The political economy of the Reconstruction Era’s race riots

This paper analyzes the political economy of the Reconstruction Era’s (1865–1877) race riots through the economic logic of rules. The central argument is that the race riots were not an inevitable outcome at the end of the Civil War, but instead occurred because of the absence of effective rules to raise the cost of engaging in violence. We offer a general framework of ‘rule stickiness’ to analyze the process of rule reform. This framework offers insight into the conditions influencing the enforcement costs of formal rules, as well as the likelihood of third-party enforcers effectively monitoring and punishing rule breakers. The Memphis race riot of 1866 is provided as a case study to illuminate the explanatory power of the theoretical framework.     

‘US Intelligence and Vietnam’: The Official Version(s)

Recent declassifications of the official histories of Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency activities in the Vietnam War give historians a sharper outline of the overall American intelligence effort in that conflict and a trove of supporting details. While scholars will have to use the new releases with caution, the histories (when combined with appraisals from the Armed Services) offer glimpses of the scale of the US intelligence program and some of the complications that hindered its effectiveness. Two particular features stand out when these materials are viewed in conjunction: the disconnectedness of the various agencies' and Services' efforts from each other (and from decision makers in Washington); and the difficulties that all of them had in working with America's South Vietnamese allies. The picture emerging is thus one of a congeries of largely independent intelligence campaigns working simultaneously against the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong targets. Intelligence miscues did not lose the Vietnam War for the Americans and South Vietnamese, but it now seems clearer that they made victory less likely.     

Militarized occupations: evolution of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s 1920s intersectional conversation

Abstract

This article brings together transnational feminism, intersectionality, and militarized occupations by recovering Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s (WILPF) 1920s intersectional conversation. Mary Church Terrell, Helen Curtis, Addie Hunton, Jane Addams, and Emily Balch negotiated WILPF’s stance on two occupations: the controversy over the French use of colonial troops in its occupation of Germany, and the US occupation of Haiti. My argument is that through the evolving intersectional conversation, WILPF came to understand the necessity of weaving racialized sexual politics into its analysis of and activism around the politics of militarized occupations. To develop the argument, I construct and apply an ideal type of an intersectional conversation that incorporates a notion of unbracketing substantive inequalities during the conversation. I conclude with some implications for today about what we can learn in the twenty-first century from a moment in an early twentieth-century genealogy of intersectional transnational feminism.     

Gary Becker’s economics of population: reproduction and neoliberal biopolitics

This paper argues that Chicago School economist Gary Becker’s theory of fertility underpins contemporary rationalities of global population governance. Drawing on feminist critiques of biopolitics, the paper proposes reproduction as a missing link that ties Becker’s homo economicus to the aggregate question of population. It argues that Becker’s work challenged macroeconomic theories of fertility by figuring reproduction, and hence population patterns, as governed by the personal utility-maximizing decisions of individuals. It further examines how his approach to fertility inaugurated reproductive decision-making as a regulatory node of population quality, one also tied to a particular sex, race and class politics. Finally, the paper briefly analyses the relationship between Becker’s contribution and today’s focus on women’s reproductive and productive decision-making in population governance in the context of development.     

Moral community and moral order: Buchanan’s theory of obligation

Public Choice - In 1981, James Buchanan published the text of a lecture entitled “Moral Community, Moral Order, and Moral Anarchy.” The argument in that paper deserves more attention...     

The Clinton administration’s development and implementation of cybersecurity strategy (1993–2001)

The concept of an assault on the critical infrastructure of the United States is often referred to as a ‘Cyber Pearl Harbor’. This implies that such an attack would come as a surprise. By 2016, however, few could claim to be surprised by such an event. This paper explains how the Clinton administration addressed cybersecurity in the 1990s as computers became an everyday item. With the benefits of this era, however, came potentially devastating implications for national security as the Clinton administration was required to confront a form of politically motivated violence unlike any that had been seen before Cyberterrorism.     

Explaining the Failure of Mexico’s National Commission of Human Rights (Ombudsman’s Office) after Democratization: Elections, Incentives, and Unaccountability in the Mexican Senate

Mexico??s ombudsman??s office (the Comision Nacional de Derechos Humanos (CNDH)), established in 1990 by a nondemocratic government, posed no threat to the then ruling party. Counter to expectations, even after Mexico democratized in 2000, the CNDH remained unwilling to challenge officials for human rights violations. I argue that this is because the ombudsman (the head of the CNDH) is chosen by Mexican Senators who are not accountable??due to secret voting and a prohibition on reelection??to the Mexican public. While civil society wanted a powerful ombudsman, the three main parties did not. Ignoring the public, Senators responded to their parties and appointed a compliant individual to serve as ombudsman, thereby ensuring that the CNDH would not challenge those who held political power. The paper suggests that where accountability institutions, such as human rights offices, are chosen by unaccountable actors (in this case the Mexican Senate), the development of such accountability institutions will be limited.     

The composition and interests of Russia’s business lobbies: testing Olson’s hypothesis of the “encompassing organization”

Why are some business lobbies less benign in their external effects than others? In The rise and decline of nations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), Mancur Olson proposed that less-encompassing groups—i.e., those whose constituents collectively represent a relatively narrow range of interests—have a greater interest in seeking the types of subsidies, tariffs, tax loopholes, and competition-limiting regulations that, while benefiting their members, impose costs on the rest of society. By drawing on a unique pair of surveys—one targeted to managers of Russian regional lobbies, and the other addressed to managers of Russian industrial enterprises—we provide what we believe to be the most direct test of this hypothesis to date. The pattern of responses is striking. Managers of both the less encompassing lobbies and the enterprises belonging to those types of organizations display stronger preferences for narrowly targeted policy interventions. Our results, that is, strongly support Olson’s hypothesis.     

District magnitude and representation of the majority’s preferences: a comment and reinterpretation

Drawing on new data that combine recorded votes from the Swiss National Assembly with canton-level referendum results on identical legislative proposals, Portmann et al. (Public Choice 151:585–610, 2012) develop an innovative strategy to identify the effect of district magnitude on the relationship between representatives and their constituents. We replicate PSE’s central result and also estimate a related model that allows for the possibility of non-monotonicity in the relationship between district magnitude and representatives’ deviance from referendum median voters. Our results indicate that representatives elected in low-magnitude multi-member districts deviate from canton-level majorities less than either MPs from single-member districts or those from high-magnitude multi-member districts.     

Palpable insecurity and Sen’s comparative view of justice: anthropological considerations

Amartya Sen’s comparative approach to justice makes clear that notions of justice are shaped by human agency and experience, and both his focus on the ‘internal view’ of well-being that emphasizes suffering as a central feature of illness and his recognition that social and cultural factors shape perceived injustice are critical to this approach. However, Sen questionably depicts the contributions of anthropological research to this project as limited to ‘the sensory dimension of ill-health.’ Focusing on mental health in the context of global justice, I argue that Sen’s treatise on justice can be refined through an ethnographic method that synchronizes attention to (1) cultural knowledge and social relations in ecological settings; (2) fundamental human needs; and (3) levels of analytic specificity involving situations, categories, and events. This method integrates analysis of internal phenomenology and external constraints of political economy and ideology. To demonstrate I discuss three cases involving students and violence in Rio de Janeiro, women and witchcraft in Ghana, and historical migration and war trauma among Vietnamese immigrants in which external conditions of insecurity and inequality contributed to deteriorating mental health conditions including depression, trauma, and debilitating anxiety.     

Herbert’s Herbivore: One-Dimensional Society and the Possibility of Radical Vegetarianism

Abstract

Careful reading of Herbert Marcuse’s texts, including Counterrevolution and Revolt, One-Dimensional Man, An Essay on Liberation, and Eros and Civilization, reveals his subtle attention to the human–animal dialectic and its role in human liberation. More specifically, animals mark the irrationality of advanced industrialized society for Marcuse, and his subtle but keen treatment of the animal question in politics provides an opening to radically rethink politics for animals and humans. Working from Marcuse’s critical theory, I explore the contemporary one-dimensional animal, which I argue imbricates both animals and humans in the violence and destruction that characterizes advanced industrial society. Using Marcuse’s concept of one-dimensional society and his discussion of animals as my theoretical framework, I specifically consider vegetarianism in its capacity to militate against the contemporary political economy of meat. I conclude that Marcuse’s insights point to a radical vegetarianism aligned with anti-capitalist politics that offers the development of sensuous, pleasurable, life-affirming sensibilities that support true liberation for both animals and humans.     

Marcuse’s Hegel: Hope and Despair in the Logic of Negation

Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution found a rich reception in the 1960’s field of Hegel/Marx commentary. This rereading challenges Marcuse’s reduction of Hegel’s dialectical logic to a logic of negation. It describes weaknesses in Marcuse’s Hegel paraphrases, and argues that Marcuse’s bold leap to a Revolutionary logic rejects Hegel’s method: turning instead to Kant’s transcendental logic, and leading his readers into an antinomy of hope and despair.     

Mexico’s cartels and the rule of law

The threat to public security and the rule of law posed by drug cartels has been the defining domestic issue for Mexico’s presidents for over a decade. The Mexican people hoped security would improve when they elected an outsider president in late 2018 who promoted a new idea for pacifying the cartels – ‘hugs, not bullets’ – but the situation continues to deteriorate.     

Putting Food Sovereignty to Work: Civil Society Governmentalities and Canada’s People’s Food Policy Project (2008–2011)

The People’s Food Policy Project (PFPP) used ‘food sovereignty’ to unite civil society organizations and build a national food policy agenda in Canada from 2008 to 2011. Agri-food scholarship largely highlights the resistance and empowerment dynamic of food sovereignty in the context of neoliberal capital relations. We propose that the story of what food sovereignty discourse does, or could do, in the work of civil society organizations (CSOs), is more complicated. This article contributes to agri-food literature and CSOs studies by examining the governmentalities of the PFPP. We find that the PFPP’s food sovereignty produced at least two discourses: food sovereignty as ethic, or a governmentality of resistance and agrarian empowerment; and food sovereignty as tactic, which we see as a governmentality of administration by CSOs. While PFPP activists increasingly share a spoken commitment to food sovereignty, the analytic of governmentality allows us to show these important differences in the movement, rooted in how CSO actors understand their day-to-day work, and the tensions these differences bring to their seemingly united agenda.     

Capabilities Theory and the Limits of Liberal Justice: On Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice

In Frontiers of Justice, Martha Nussbaum applies the “Capabilities Approach,” which she calls “one species of a human rights approach,” to justice issues that have in her view been inadequately addressed in liberal political theory. These issues include rights of the disabled, rights that transcend national borders, and animal rights issues. She demonstrates the weakness of Rawlsianism, contractualism in general, and much of the Kantian tradition in moral philosophy and shows the need to move beyond the limitations of narrow rationalism, nationalism, and speciesism. Nevertheless, Nussbaum fails to elaborate adequately the grounds for her own capabilities position or to face fundamental theoretical questions about the nature and implications of that position.     

The EU’s Multilevel Parliamentary (Battle)Field: Inter-parliamentary Cooperation and Conflict in Foreign and Security Policy

The Treaty of Lisbon has been dubbed ‘the Treaty of Parliaments’, as it upgraded the position of both the European Parliament and of national parliaments within the institutional system of the EU. However, the implementation of the new Treaty also brought to the surface the uneasy relationship between the European and national parliamentary spheres in a number of domains. Drawing on the notion of ‘parliamentary field’, this article accounts for this growing divide by highlighting the competitive dynamics that may emerge from a mismatch between formal constitutional authority and the actual parliamentary capital that parliaments enjoy. The article examines this proposition within the domain of foreign and security policy, where the process of establishing a new inter-parliamentary mechanism for scrutinising policy has placed the European Parliament and the national parliaments visibly at odds.