Developmental State

The role of formal education in the reproduction of inequalities is well documented. Less clear is how this lens can be applied to a study of post-conflict state-building. The present study pairs policy analysis with student-centred ethnographic fieldwork to examine education policy in Rwanda. Since the end of the genocide, the government has staked its claim to legitimacy in delivering inclusive development. Its basic education policy is an entitlement programme with broad public support and designed to allow all children to attend primary and secondary school. Students found themselves caught up in a web of contradictions with important symbolic and material dimensions. They went to schools designed to improve access for the poor. But they were also poor schools, lacking in quality and associated with failure. The country’s switch from French to English was bound up in alliances of domestic power that further undermined effective teaching and learning. The basic education policy intended to highlight the government’s commitment to deliver development to all. But in absence of a sustained and effective strategy to improve quality, young people felt excluded from meaningful engagement in the education system. Whether the basic education policy constitutes inclusive development is therefore debatable.     

Identities in a ‘fragmegrated’ world: black cyber-communities and the French integration system

Constrained by racism and increasing white ownership of the music industry in the United States, African-American jazz drummer Kenny Clarke exited the New York jazz scene for Paris in 1956. Clarke's migration not only represented social freedom but also creative freedom. Through his mentorship of French artists and his work to universalize jazz beyond the authority of just African-American musicians, Clarke signified blackness and Europeaness. In the process of his migration, musicianship and mentorship, Clarke used jazz to meld African-American culture with the music, culture and socio-political concerns of European musicians and fans. This paper argues that even though he was not born in Europe or colonized by European countries, Kenny Clarke and other exiled African-American artists offer an alternative narrative to the negotiation between being black and European.     

Wither the ‘development contract’? Historical conjunctures in Naomi Hossain’s The Aid Lab: Understanding Bangladesh’s Unexpected Success

This paper examines methodological avenues for a historical sociology of development through a close reading of Naomi Hossain’s recent book, The Aid Lab: Understanding Bangladesh’s Unexpected Success (2017). Hossain’s conjunctural perspective, the formative moment of Bangladesh in environmental catastrophe, war and famine in the 1970s, establishes a novel account of the country’s development trajectory. Contingencies of the moment and consequent political uncertainties committed an emergent national elite to a largely informal but substantive social compact against future crises of subsistence. The result was a specific, transnational power configuration rendering Bangladesh a test case for developmental interventions and the production of knowledge regarding them. Debates in critical development studies have often posited that such ‘elite commitment’ is a consequence and not so much a precondition for social improvement, brought about through struggles from ‘below.’ How might these positions be reconciled by shifting the temporal frames of reference? By rendering historical processes legible as conflicting and complementary interactions between different social forces and actors? How can such actors be envisaged without presuming their identities and interests as fixed or given, but rather, as shaping and being shaped by such processes? These questions motivate the immanent critique and reappraisal of Hossain’s timely work, highlighting its significance for dynamic analyses of historical capitalism today through the ‘universal particularities’ of the national case.     

The ‘Ankara Moment’: the politics of Turkey’s regional power in the Middle East, 2007–11

Around 2007 Turkey became a regional power in the Middle East, a status it has maintained at least until the outset of the Arab Revolt in 2011. To understand why Turkey only became a regional power under the Muslim akp government and why this happened at the specific point in time that it did, this article highlights the self-reinforcing dynamics between Turkey’s domestic political-economic transformation in the first decade of this century and the advantageous regional developments in the Middle East at the same time. It holds that this specific linkage—the ‘Ankara Moment’—and its regional resonance in the neighbouring Middle East carries more transformative potential than the ‘Washington Consensus’ or the ‘Beijing Consensus’ so prominently discussed in current global South politics.     

Violent Narco-Cartels or US Hegemony? The political economy of the ‘war on drugs’ in Mexico

Mainstream analysis and commentary on drug trafficking and related violence in Mexico focuses overwhelmingly on the narco-cartels as sources of the problem and presents the US as a well intentioned player helping to conduct a ‘war on drugs’ out of concern for addiction, crime and violence. This article offers an alternative interpretation, grounded in critical political economy, showing that in addition to fuelling the narcotics industry in Mexico thanks to its large drug consumption and loose firearms regulations, the US shares much responsibility for its expansion thanks to its record of support for some of the main players in the drugs trade, such as the Mexican government and military, and by implementing neoliberal reforms that have increased the size of the narcotics industry. The war on drugs has served as a pretext to intervene in Mexican affairs and to protect US hegemonic projects such as nafta, rather than as a genuine attack on drug problems. In particular, the drugs war has been used repeatedly to repress dissent and popular opposition to neoliberal policies in Mexico. Finally, US banks have increased their profits by laundering drug money from Mexico and elsewhere; the failure to implement tighter regulations testifies to the power of the financial community in the US.     

‘The new Europeans’: the image of the African refugee in European literature

Abstract

This essay examines the representation of African refugees and asylum seekers in European literature in general, as well recent life writings and literature for young adults in particular. Examples will be drawn from writers as diverse as Benjamin Zephaniah and Senait G. Mehari. It is argued that the selected refugee stories invest in narrating an imagined community of ‘the new Europeans’ and thus invite readers to a plural reading of history. Following this train of thought, I am particularly interested in the interplay between images and motifs that evoke and shape various nation-states while illuminating an imagined European community. I therefore seek to excavate a transcultural imagery that characterizes refugee and asylum seekers as the ‘new Europeans’ by utilizing narrative strategies which reflect Paul Ricoeur's ideas about a new ethos for Europe.     

The paradoxes of the ‘everyday’: scrutinising the local turn in peace building

With the advent of the local turn in the mid-2000s, critical approaches have attempted to rethink peace building from the bottom up, placing local agents at the centre of the debate, declaring the end of top-down governance and affirming the fragmented, complex and plural nature of the social milieu. While local turn approaches have become popular in peace-building theory, this article invites the reader to question and problematise the local turn’s use of the concept of ‘everyday’, in order to explore paradoxes and contradictions that indicate the need to think more deeply about the impact of the local turn’s project of critique.     

Redefining Who’s ‘In’ and Who’s ‘Out’: Explaining Preferences for Redistribution in Bolivia

How does welfare state expansion reconfigure political coalitions? This paper challenges traditional accounts that pit social policy ‘insiders’, who univocally oppose policy expansion, against ‘outsiders’ who favour it. It argues that labour market vulnerability and partisan cues can play a critical role in shaping the preferences of both insiders and outsiders, and thus produce new pro-expansion coalitions. To test this claim, it employs historical analysis of key social insurance configurations in Bolivia over the last 30 years, as well as an original survey carried out in Bolivia following that nation’s 2007 extension of a noncontributory national minimum pension.     

China’s ‘New Silk Roads’: sub-national regions and networks of global political economy

This paper argues that the Chinese government’s ‘belt and road’ initiative – the Silk Roads vision of land and maritime logistics and communications networks connecting Asia, Europe and Africa – has its roots in sub-national ideas and practices, and that it reflects their elevation to the national level more than the creation of substantially new policy content. Further, the spatial paradigms inherent in the Silk Roads vision reveal the reproduction of capitalist developmental ideas expressed particularly in the form of networks, which themselves have become a feature of contemporary global political economy. In other words, the Silk Roads vision is more of a ‘spatial fix’ than a geopolitical manoeuvre.     

ASEAN At 50: the global political economy’s contribution to durability

Why has the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) proved so durable as a regional organisation given the many challenges it has faced since its inception in 1967? This analysis makes use of an historical institutionalist approach. It shows how the global political economy, through the injection of aid and investment and the development of production networks and increased trade, generated a generally positive regional economic environment that encouraged cooperation. It also provided the resources for the gradual institutionalisation of ASEAN and the expansion of its reach through the establishment of associated regional organisations. The result was that these factors, in combination, contributed to ASEAN’s staying power.     

The ‘basket case’ and the ‘poster child’: explaining the end of civil conflicts in Liberia and Mozambique

Through a comparison of protracted domestic conflicts in Liberia and Mozambique this paper evaluates several standard explanations regarding the roles of leaders, third parties and domestic social forces in resolving or continuing civil wars in Africa. The paper finds that no single account of how peace is achieved is sufficient to explain the continuance of violence in Liberia and the successful attainment of peace in Mozambique. Rather, an explanation that can accommodate the divergent outcomes of conflict in the two countries must combine insights from elite, structuralist and agency‐based approaches. Furthermore, the paper addresses the ways in which the construction of social organisations, particularly women's groups, during wartime affects the direction of donor funding and the shape of reconstruction efforts after the peace is signed. We illustrate our argument by examining the efforts of leaders, third parties and local actors, particularly women, to perpetuate violence or to bring about peace in Liberia and Mozambique, and the gendered contexts in which donor aid is distributed in the postwar period.     

The ‘philanthropic’ gene: biocapital and the new green revolution in Africa

Climate change and population growth have prompted calls for African countries to embrace a ‘new Green Revolution’ in order to promote food security. What is ‘new’ about this new Green Revolution? What configurations of capital, the state, agribusiness, and the law define this period of agricultural transition? In this new Green Revolution, I argue, there is a proliferation of new forms of capital – biocapital and philanthrocapital – that integrate biotechnology with philanthropy to create market value. These shifts are engendered by philanthropic giving, in the form of donated genetic material for the development of ‘pro-poor’ biotechnology which normalises seed as commodity, and legislative reform that renders seed patentable material.     

The ‘Arab Spring’: the view from Tehran

2011 saw an unprecedented wave of popular protests shake the foundations of many Arab regimes across the Middle East and North Africa. While many observers welcomed the uprisings as movements for greater freedoms and democracy, Iran celebrated the unrests as an ‘Islamic awakening’ – the first steps in a process that would eventually result in the realignment of the Greater Middle East. This article will examine the official narrative of the Iranian regime and will contextualise the apparent contradiction in the Islamic Republic's support for the Arab uprisings despite its brutal suppression of its own people and the incitement of the same practise in Syria. The article will then assess Iran's actual role in the Arab unrests and whether the Islamic Republic has, and will retain, the ability to exploit the ‘Arab Spring’ as part of its broader revisionist struggle to weaken the forces of status quo in the region.     

Are the LDCs really the world’s least developed countries?

The term ‘the least developed countries’ (LDCs) is widely understood to designate, exactly as stated, the world’s least developed countries. In conjunction with the 2015 United Nations (UN) triennial review of the LDC category, this article attempts to critically evaluate the UN’s list of LDC countries in the light of various indicators – economic, social, political, military and security related, and psychological. It concludes that the official and actual lists of LDCs, despite important similarities, are not completely identical. The term ‘the LDCs’ as used by the UN is therefore not fully consistent with the reality it attempts to designate and describe.