The (Neglected) Statist Bias and the Developmental State: the case of Singapore and Vietnam

Abstract

This paper highlights three key weaknesses with the developmental state as a theory of the state. First, that the theory imagines the state in Weberian terms and then seeks to judge all states—even ones which are not Weberian—according to Weberian yardsticks which are not universal. Second, that the theory underestimates the extent to which it is itself bound up with dominant global power structures associated with the Cold War and the post-cold war period. Third, that in its concern to identify the correct ‘institutional mix’ for development to occur, developmental state theorists ends up believing that the (best) states really do stand apart from society, forgetting that this is an illusion which is fundamental to how states rule. Not to be alert to the state's ‘ideological effects’ is not really to study the state at all; this is ultimately a criticism which has to be levelled at the theory of the developmental state. To suggest—as many scholars do—that the theory's weaknesses can be solved by breaking the state down into its constituent parts, focusing more on society, or trying to locate the ‘blurred’ boundary between state and society more effectively, completely misses the point, since it does little, if anything, to uncover how states really rule. The issues are explored via a comparison of the state in Singapore and Vietnam.     

War,Violence and the Making of the Stalinist State: A Tillyian Analysis

Abstract

Defining the state as ‘organised violence’, based on the emergence of the modern European national state system, Charles Tilly identified four essential war-driven, state-building activities: ‘war-making’; ‘state-making’; ‘protection’ of elite ‘clients’; and ‘extraction’ of resources. Drawing on Tilly's primary categories of analysis, this essay considers the ways in which war, or the threat of war, real or imagined, shaped the Soviet state, particularly in its Stalinist manifestation. This essay argues that Tilly's warfare-state paradigm, judiciously deployed, brings into high relief facets of Soviet state-making that few other paradigms do.     

The Rise of Militant Islam and the Security State in the Era of the ‘Long War’

This paper distinguishes between political and militant Islam and analyses the latter's current ability to confront empire and to become a social force in Muslim-majority states. This analysis is within the dialectic of collaboration and resistance, starting with client postcolonial states' pivotal role in bringing to fruition the collaboration between political Islam and US imperialism during the cold war era. The post-cold war period signals the imperialist putsch to confront militant Islam in the ‘Long War’ by employing the cold war strategy of ‘permanent war’ and universalising the idea of the security state. Militant Islam's resistance to the Long War and the security state makes this two-pronged imperial strategy a losing proposition for the USA. Paradoxically this strategy has also become the prime mover for militant Islam's ascendancy. The paper addresses the paradox of the USA's continuation with its losing Long War strategy and securitisation agenda which, although providing succour to militant Islam, is also achieving its larger objectives to buttress capitalist globalism; fuel the military–industrial and security–industrial complexes; and support ‘big oil’.     

WEBER AND KAFKA: THE RATIONAL AND THE ENIGMATIC BUREAUCRACY

Max Weber's and Franz Kafka's respective understandings of bureaucracy are as different as night and day. Yet, Kafka's novel The Castle is best read with Max Weber at hand. In fact, Kafka relates systematically to all the dimensions in Weber's ideal type of bureaucracy and give us a much‐contemplated parody, almost a counter‐punctual ideal type, based on four key observations: bureaucratic excesses unfold in time and space; a ‘no error’ ideology generates inescapable dilemmas; inscrutability is a life condition in bureaucracy; civil servants end up walking on the spot, just like the figures in Escher's painting: Ascending and Descending. Nevertheless, Weber and Kafka can both be right. While Kafka looks at the bureaucratic phenomenon through persons who are marginalized, Weber's perspective is historic‐comparative and top‐down. Are the observations of the one more correct than the other? The question is meaningless. As two opposite poles, Weber and Kafka ‘magnetize’ each other.     

The Gender Logics of Resistance to the ‘War on Terror’: constructing sex–gender difference through the erasure of patriarchy in the Middle East

Abstract

This article asks, ‘How are femininities constructed in resisting the “war on terror” and with what implications for women's agency and the conceptualisation of gender?’ It examines the under-studied gender logics of non-violent resistance to the ‘war on terror’ by focusing on a series of conferences held in Cairo, between 2002 and 2008, uniting opposition to imperialism, Zionism, neoliberalism and dictatorship. Whereas much feminist scholarship conceptualises sex–gender difference within patriarchy as the major source of women's subordination, women speakers at the Cairo conferences erased patriarchy as a source of subordination and valorised sex–gender difference as a source of agency in resisting the ‘war on terror’. Femininities were constructed against the dominant narratives and practices of the war on terror through the representation of national/religious or class differences. These ‘resistance femininities’ represent strategically essentialised identities that function to bridge differences and mobilise women against the ‘war on terror’.     

Distributive Politics and Regional Development: Assessing the Territorial Distribution of Turkey’s Public Investment

Turkey is often perceived as a country with low bureaucratic capacity and prone to political manipulation and ‘pork-barrel’. This article tests whether this is the case, by analysing the extent to which politics, rather than equity and efficiency criteria, have determined the geographical allocation of public investment across the 81 provinces of Turkey between 2005 and 2012. The results show that although the Turkish government has indeed channelled public expenditures to reward its core constituencies, socioeconomic factors remained the most relevant predictors of investment. Moreover, in contrast to official regional development policy principles, we uncover the concentration of public investment in areas with comparatively higher levels of development. We interpret this as the state bureaucracy’s intentional strategy of focussing on efficiency by concentrating resources on ‘the better off among the most in need’.     

Expanding the theoretical boundaries of active representation: Clients' deservedness of service in the 911 emergency system

The objective of this study was to explore how emergency responders' experience, beliefs and organizational context influence their decision-making processes and their interaction with their clients. The study includes 27 interviews with 911 emergency responders to unveil the underlying factors which lead responders to act in favour of some of their clients, that is, actively represent them, while limiting their representation of others. The study is situated at the intersection between the street-level bureaucracy and representative bureaucracy literatures. Building on symbolic representation, this study argues that active representation is shaped by factors beyond mere socio-demographic characteristics and organizational or group identities. By focusing the analysis on the attitudes of the bureaucrats themselves, this study provides initial evidence to support Meier's recent hypotheses in his micro-theory of representative bureaucracy.     

Religious change in a minority context: transforming Islam in Sri Lanka

Scholarly work exists on how Muslim minority positioning affects identity and politics, but what is less known is its impact on religion. Sri Lanka’s 9% Muslim population, the country’s second largest minority, has undergone a series of recent changes to religious identity, thinking and practice, which have been shaped by its relationship to the dominant and warring ‘ethnic others’. As Sri Lanka plunged deeper into armed conflict in the 1990s, Muslims experienced significant shifts in religious thinking and practice, identifying strictly with a more ‘authentic’ Islam. After the war ended in 2009, Muslims became the target of majoritarian Sinhala-Buddhist violence, resulting in a reinterpretation of Islam and a counter process of change. Using the Sri Lankan Muslim case study to engage with scholarly critiques of majority–minority binaries, this article analyses how religious change is brought about through the interjection of minority status with ethno-nationalisms and conflict. Its focus on Islam in Sri Lanka contributes to area studies and to Islamic studies, the latter through a rare analysis of Islamic reform in a Muslim minority context.     

Understanding the Politics of Latin America's Plural Lefts (Chávez/Lula): social democracy,populism and convergence on the path to a post-neoliberal world

This article explores the academic and public debate on the politics of Latin America's twenty-first century turn towards the left. It rejects dichotomous categorisations of ‘social democratic’ and ‘populist’ lefts as a disciplinary move by neoliberals that appeals to entrenched liberal predispositions. It suggests that such classificatory taxonomies are directly linked to an impoverished notion of the political, in which a politics of exalted expertise and enlightenment, based on reason, rationality and objectivity is juxtaposed against a lesser sphere of emotion, passion and ‘personalism’. This underlying dualism, which permeates academic disciplines and crosses lines of ideology, tracks established markers of hierarchical distinction in societies profoundly divided along multiple lines of class and cultural capital. This is explored through an analysis of the discourse of Chávez vis-a-vis Lula, while offering an appreciation of the subaltern origin of Lula's distinctive style of political leadership, from trade unionism to the presidency, based upon the creation of spaces of convergence.     

Empty Spaces and the Value of Symbols: Estonia's ‘War of Monuments’ from Another Angle

Taking as its point of departure the recent heightened discussion surrounding publicly sited monuments in Estonia, this article investigates the issue from the perspective of the country's eastern border city of Narva, focusing especially upon the restoration in 2000 of a ‘Swedish Lion’ monument to mark the 300th anniversary of Sweden's victory over Russia at the first Battle of Narva. This commemoration is characterised here as a successful local negotiation of a potentially divisive past, as are subsequent commemorations of the Russian conquest of Narva in 1704. A recent proposal to erect a statue of Peter the Great in the city, however, briefly threatened to open a new front in Estonia's ongoing ‘war of monuments’. Through a discussion of these episodes, the article seeks to link the Narva case to broader conceptual issues of identity politics, nationalism and post-communist transition.     

The demonisation of politicians: moral panics,folk devils and MPs’ expenses

This article makes an argument of almost primitive simplicity: politicians have become examples of Cohen's ‘folk devils’. This, in turn, raises as yet unexplored questions about demonisation and social discourse, the capacity of politicians, the role of invisible political actors, the dangers of ‘self-evident truths’ and the challenges of revitalising politics within a low-trust high-blame environment. More specifically, this article engages in a process of conceptual travelling through which the theory of moral panics and the concept of ‘folk devils’ are deployed in order to tease apart a recent political crisis. The core argument of this article is that Cohen's seminal work on folk devils provides a powerful conceptual lens through which to generate a more reasoned and balanced account of political behaviour. More broadly, it argues that the ‘bad faith model of politics’ presents a severely distorted view of political reality that urgently needs revision.     

The Centre Decides and the Local Pays: Mandates and Politics in Local Government Financial Management in China

Abstract

In China, ‘the centre decides and the local pays’ means the central government decides on policies but requires its local subordinates to provide the financial resources. The politics of this practice implies that local government has to take different strategies to cope with the unfunded mandates with various consequences. As an empirical study framed by Niskanen’s rational choice theory and Dunleavy’s ‘bureau-shaping’ model, this paper examines how the unfunded mandates impact local government behaviour. Its main focus is the question of how the local officials respond, the extent to which they comply or resist and the techniques they use to adapt to these mandates. This paper finds when deciding how to pay the bill for the centre, local officials have to take a number of principles into consideration. They need to stick to the people-orientated principle and to finance money for salaries and operation to the extent that they can; they also have to see if the mandates are strictly implemented or popular among local people.     

What do buzzwords do for development policy? a critical look at ‘participation’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘poverty reduction’

In the fast-moving world of development policy, buzzwords play an important part in framing solutions. Today's development orthodoxies are captured in a seductive mix of such words, among which ‘participation’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘poverty reduction’ take a prominent place. This paper takes a critical look at how these three terms have come to be used in international development policy, exploring how different configurations of words frame and justify particular kinds of development interventions. It analyses their use in the context of two contemporary development policy instruments, the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (prsps) and the Millennium Development Goals (mdgs). We show how words that once spoke of politics and power have come to be reconfigured in the service of today's one-size-fits-all development recipes, spun into an apoliticised form that everyone can agree with. As such, we contend, their use in development policy may offer little hope of the world free of poverty that they are used to evoke.     

Fear of a black planet: anarchy anxieties and postcolonial travel to Africa

Western travel to Africa has historically involved the construction and consumption of African otherness. In the postcolonial era this is most clearly evident in Western tourism to the continent, where Africa is frequently marketed as an exoticised destination to see and consume both ‘nature’ and ‘native’. The Western tourist gaze often requires fixing Africans, both in a spatial site (‘village’) and a temporal site (‘tradition’). Africans on the move (both spatially and temporally) are often seen as threatening to the Western‐established images of Africa, which are grounded in a long‐standing fear of ‘unorded’ and ‘chaotic’ African space. After 11 September and the USA's ‘war on terror’ retributive response, the political implications of these fears are evinced in the writings of Robert Kaplan and his popular ‘coming anarchy’ thesis. The article concludes with a critique of Kaplan's work and a discussion of its implications for Africa and African international relations.     

The dark(er) side of ‘state failure’: state formation and socio-political variation

Scholars concerned with the formation of states, specifically the relationship between state formation and war, hold one of two positions. Some agree with Charles Tilly’s historiological conclusion that war is decisive for the establishment of stateness and specify key concepts, in order to explain presumed discrepancies between past and present. Others point towards the international sphere in its current form and advocate a ‘war breaks states’ perspective. This paper argues that both standpoints neglect the ‘sub-national’ level. While proponents of the ‘war breaks states’ thesis are missing para-sovereign zones of rule, supporters of the ‘war makes states’ approach take a juridical view of statehood and focus on ‘state strength’. The failed states paradigm guiding contemporary security and development policy hinders an adequate analysis of the actual situation on the ground. Discussing the shortcomings of failed states approaches and state formation theorising, the paper proposes a conceptualisation in terms of socio-political variation instead of a mere dichotomisation of order. Some conclusive questions are raised, indicating future research directions linked to the historical sociology of state formation.     

Contagious insecurity: war,SARS and global air mobility

Neglect of the cross-cutting confluences between different domains of security can lead to insular notions of global security as well as to lost opportunities for security sensitive contributions to the adjoining issue areas. This article attempts to overview the patterns of interactions during three security scenarios of early 2003: wars, as, for example, the War against Terror and the war in Iraq; pandemics such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS); and air mobility. The overview approach is meant to draw attention to the synoptic interplay between global security scenarios that go beyond the usual disciplinary and conceptual boundaries separating security studies, global health and mobility infrastructures. How does the context of war amplify other security concerns? What were the synoptic interactions within temporally situated ‘bundles’ of security-related concerns? How did global air mobility politics and pandemic politics construct their combined security problematiques? The main research findings point to the relatively unique yet momentary qualities of the emergent nexus of security scenarios. This sheds light on the difficulties of managing pandemic diseases as purely epidemiological processes, on the complexities of securing global air mobility networks, and on how tense situations are prone to lead to speculative projections as people's fears find different somatic, material and political manifestations. The primary material for the textual analysis is provided by World Health Organization's SARS chronology.     

Modernism's Legacy: Dialogue,Objectivity, and Justice in Mark Bevir's Democratic Governance

This article looks at Mark Bevir's ideas on the changing nature of the modern state, as expressed in his book, ‘Democratic Governance’. In the book, the author argues that recent developments in the theory and practice of politics have their intellectual roots in wider trends in the academic study of society and politics. In particular, he argues, the rise in what he and others have called ‘the new governance’ – that is, the shift in Britain and elsewhere away from centralised policy making and implementation by state institutions toward policy networks in which the state is merely one actor among many – has emerged as a direct consequence of the rise of ahistorical, universalist social science methodologies.     

How the United States justified its war on terrorism: prime morality and the construction of a ‘just war’

Just war theory has a long established reputation in the social sciences for evaluating the morality of the military actions of states. However, this analysis has rested upon assumptions of territorial sovereignty and the equal rights of states. The actions of hegemonic powers violate these twin assumptions through their expression of extra‐territorial reach. To avoid charges of immoral behaviour hegemonic powers must use the just war rhetoric of territoriality to justify their extra‐territorial acts. A world‐systems theory conceptualisation of hegemony allows for an interpretation of hegemonic military actions as the defence of a universal prime modernity. Prime modernity refers to an ideal organization of society projected by the hegemonic power as a form of integrative power. For the hegemonic power, threat is perceived as a rejection of the prime modernity anywhere rather than the language of border violations that dominates the foundations of just war theory. Using the language embedded in government and non‐government documents justifying the War on Terrorism, the manner in which a hegemonic power constructed military extra‐territoriality in a system of sovereign states as just is examined. The development of a ‘prime morality’ allowed the hegemonic power to claim that it was operating at the scales of the individual and ‘humankind’ rather than inter‐state power politics. The analysis challenges the implicit geographic assumptions of just war theory and extends our understanding of the imperatives underlying the hegemonic power's construction of its military actions as morally right.