A Confluence of Competitions: Regime-Building and Violence in Timor-Leste

In April 2006, riots broke out on the streets of Dili. As violence escalated over the weeks that followed, a beacon of liberal peace-building dissolved into near-anarchy. While there have been several accounts of Timor-Leste’s “crisis” of 2006, it remains unclear why violence spiraled at that time, rather than at an earlier point in the country’s post-conflict transition. This article addresses that temporal puzzle by combining an analysis of the structural origins of the crisis with discussion of proximate, agency-driven triggers to violence. The resulting narrative first details the development of competition between governing elites, and also between state security actors, over the years following independence. The fusion of those two dynamics of competition in 2006, I then argue, created conditions sufficient for violent conflict.     

The Japanese Movement to Protest Wartime Sexual Violence: A Survey of Japanese and International Literature

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes a genealogical perspective to the social sciences study of robots in Japan, proposing a widely applicable research on “robot cultures.” The author discusses the corporate and governmental strategies and mechanisms that are shaping a national robot culture through establishing robot “lineages” and a national robot history which can have significant implications for both humans and robots. The paper contributes discussions on monozukuri (manufacturing) and Nihonjinron (theories on “Japaneseness”) to the existing anthropological consideration of robots, by examining links between monozukuri and robots, robot genealogy, popular culture and robots, and different social rituals and sites that help the enculturation of robots. The paper draws attention to the power relations and hegemonies of robot culture which also imply the existence of plurality and diversity that will require further scholarly attention as the robot phenomenon unfolds.     

Drugs, Violence, and Development in Colombia: A Department-Level Analysis

Observers say that drug production fuels violence in Colombia, but does coca production explain different levels of violence? This article examines the relationship between coca production and guerrilla violence by reviewing national‐level data over time and studying Colombia by department, exploring the interactions among guerrilla violence, exports, development, and displacement. It uses historical analysis, cartographic visualization, and analysis of the trends in four high coca‐producing and four violent Colombian departments, along with a department‐level fixed effects model. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the department‐level analysis suggests that coca production is not the driving force of contemporary Colombian guerrilla violence. Instead, economic factors and coca eradication emerge as prominent explanatory factors.     

Making Referendums Safe for Democracy: A Call for More and Better Deliberation

In this essay I argue that when thinking about the design of referendums we should pay particular attention to the quality, substance, and inclusiveness of the debate and deliberation that precedes the vote. This is especially true for constitutional referendums that affect fundamental laws. I suggest that drawing out the procedure over time and including citizens’ mini‐publics might be helpful additions to our design tools box.     

Violence,the Subject,and the Beyond: Achille Mbembe and Violence in International Relations Theory

A double-barrelled question underpins this special edition: can International Relations (IR) be decolonised? If so, how? I argue that IR's insistence on more-or-less concretised subjects, which engage in dialectical relations of struggle, renders the discipline (and the practice it engenders) constitutionally blind to the origins of colonial violence. Traditional theory necessarily elides the violence which forges legible concrete actors and which culminates in colonialism and slavery. I offer a critique of this theoretical structure through Achille Mbembe's reading of Bataille, Fanon, Hegel, and Kojève, and I close by touching on the decolonising potential of Édouard Glissant's work for academic IR. I conclude that IR can indeed be decolonised, but it must become something quite unrecognisable if it is to do so.     

The Illegal Drug Industry,Violence and the Colombian Economy: A Department Level Analysis

Previous research on the Colombian illegal drug trade, which is generally qualitative in approach and focused on the national level, has concluded that the drug industry harms the economy. In order to test out this widespread claim, this article seeks to differentiate between the corrosive economic effects of Colombia's persistently high levels of generalised political violence and the specific consequences of the cocaine trade. It combines historical national level analysis with quantitative department analysis and identifies the economic effects of both paramilitary and guerrilla violence, thereby contributing to a closer examination of the impact of the drugs trade on the economy. The results reveal that paramilitary violence is related positively to exports but negatively to gross domestic product. Guerrilla violence, however, appears to harm exports but, surprisingly, not gross domestic product. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, coca cultivation does not have independent effects on exports or GDP, a conclusion which suggests that Colombia's economic problems stem more from political violence than from the drug trade in itself.     

战略的背叛:呼吁真正的欧盟战略伙伴关系

以对欧盟的官方文件和非正式文件的回顾,以及笔者对欧洲官员进行的大量访谈为基础,本文得出的结论是,截至2011年,欧盟总共与10个第三国建立了战略伙伴关系。在对上述战略伙伴关系进行了批判性评估之后,本文对其战略性质大体持质疑态度,原因在于:第一,并非每个战略伙伴都具有同等的战略意义;第二,在绝大多数真正具有战略性的问题上,欧盟并没有与其合作伙伴开展合作;第三,战略伙伴关系并没有对双方关系产生结构性或制度性影响;第四,在很多情况下,欧盟本身根本就没有被视为战略伙伴。最后,本文还是提出了积极的结论:既然欧盟已经创设了战略伙伴关系,而且提升了战略伙伴的预期,那么,欧盟就必须发展并实施这些战略伙伴关系,以使其真正有效,并最终具有真正的战略性。     

Defining the limits of the North Korean Human Rights Act: A security and legal perspective

The introduction of the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004 (HR 4011 or the Act) was hailed by many in the U.S. Congress as a significant and much-needed legislative effort that would substantially improve the human rights conditions of North Korea, considered to be one of the most unpredictable and undemocratic regimes in the world today. The passage of HR 4011 effectively marked a new and notable phase within U.S. foreign policy, in which the issue of human rights was directly linked to the issue of North Korean nuclear non-proliferation in a Helsinki-style framework. Relating to the Act, this paper argues from cross-cultural, security, and legal perspectives that HR 4011 may encounter specific limitations, which may hinder the Act from reaching its stated objectives of furthering “respect for and protection of fundamental human rights in North Korea” and “to promote a more durable humanitarian solution to the plight of North Korean refugees.” Although improving human rights is a fundamentally important issue, linking human rights with DPRK nuclear non-proliferation through HR 4011’s explicit Helsinki-style approach may exacerbate rather than eradicate North Korean human rights violations as well as the DPRK’s ongoing nuclear standoff with the international community.     

Colombian Paramilitaries Since Demobilization: Between State Crackdown and Increased Violence

This article addresses the puzzle of heterogeneous trends in paramilitary violence on the Colombian Pacific Coast since the beginning of the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) process in 2003. The usual explanations derived from political conflict theories are improved with insights from organized crime research. The article argues that the occasional escalation of post‐DDR paramilitary violence at the subregional level cannot be explained by the weakness of the state argument. Instead, the article demonstrates the counterintuitive evidence that paramilitary violence correlates positively with the incidence of state repressive intervention against paramilitary groups. More specifically, paramilitaries challenged by the state use more violence, either to replace their nonviolent resources most affected by law enforcement activities or to respond to crackdown‐related intensification of predatory tendencies within their respective organizations.     

Manufacturing Black-on-Black Violence in Africa: A Decolonial Perspective on Mfecane and Afrophobia/Xenophobia in South Africa

The phenomenon of “black-on-black” violence among the people of Africa has, ever since the advent of modernity/coloniality, been articulated in such a way that it presents victims as perpetrators. Thus, from the Mfecane violence of the “pre-colonial” era to the xenophobic/Afrophobic violence of the “post-colonial” era in Africa, incidents of black-on-black violence have always attracted explanations that cast doubt on the humanity of the black subject, through the colonial strategy of inventing and inverting causation. This colonial strategy entails both mis-presenting the epochal history of coloniality by representing it in terms of rupture instead of continuity, as well as representing the indigenous African subject as inherently violent. I argue in this article that black-on-black violence is a product of coloniality—a racist global power structure that makes incidents of “non-revolutionary violence” among the oppressed black subject inevitable. Thus, I deploy the case of the Mfecane violence of the “pre-colonial” era in southern Africa, and the Afro-phobic attacks on foreign nationals in “post-apartheid” South Africa to unmask the longue durée of coloniality, and its role of manufacturing blackon-black violence among the black people of Africa.