Russia’s idea of the multipolar world order: origins and main dimensions

Contemporary international relations are rife with the ideological struggle over the potential nature of the rapidly changing world order. Two distinct paradigmatic positions have surfaced. One champions economic, cultural, and political globalization conducted under the leadership of the Western world. The other advocates a more particularistic approach that fends for a balance of interests, multiplicity of politico-cultural forms and multiple centers of international influence. The latter doctrine, often referred to as the multipolar world theory, is the subject of this paper. The discussion argues that the idea of a multipolar world order has emerged as Russia’s main ethical and ideological position advanced in the international arena. Its philosophical tenets buttress Russian society intellectually at home, providing the expedients to pursue the country’s foreign policy goals abroad. The paper examines a substantial value package with roots in both Russian and Western philosophy that sustains the multipolar world order theory.     

Ethnocultural nationalism and Turkey’s non-Muslim minorities during the early republican period

This article analyses the Turkish nationalist elite’s economic and demographic Turkification policies toward the non-Muslim minorities in the 1920s and 1930s, and argues that the nationalist elite pursued ethnocultural nationalism toward the country’s non-Muslim citizens, while applying civic-territorial nationalism toward Muslim Turks. The article maintains that the nationalist elite, like the Young Turk regime, aimed at forming a national Turkish Muslim businessmen class at the expense of the non-Muslim minorities by pursuing economic and demographic Turkification policies.     

Assessing public opinion’s influence on foreign policy: the case of China’s assertive maritime behavior

ABSTRACT

English-language analysis of Chinese foreign policy has often cited nationalist public opinion as a key driver of Beijing’s recent assertive maritime conduct. Yet these important conjectures have not been systematically tested. How can we know whether public opinion has been driving an authoritarian state’s foreign policy? What are some cases in which concern about popular nationalism may have influenced Beijing’s behavior in disputed maritime spaces? To answer these questions, this article constructs a methodological framework for assessing the likely impact of public opinion on particular instances of state action. Applying this to five cases typical of China’s on-water policy in the South and East China Seas since 2007 indicates that popular nationalism has had little to do with China’s assertive turn on its maritime periphery.     

Saudi Arabia: the ‘arab street’, the media and popular agitation since September 11

Dr Mai Yamani studied Anthropology at Bryn Mawr and Oxford. She has taught at King Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia, and lectured widely in the Middle East, Europe and the United States. She is currently an Associate Research Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, where she has participated in conferences in the Middle East Programme. In February 2003 she, with others in the RIIA Programme, published Iraq, the Regional Fallout, which is available on the RIIA website. She has written numerous articles and her book, Changed Identities: the Challenge of the New Generation in Saudi Arabia (Royal Institute for International Affairs, 2001) was reviewed in the February 2002 issue of Asian Affairs.     

Negotiating power and authority in the desert: the Arab Bedouin and the limits of the Ottoman state in Hijaz, 1840–1908

This article explores the techniques and strategies used by Ottoman authorities to control the Bedouin with a specific focus on the province of Hijaz between 1840 and 1908. Using primary sources from the Ottoman and British archives, it argues that the Ottoman Empire developed a ‘politics of negotiation’ towards the tribes in its attempt to secure cities and major pilgrimage and trade routes against tribal attack. The principal agents of the empire who made this negotiated governance possible were the amir of Mecca and the governor of Hijaz. As a result of this policy, imperial authorities had to give significant concessions to the tribes, and they thus incorporated them into the province's imperial order. When the Ottoman economy went through a crisis, as in the 1900s, negotiated governance and order faced great problems.     

South Africa’s peacebuilding in the DRC: Convergence and dissonance with the liberal model

The task of transforming countries affected by conflict towards sustainable peace has been a persistent problem. In response to growing intra-state conflict in the post-Cold War era, it has become the norm to prescribe a cocktail of liberal democracy and free-market economics as a universal formula for building peaceful societies. South Africa, since its post-democratic emergence into global affairs, has also been active in promoting peace in Africa along similar lines. This article embarks on an exploratory qualitative analysis of South Africa’s peacebuilding engagements in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It aims to contribute a better understanding of South Africa’s peacebuilding engagements by utilising the DRC case study to point out areas of convergence and dissonance with the dominant liberal model of peacebuilding. The article finds that, although peppered with successes and failures, South Africa does approach peacebuilding in a unique manner. It also calls for a revision of South Africa’s approach, given the varying levels of success in the DRC.     

Coetzee’s stones: Dusklands and the nonhuman witness

Bringing together theoretical writing on objects, testimony, and trauma to develop the category of the “nonhuman witness,” this essay considers the narrative, ethical, and ecological work performed by peripheral objects in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974). Coetzee’s insistent object catalogues acquire narrative agency and provide material for a counter-narrative parody of first-personal reports of violence in Dusklands. Such collections of nonhuman witnesses further disclose the longer temporality of ecological violence that extends beyond the text’s represented and imagined casualties. Linking the paired novellas of Dusklands, which concern 1970s America and 1760s South Africa, the essay finds in Coetzee’s strange early work a durable ethical contribution to South African literature precisely for its attention to nonhuman claimants and environments.     

Brazil and South Africa: the ‘odd couple’ of the South Atlantic?

Exploring the complexity of South Africa's and Brazil's ‘like-mindedness’ at the regional, multilateral, and bilateral levels, this article argues that shared middle power roles traceable to the pre-Cold War era and beyond set the scene for a great deal of political complementarity and cooperation at the multilateral level where Brazil and South Africa's shared identities drive an interest in reforming global governance processes. This complementarity does not, however, always spill over to the bilateral level, where trans-societal linkages are still relatively limited compared with state-to-state interactions.     

Constructing the ‘Immigrant’: Germany’s Radical Left in the Refugee Crisis

The article scrutinises how Germany’s non-political party radical left has discussed immigration and ‘cultural’ or ‘national’ identity in the context of past and current immigration into Germany, with a focus on the refugee crisis of 2015. Three types of radical left discourse are identified. First, some in the radical left have come to regard immigrants, in particular refugees, as an ‘ersatz proletariat’ and therefore as potential revolutionary instruments for their own project. Second, some agree that revolutionary change is necessary but subordinate their principles to practical support for immigrants and refugees in the here and now. Third, given the improbability of communist revolution and the crisis of ‘Western modernity’, some on the radical left have called for the defence of ‘the West’ and to help immigrants assimilate into Western civilisation. The article makes a timely contribution to the knowledge about contemporary radical left politics in Germany and shows the fractured nature of Germany’s non-political party radical left in the context of the refugee crisis. It also investigates the impact of ‘crisis’ as an ‘open moment’ and ‘catalyst’ on the radical left’s discourse-as-practice.     

Securing Hong Kong’s identity in the colonial past: strategic essentialism and the umbrella movement

ABSTRACT

The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong is the most radical political movement to have taken place in the former British colony since 1967 anti-colonial demonstrations. Using empirical evidence obtained from activists who participated in the Umbrella Movement, this paper explains how Hong Kong’s youth are looking simultaneously to both the past and future to secure their identity in the colonial past even as some hope to achieve ultimate secession from Mainland rule. Racism and anti-Mainland hostilities in Hong Kong are the result of nostalgia and the insurrectionary impulse akin to the millenarianism of social movements founded on suffering and loss that continually seek the recovery of pasts of which they are now deprived. We illuminate how, to young activists, the Umbrella Movement presents hope for a future embedded in the past that remains one the territory and former colony may still aspire toward.     

Understanding Egyptian capitalism through the Muslim Brotherhood’s eyes: the quest for an ‘Islamic economy’ in the 1940s and its ideological and social impact

The following article addresses the intricate issue of contemporary Islamist thought’s relation to the modern capitalist economy, with special reference to the Egyptian case. Islamist thinkers have been vigorously proclaiming for the past decades that the economic prosperity of some Muslim nations stems from the proper adoption of an ‘Islamic economy’, whereas the absence of such a model has been mainly responsible for the crises that other nations faced. At the same time, we witness that the Muslim nations are fully integrated into the global market system. Although their rulers boast about achieving social justice, by economically interpreting Islam, nonetheless poverty and horrific injustices are officially retained and morally accepted, thus, enabling the upper classes to keep performing their pious duties in the name of God. In this regard, it seems that capitalism and piety are intertwined: the first justifies the necessity of the second, while the second humanizes the brutal impact of the first. By referring to the historical example of the Muslim Brothers in pre-socialist Egypt, the article tends to show under which circumstances was capitalism’s relation to religious piety conceptualized in Islamist thought and literature, in addition to the main social, organizational and ideological outcomes of this conceptualization.     

Inside the Karen Insurgency: Explaining Conflict and Conciliation in Myanmar’s Changing Borderlands

Since 2012 Myanmar’s oldest ethnic rebel group, the Karen National Union (KNU), has sought for considerable rapprochement with the government. To many, this seemed to be the direct outcome of wider political transition in Myanmar. This article proposes an alternative explanation. Based on extensive field research and an emerging literature on armed groups, it demonstrates that the group’s rapprochement with the government was driven by leadership struggles between two rival factions within the KNU. At the core of this contestation are shifting internal power relations, which resulted from military pressures and geopolitical transformations in the Myanmar-Thai borderlands. These findings point to significant shortcomings of Myanmar’s peace process. They also contribute to the field of Conflict and Security Studies with much needed primary source data on the internal politics of insurgency, which shows how dynamics of civil war are driven by an interplay between forces on different levels of analysis.     

Negotiating the “Drunken Aborigine”: Alcohol in Indigenous Autobiography

This article approaches the question of how Aboriginal Australians describe their own experiences of drinking alcohol, sometimes to excess, and how they recover, through a reading of seven autobiographies alongside the scholarship on Aboriginal drinking. The evidence contained in these life stories stresses personal factors and adds to the picture we glean from the scholarship, whether academic or governmental, epidemiological, anthropological or historical, which explains Aboriginal drinking habits in more social terms. Thus, the autobiographies themselves make an important intervention into the scholarship on Aboriginal drinking. Beyond this, negotiating with the stereotype of the “drunken Aborigine” is unavoidable for Aboriginal people who write about their drinking and these autobiographies represent a challenge to this popular image. This article examines a previously unexamined discourse on Aboriginal drinking that goes some way towards undermining the public representation of a drunken Aboriginal culture while simultaneously giving individual Aboriginal Australians greater voice in describing their past and current experiences.     

The Beast in the Machine: Modernity,Aviation and the Legacies of Colonialism in Roger McDonald’s Slipstream

The expectation that a novel about a celebrity aviator will romanticise flight and glorify the pilot is a product of the mythologisation of aviation, which this essay understands is a response to the threat of technology and the alienating conditions of modernity. Roger McDonald’s novel Slipstream refuses to reproduce this mythology, expressing a literary aspiration to use the form of the modern novel to explore the entanglement of the subject under the conditions of postcolonial modernity. My argument will develop through three parts. The first section will explore the mythologisation of aviation as a symptom of modernity. The second will examine the ways in which the novel uses its modernist form to call into question the celebrity of the aviator and the spectacle of flight. This part of my argument is indebted to the critique by German philosopher Martin Heidegger of the technological mode of Being. Finally, I take up the postcolonial implications of the Heideggerian critique in a country in which many of modernism’s standard antidotes to the problems of its century are compromised by the legacies of colonialism.     

Negotiating the technological capacity in Chinese engagements: Is the Tanzanian government in the driving seat?

Is the Tanzanian government in charge of development cooperation programmes with China? The literature has portrayed the Tanzanian and other state actors in Africa as passive and weakly coordinated players over the five decades of intensified cooperation with China. This paper will attempt to challenge this narrative by drawing on lessons from the negotiation efforts of individual and institutional actors in Tanzania, as they sought to improve the country's industrial and technological capacity, among other interests. Our findings revealed a gap between the capacity to attract Chinese investments and development assistance, and extraction of knowledge and technology from such engagements. President John Pombe Magufuli's anti-corruption measures signal a paradigm shift against the rent-seeking tendencies, elitism and limited utilisation of local content under the Chinese partnership projects. Nevertheless, the combination of a declining share of official Chinese engagements with the increased involvement of private actors necessitates further policy innovations in order to boost inter-firm technological spillovers.     

‘A Pioneer in the Struggle for Social Justice’: Manuel Larraín and Transnational Catholic Activism in Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s

This article explores the development of inter-American Catholicism during the 1950s and 1960s. It analyses the role of the Chilean Catholic bishop Manuel Larraín (1900–1966) in his efforts to disseminate his diagnosis of underdevelopment in Latin America and to establish links with the Catholic world in the United States. Based on a review of his writings, the American press and documentation from Catholic organisations, it is suggested that the Chilean bishop advocated the implementation of social reforms and American collaboration to prevent the advance of communism and strengthen Catholicism on the continent.     

Asia’s Security Triangles: Maritime Minilateralism in the Indo-Pacific

Since the early years of the twenty-first century, a number of key regional governments have consciously chosen to alter the way they talk about the region, and have now largely shifted from using the ‘Asia-Pacific’ to the ‘Indo-Pacific’ construct. But after three decades of utilising the ‘Asia-Pacific’ concept, why has this been the case and how might this shift in geographical conceptualisation alter the strategic framework of the region? This paper argues that the ‘Indo-Pacific’ is a regional reconceptualisation utilised by Japan, Australia, India and the USA to address deficiencies in Asia’s maritime security and institutional architecture, which are being simultaneously influenced by a more assertive Chinese posture and waning U.S. influence. Additionally, the Indo-Pacific concept has developed in tandem with a transformation in the regional security architecture. The utilisation of maritime minilateralism between Japan, India, Australia and the USA supplements Asia’s bilateral American alliances, with an array of trilateral security dialogues or ‘security triangles’. The Asia-Pacific to Indo-Pacific shift is really an instance of an emerging minilateral security regionalism, rather than the predominant forms of bilateral and multilateral security and economic regionalism that have dominated Asia in recent decades.