Four Years After the Collapse of the USSR

A prominent French political scientist and specialist on Russia introduces this special issue of Post-Soviet Affairs, The essay notes recent literature on Russia's regions and challenges analysts to rethink prevailing conceptions of center-periphery relations, centralization versus decentralization of political power, and authoritarian versus democratic politics. Focis is on regional elites' attitudes toward political inclusion and on the mutual dependence of elites.     

China and Africa: economic growth and a non-transformative political elite

Prevailing narratives in the discourse on China-Africa engagement are that China is developing Africa. This paper departs from those narratives because they disregard the agency of Africa's political elite. Basing its argument on the nature of the African political elite, the paper analyses their role in determining the impact of China's economic and trade engagement on economic development in their respective countries. To do that, it first discusses the nature and identity of African political elites, and examines how they control their states and scarce resources. Having done that, the paper then analyses their role in determining the nature and extent of development emanating from their countries’ economic engagement with China. It then concludes that it is not how much foreign states invest in African countries that determines Africa's rise, but rather political elites who influence the direction of their states’ development.     

Strong Societies, Wed Parties: Regime Change in Cuba and Venzula in the 1950s and Today

The literature on the origins of democratic institutions is split between bottom‐up and top‐down approaches. The former emphasize societal factors that press for democracy; the latter, rules and institutions that shape elites' incentives. Can these approaches be reconciled? This article proposes competitive political parties, more so than degrees of modernization and associationalism, as the link between the two. Competitive political parties enhance society's bargaining power with the state and show dominant elites that liberalization is in their best interest; the parties are thus effective conduits of democracy. In the context of party deficit, the prospects for democratization or redemocratization are slim. This is illustrated by comparing Cuba and Venezuela in the 1950s and 1330s.     

Political culture,state elites and regional security in West Africa

This article analyses the dominant patterns of political culture among West Africa's state elites in an attempt to understand what standards, beliefs and principles they cherish. We suggest that although there are significant differences across the region's states, the dominant political culture can be characterised as neopatrimonial, that is, systems based on personalised structures of authority where patron–client relationships operate behind a façade of ostensibly rational state bureaucracy. In order to explore these issues the article proceeds in four parts. After providing a definition of political culture and why it is an important topic of analysis, we examine the central characteristics of the political culture held by state elites in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) region. The section ‘The Nigerian factor’ briefly discusses some of the malign effects that this culture has had upon governance and political economy issues in the regional giant, Nigeria. The final section explores whether the region's elites are living up to their own claims that they are embarking upon a serious attempt to engage in state reconstruction or are instead simply searching for alternative ways to sell their more traditional concern with regime protection. We conclude that, without a fundamental recasting of the political culture guiding the region's elites, a security culture that prioritises democracy and human security is unlikely to emerge within ECOWAS.     

Martyrs at the Margins: The Politics of Neglect in Lebanon's Borderlands

Events in Lebanon are primarily interpreted through the lens of sectarianism and religious difference. Yet if we look at Lebanon through the lens of politics of space, significant similarities emerge among populations that are otherwise considered different. For instance, communities in Lebanon's geographical borderlands are home to disproportionate numbers of martyrs. As a result of a policy of neglect by elites at Lebanon's political centre, communities of Sunnis and Shiites in North and South Lebanon similarly identify as disenfranchised and oppressed (al-mahrumīn or al-mazlumīn). My research is supported by interviews with families of martyrs of recent violence, analysis of newspaper articles, as well as a reading of roadside martyr images in North and South Lebanon.     

Intersectionality and women's political citizenship: the case of Mauritius

This paper analyses the impact of intersectionality and multiple identities on women's political citizenship in Mauritius. Mauritius is commonly known as a ‘rainbow nation’ with its multiethnic population marked by ethnic or communal divisions. Communalism dominates the Mauritian political system and institutions, intensifying during elections when the different communal groups compete for representation in parliament. The paper argues that the strong emphasis attributed to ethnic and communal representation by the Mauritian political system and structures marginalises women's political citizenship. Political candidates are often sponsored by religious and sociocultural organisations that are male dominated whereas the women's lobby is weak in comparison to the communal lobby. The paper thus contends that the communal dimension in Mauritian politics carries a significant gendered dimension. Communalism has made the political system very resistant to change, despite the fact that it marginalises women.     

How Elites Can Maintain their Power in the Middle East: The Junblat Family as a Case Study

Elites are more than the producers of wealth and power; elites reproduce themselves and control the masses by means of norms and values. For many years, the Junblat family of Lebanon has based its leading role on the idea of protecting the Druze community's interests and rejuvenating Druze glory. Despite the enormous political, economic and social transformations the area has witnessed, the Junblat family has succeeded in maintaining a continuous tradition of leadership and power from the early seventeenth century to the present. This article will argue that the explanation behind the durability of this political power lies in what might be called the ‘ideology of adjustment’ on one hand and preserving organic communication with the masses on the other. Many conclusions can be drawn from the case of the Lebanese Junblat family regarding behavioural patterns and structures of traditional elites in the Arab Middle East. The most important is that traditional elites have no commitment to ideology other than to the degree that it allows them to adjust, serves their self-preservation and helps them to gain as much power as they can.     

精英互动与缅甸的政治发展:2011年缅甸的政治与外交

2011年缅甸政府与国内外精英的互动有力地推动了缅甸的政治发展。通过与政治反对派的互动,政府修改了政党登记法,赢得了政治反对派的初步信任,为更广范围分享政治权力扫清了障碍。通过与少数民族武装的互动,政府赢得了少数民族武装的信任,与绝大部分少数民族武装签订了和平协议,为更公平地在民族间分享资源创造了可能。通过与外国政要的互动,政府赢得了西方国家的信任,西方开始逐步解除对缅甸的制裁,为缅甸生产和提供更好的公共产品提供了条件。政府叫停密松电站建设可以看做是缅甸政府与国内外精英互动的一个顺理成章的结果。2011年缅甸的精英互动与政治发展表明:即使为结构所限,精英的认知和互动也可以推动一个国家的政治发展。     

A mob for hire? Unpacking older women’s political activism in Kyrgyzstan

This article explores the politics of older women in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, who have emerged as informal leaders in urban neighbourhoods to ‘speak for the poor’ to the state. Their mediating role is crucial for understanding community micro-politics, women’s political agency and more broadly state–society relations in the post-Soviet context. Drawing on in-depth interviews with older female informal leaders, the paper examines their political legitimacy and modes of mediation with the state and elites. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of political capital and ‘double dealings’, the paper argues that older women are important informal mediators, whose representational practices involve communal leadership, protest activism, bargaining and vote mobilization. Their multitasking roles are necessitated by their legitimation struggles and elites’ strategies of state capture. The article challenges the dominant media representation of older women activists as ‘a mob for hire’ and offers a more nuanced account of older women’s politics, addressing a blind spot in the literature on politics in Central Asia.     

Everyday forms of state decomposition: Quetzaltenango,Guatemala, 1954⋆

This essay explores how Guatemala's 1952 agrarian reform played out among Quetzalteco K'iche's. Much of the academic writing on the revolution is concerned with the way the agrarian reform affected indigenous communities. These studies either view the reform as creating bitter political conflicts within the community, thereby weakening or destroying local institutions of communal politics and identification, or else they understand the reform as deepening incipient class divisions. In all of these studies,‘conflict’is understood to be something antithetical to‘community’. Yet conflict is as essential to communal formation as are more visible identity markers, suggesting an intriguing correlation: the greater the degree of communal conflict, the greater the level of communal identification.     

The ideology of development and legitimation: beyond ‘Kazakhstan 2030’

The paper analyses the multifaceted discourse of development and nation-building in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. It addresses the regional clan–central elite relations and Nursultan Nazarbayev regime's legitimating agenda through the Kazakhstan 2030 Strategy for development. The economic developmental component in Nazarbayev's ideological discourses is primarily an exercise of control over regional economic and political elites and that helped building further legitimacy for the regime in various socio-ethnic constituencies on both the regional and central levels. Kazakhstan 2030 was deployed by the regime to substitute the Soviet version of ideology, legitimize the regime among various ethno-lingual audiences, and discipline the behaviour of regional elites. The paper shows how the study of elites’ interests can best explain the nature of national ideology and development projects.     

Secularizing Islamism and Islamizing Democracy: The Political and Ideational Evolution of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers 1984–2012

The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) emerged in Egypt in the early twentieth century to resist secularism and political pluralism in favour of religious revival and a unitary Islamic state. After three decades of political participation culminating in its formation of a government in Egypt, the MB has prioritized electoral paths to power, while claiming to defend individual rights, popular majorities and a civil state. Nevertheless, the MB's discourse continues to straddle religious and secular terrain: in recent election campaigns, MB leaders promised to build an ‘Islamic state’ and a ‘caliphate’, all the while insisting that the people, not God are the source of all power. What explains these contradictions, and what do they tell us about the Brotherhood's apparent adoption of political and ideational pluralism and democratic values? The article contends that the MB's ambivalence about democracy is not a sign of dissimulation or lack of ideological evolution. Instead, it has its roots in a 30-year process of partially adapting to democratic and ‘secular’ political ideas by reframing them in religious terms which, however, resulted in creating what the article discusses as a hybrid ‘secularized’ Islamism. This hybridization has both enabled and constrained the Brothers' adaptation to democracy in the post-Mubarak period.     

Business Power and the Politics of Postneoliberalism: Relations Between Governments and Economic Elites in Bolivia and Ecuador

The article analyzes and compares the dynamics of business‐government relations in Bolivia and Ecuador during the presidencies of Evo Morales and Rafael Correa. It specifically traces the shift from confrontation to rapprochement to a fairly stable pattern of negotiation and dialogue that characterizes the two governments' interaction with core business elites. Drawing on the structural and instrumental power framework developed by Tasha Fairfield, it proposes an explanation that accounts for this overall shift as well as for the main differences between the two countries. In a nutshell, the article argues that the business elites' response to a severe loss of instrumental power and the governments' response to the persistent structural power of business combined to cause the shift toward negotiation and dialogue. The article also probes the plausibility of this power‐based explanation by briefly comparing the two cases with other left‐of‐center governments in the region.     

Coloured Judgements? The Work of the Thai Constitutional Court, 1998–2016

Created in 1997 as part of a major constitutional reform, Thailand’s Constitutional Court has since become embroiled in several high-profile political controversies. Since the 2006 coup, because a number of such decisions have favoured one political camp and considering obvious close and long-standing relations between judges and political elites, questions have arisen about the court’s ability to act as an independent arbiter. Is this view justifiable? To answer that question, this article first analyses how the court has behaved across political administrations in 32 high-profile cases since 2001. It then turns to the socio-biographic profile of the bench, the politics of nominations and changes to its composition, particularly since 2006. Finally, the article considers data on participants in classes offered by the Constitutional Court, which makes it possible to better understand the links between Thai political and judicial networks. The analysis finds evidence of politically biased voting patterns and increasingly partisan nominations to the court, though formally appointment procedures are apolitical, which suggests the politicisation of the court and growing ties between judicial and political elites. These findings raise new questions about the public’s perception of the Constitutional Court’s legitimacy and prospects for the rule of law.     

哈萨克斯坦石油精英及其对能源政策的影响

哈萨克斯坦是一个经济结构严重受制于能源经济和依靠石油寻租的油气生产国。国有大型油气公司的高级主管对该国的能源政策具有举足轻重的作用。石油精英通过与政治精英建立非正式的关系网络,不仅影响本国能源部门的发展,而且还介入政治决策和政治制度。而哈萨克斯坦普遍存在着制度的不透明性、法律的不确定性和总统决定的随意性,助长并养成了非正式政治体制的固化,加强了威权主义的趋势,并进一步鼓励寻租和腐败行为的延续。     

South Africa and Japan: maintaining a difficult friendship

Japan's economic and political relationship with South Africa has been characterised historically by ambiguity. Throughout the twentieth century, economic ties were underpinned by mercantilist and strategic considerations. During apartheid, this placed Japan in an uneasy position as it sought to balance a relationship of expediency with wider foreign policy objectives in the rest of Africa and beyond. The demise of apartheid created the space for new forms of engagement centred on the pursuit of cognate goals. This has seen the intensification and deepening of economic ties in particular. Yet relations, especially at the political and diplomatic levels, have also been more complex than anticipated, and in recent years, the rise in Africa of other players from Asia and the Global South has had a bearing on South Africa–Japan ties. In this paper, it is argued that two related dynamics pivoting on policy elites’ changing conceptions (or self-view) of the nature of the state they are running and its place in the wider world order help explain the post-apartheid evolution of the South Africa–Japan relationship. First, there has been an apparent shift in South African foreign policy elites’ self-view, mediated by a changing systemic context. The development and manifestation over time of a stronger Global South self-conception in South African foreign policy, fashioned in juxtaposition to what have been considered in the past key Global North relationships, had direct consequences for South Africa–Japan ties. Second, meso- and micro-level dynamics – the role of the general operations in the diplomatic (i.e. bureaucratic) arena, and the personalities and shifting political preferences of individual executive leaders – had major impacts on how South Africa engaged with Japan in the past two decades.     

Islamism,Pluralism and the Palestine Question: The Case of Hizbullah

The political vocabulary of the Lebanese Islamist party and militia Hizbullah in relation to pluralism exhibits an important self-contradiction. In Lebanon, Hizbullah has adapted to a process of national integration after 15 years of civil war, and appears as much more positive towards pluralism now than in 1985, when it made itself known officially. However, the Palestinian resistance struggle constitutes an ever more important part of the party's political and religious identity, and in this area the party relies on a vocabulary of absolute and religiously motivated conflict. Hizbullah has made the Palestine Question into a religious absolute at the same time as it connects this question to the issue of national unity in Lebanon, questioning the patriotic credibility of every Lebanese who disagrees with it on this issue. Consequently, a conflict-oriented vocabulary ‘colonizes’ Hizbullah's more tolerant and pluralist vocabulary within Lebanon, thus hindering a further development of pluralist attitudes.     

Opposition politics in Malawi: hopeful signs amid the warnings

Across Africa, governments are either peacefully and legitimately ousted, or forced to share power, through the ballot box. In Malawi, the emergence of many political parties since the advent of a multiparty dispensation in 1993 signalled the flourishing of pluralism and opposition politics. However, in the May 2009 elections, the Malawi Congress Party and the United Democratic Front, which constituted the opposition, were largely rejected by the electorate in favour of President Bingu Mutharika's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), credited for his sound economic policies emulated internationally. The reduced presence in parliament of parties outside of the Democratic Progressive Party coalition is troubling. This development has stimulated debate on the opposition's role and ability to defend democratic governance, and the challenges facing it. On the other hand, the DPP's landslide victory has to some degree demonstrated that it is possible to ‘de-regionalise’ and ‘de-ethinicise’ the configuration and alignment of political interests and forces, confirming for other African countries that the analysis of African politics need not be oversimplified into ethnic and cultural terms as is often the case. This paper contends that democratic governance is promoted by a credible opposition that effectively acts as an alternative government. Therefore, there is need for addressing the major factors that militate against its operations to enable it play its rightful role in Malawi's emerging democracy.     

Nationalism and democratic construction: the origins of Argentina and Uruguay's political cultures in comparative perspective

The article focuses on the different effects the formation of national identity had on the development of political democracy in Uruguay and Argentina. Uruguay's process of state building after the civil wars relied on political consensus regarding the rules of the game: the concept of political democracy became an integral part of Uruguay's collective identity. In Argentina, political elites after the civil wars divided on the question of national identity and the substance of political democracy. Uruguay's political identity as a partidocracia [rule by parties] is not a guarantee against authoritarianism, but the country's democratic political culture is resilient, permeating even the armed forces. In Argentina, the exclusionist character of the political process invites authoritarianism, whether of the liberal or populist‐democratic variety. This article focuses, first, on the different models of collective identity that developed after independence; second, on the distinct roles played by the two hegemonic parties in each nation ‐ the Colorados under Batlle and the Radicals under Yrigoyen; and finally, on the authoritarian periods both countries experienced in the 1930s.