Building politics: The British Embassy Peking, 1949–1992

Abstract

Timor-Leste is among the youngest nations in the world. It began its independence under difficult circumstances: poverty is widespread, education is poor, the industrial sector is non-existent, and political turbulence is on the rise. On the positive side, future oil revenues are predicted to be substantial, which could potentially be a great help in Timor-Leste's struggle for development. This paper examines critically the possibility for Timor-Leste to use oil revenues to achieve economic development. It describes how difficult it is to estimate the future revenues because of volatile prices, territorial disputes, and insufficient seismological mapping. It continues with a discussion of the ‘resource curse’ – the difficulty of combining natural resources with economic development. Moreover, the particular challenges for Timor-Leste's development are dealt with at some length, as are possible ways to avoid the resource curse.     

Not a Curse at All: Why Middle Eastern Oil States Fail and How it can be Prevented

Western scholarship has often noted that oil states in the Middle East are affected by the ‘resource curse’. Thus, such states are to eventually fail due to their plundering of resources and their neglect of the social contract with their citizens. However, this is not the case, as oil states are neither failed states, nor fully democratic. They hover in a middle ground in which they assure security through coercion, but lack representation and legitimacy. Due to the events of the Arab Spring, a pragmatic, insightful and comprehensive review of oil states in the region is necessary. Although oil states in the region thus far have remained stable, change can be expected in the future. How will oil states deal with the pressures of a more demanding society and an ever-challenging economic atmosphere? Furthermore, what can history teach us so that state failure can be averted?     

The tax-welfare mix: explaining Japan's weak extractive capacity

Abstract

Despite having the highest level of public debt in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), higher than Greece or Italy, Japan has one of the lowest aggregate tax burdens of the advanced industrial democracies. This paper asks why Japan, once described as a strong developmental state, has had such a weak extractive capacity, an inability to raise revenues to confront deficits and public debt? In contrast to the existing explanations that focus on political institutions, partisan preferences, or economic globalization, this article argues that Japan's ‘tax–welfare mix’ – the combination of taxes and redistributive welfare polices – undermined the state's long-term capacity to secure adequate tax revenue. More than just a source of revenue, taxes can be used directly to achieve redistributive goals, such as targeting low taxes and exemptions to specific groups. This study shows how Japan's tax–welfare mix diminished its extractive capacity through three mechanisms: the political lock-in of a redistributive social bargain struck around low taxes, the timing and sequencing of its tax policy and welfare development, and the erosion of public trust, which undermined tax consent. Beyond offering a new theory of extractive capacity, the tax–welfare mix explains aspects of Japan's tax structure that defy existing explanations and contributes to our understanding of the capitalist development state by highlighting the redistributive political function of tax policy and its long-term impact on state capacity.     

Confronting the Governance Challenges of Developing Nigeria's Extractive Industry: Policy and Performance in the Oil and Gas Sector1

The issue of economic growth and human development has been a central concern in the oil and gas sector of Nigeria's extractive industry, and this has featured prominently in the agitations and generalized restiveness in the Niger Delta, the oil‐producing region. While many studies have focused on these problems, policies aimed at confronting them have not received much broad attention. This article bridges this research gap by holistically focusing on the solution to the problem. In doing this, the article examines the policies during the Obasanjo administration from 1999 to 2007 in order to critically assess the efficacy or inefficiency of the policies in reversing the general problem now known as the “resource curse,” and to offer a better understanding of the deeper political, social, and economic issues that drive outcomes. The article finds that while significant efforts were made to avoid the boom and bust cycle of oil and lower volatility by de‐linking public expenditure from oil revenue through the “oil‐price‐based fiscal rule,” generally, progress in this area was not matched by improvement in the other areas examined by this study, notably peace and safety of lives and oil/gas installations, the development of the oil‐producing region, environmental security and sustainability, and the transparent and accountable use of oil/gas revenues.     

Naked protest: the maternal politics of citizenship and revolt

This article explores immigrant protest, citizenship and their relationship, through an account of a ‘naked protest’ by a group of mothers, refused asylum seekers and ‘illegal immigrants’ at Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre in England and ends with an account of the use of the ‘naked curse’ in a protest by an indigenous group of mothers against global oil corporations in the Niger Delta. Woven together from activist materials, news reports, interviews, documentaries and historical data, I recount and mobilise these protests to think about ‘the scaling of bodies’ (Marion-Young 1990) and citizenship under neoliberalism, and the routes through which motherhood is mobilised as a site of political agency and resistance to processes of disenfranchisement. I argue that these maternal protests challenge the ‘catastrophic functionalism’ of Agamben-inspired accounts of ‘bare life’, and offer an alternative lens through which to perceive the ethical and political claims made by abject populations (Papadopoulos et al. 2008, p. 198). In thinking through and with these naked protests, this article reframes the sexual politics of citizenship and brings questions of maternity and natality to bear on citizenship studies.     

“The River Told Me”: Rethinking Intersectionality from the World of Berta Cáceres

ABSTRACT

Inspired by the spiritual and political journey of Berta Cáceres (1973-2016), a fierce Lenca woman leader from Honduras who died in defense of sacred indigenous rivers, the essay aims to rethink the frame of intersectionality that is axiomatic in feminist theorizing and activism. Against the backdrop of the January 2017 Women’s March in the USA, I interrogate inclusionary accounts that equate intersectionality with a pre-existing unity among women that leaves power differentials intact. I recover the intersection as an index of invisibility and violence by drawing on the intimate connections that Berta foregrounded between multiple structures of domination. However, I argue that attending to the relational histories and geographies of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism, is insufficient for imagining more just futures that are hospitable to subaltern horizons. Feminist praxis must also interrogate the Western liberal conceptions of agency and human-nature relations that undergird its intersectional analysis. Through an exploration of the indigenous cosmovisions and transnational grassroots solidarity that coalesce under Berta’s name, I point to the importance of cultivating a disposition to listening to incommensurable worlds where rivers tell stories and call upon us. This is an ecofeminist vision capable of rooting intersectional analysis within decolonizing relations and alternatives.     

Solidarity as environmental justice in brownfields remediation

Abstract

What do individuals owe to affected communities in the name of environmental justice? Principal accounts of environmental justice have made inroads in developing a pluralistic and activist-led approach. Yet precisely because of their strengths, such accounts face three problems – indeterminacy, epistemology, and structure/agency – that hinder activism and widespread engagement and threaten to leave ‘every neighborhood for itself.’ The current article examines an effort at brownfields remediation in Louisville, Kentucky, asking where environmental justice lies and how individuals ought to be engaged. Activist-led environmental justice cannot guide action, so the article defends a principle of solidarity as equity. Such solidarity requires individual engagement and, in the Louisville case, opposition to the proposed brownfields remediation plan.     

The Local Legitimacy of Peacekeepers

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship and policy doctrine alike have identified local legitimacy as an important ‘success factor’ in peacekeeping – but like many such calls for greater attention to local dynamics, it is often unclear what local legitimacy actually means, how to analyse it, what causal processes are at work, and what might obstruct the operationalization of well-intentioned policy recommendations for peacekeepers to seek local legitimacy. This article aims to bring clarity to the complex concept of local legitimacy, including the ways in which insights drawn from legitimacy theory developed in very different social contexts can be adapted to the realities of the conflict societies into which peacekeepers deploy. First, it examines what it means to locate the legitimacy of peace operations at the local level, rather than the international. Second, it clarifies the causal links between peacekeepers’ legitimacy and their effectiveness, reviewing scholarship on local legitimacy and its adaptation of broader legitimacy theory. Third, it identifies three important reasons that locally legitimizing peacekeepers is so difficult in practice, distinguishing between the difficulties derived from the particular features of conflict societies and those derived from the institutional characteristics of peace operations.     

China's engagement in South America and Africa's extractive sectors: new perspectives for resource curse theories

Abstract

China's engagement in South America and Africa's extractive sectors has increased significantly in the last decade. How comparable are the African and South American cases from a developmental perspective? This article explores resource curse theories, arguing that the ‘curses’ often associated to extraction are historically produced dynamic processes that need to be reevaluated in light of China's direct and indirect impacts on resource-endowed countries. It elaborates a framework to compare the developmental dynamics entailed by China's involvement in the South American and African extractive sectors, distinguishing between external, internal and intrinsic ‘curses’. The article holds that China's growth and investment have strengthened the position of resource-endowed countries in the international economy, revitalizing resource industries and improving terms of trade for commodities. Concurrently, the expansion of extractive activities has brought about increased environmental and economic sustainability challenges. Divergences between the African and South American cases are best observed at the national levels, where China's non-interventionist approach has different developmental implications depending on internal trends within investment host countries.     

Malaysia's new economic policy and the global economy: The evolution of ethnic accommodation

Abstract

Developing countries commonly must deal not only with issues of economic development, but also with the problems associated with a multi‐ethnic population. Most analyses of ethnic programs, however, focus on the domestic political economy and fail to appreciate the importance of international factors. In this essay, I note that Malaysia's New Economic Policy (NEP) and its successors have been affected not only by the domestic ethnic situation but also by the global economy. Furthermore, I argue that current international pressures and constraints have forced a re‐evaluation of the NEP in the past decade. While a concern for ethnic factors is by no means absent from the policy‐making process today, ethnic concerns are now overshadowed by the realities of the international economic order and the government's realization that ethnic accommodation can only be successful within the confines of an outward‐looking, expanding economy.     

The arts of refusal: tragic unreconciliation,pariah humour,and haunting laughter

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates Hannah Arendt’s writings on tragic unreconciliation and pariah humour as offering creative strategies for confronting the deadening of emotion that enables people to become reconciled to what they should refuse or resist. She offers a distinctive contribution to debates on reconciliation and justice, I suggest, by articulating a tragic approach to unreconciliation. Yet Arendt recognised that tragic accounts of violence can reinforce denial and resignation. In writings on the ‘hidden tradition’ of the ‘Jew as pariah,’ Arendt suggests that humour can be an important response to tragic accounts of political violence and a strategy for awakening an emotional response in those who cannot perceive tragedies to which they have become reconciled. As arts of refusal, tragic unreconciliation and pariah humour invoke and subvert the tragic imagination to reveal possibilities for solidarity, responsibility, and transformation that challenge problematic forms of reconciliation – reconciliation to one’s role as a participant in, or bystander to abuse, reconciliation as self-abnegating assimilation, and reconciliation as compromise, scapegoating, or denial.     

Natural resources, aid, and democratization: A best-case scenario

Natural resources and aid give dictators revenue to maintain power. Attempts are being made, therefore, to funnel these resources away from nondemocratic governments and toward their citizens. Using formal analysis and building on existing theories of democratization, I analyze the effects of such institutional solutions when they function perfectly (the best-case scenario). The models show that even with institutional safeguards, these resources diminish chances for democratization. In addition to their practical importance, the results have an important theoretical implication: the political resource curse may not be due to dictators' use of these resources, but simply to their existence in nondemocracies.     

‘Marching from all governorates’: labour lacunae in Mubarak’s Egypt

Abstract

Starting in 1991, Egypt undertook ‘structural adjustment’ reforms at the behest of international financial institutions and the country’s foreign donors. These reforms have often been included in a larger discussion of economic reforms and the withdrawal of the state from the Egyptian market. While certainly market-based, these reforms were interpreted and implemented in a uniquely Egyptian context and moved forward not through a market logic but with a specific understanding of political feasibility. Despite these local peculiarities, Egypt experienced a backlash familiar to researchers of structural adjustment internationally. How did Egypt’s structural adjustment and other ‘liberalizing’ reforms produce spatialized and sectoral backlash and drive workers from quiescence to militancy? Based on extensive fieldwork and interviews conducted in 2011–2013, this paper argues that the choices made by the Egyptian regime from 1991 to 2010 generated ‘labour lacunae’ – spaces in the political-economic structure where methods of interest aggregation were replaced by coercion or neglect – allowing militancy to flourish. I explore how labour entrepreneurs exploited these ‘lacunae’ to redefine ‘local’ protest in the run-up to the Egyptian Revolution of 2011.     

Why outcomes matter: reclaiming distributive justice

ABSTRACT

A significant strain of libertarian thinking is hostile to the idea that distributions of wealth and/or income (economic outcomes) can be judged according to antecedently determined normative standards. The general conceptual argument can be seen in the works of F. A. Hayek and Robert Nozick, both of whom argued that when governments step in to adjust outcomes, they coercively and intentionally distort the terms on which individuals make their individual decisions. By contrast, the coercion that comes with market exchanges, in that it is beyond the intentions of market actors, is not an affront to freedom, rightly understood. The proper role of government is thus to protect these exchanges (economic procedures) and leave outcomes – whatever they are – unaltered. I argue here that this critique of distributive justice turns on a false distinction between economic procedures and economic outcomes, and that reconceptualizing this distinction allows us not only to overcome objections to outcome-based distributive justice, but also to reconsider how the legitimacy of a system of ownership is determined.     

The gender politics of economic competitiveness in Malaysia's transition to a knowledge economy

Abstract

Many academic commentators have pointed to how the widening and deepening of a neoliberal reform agenda in Southeast Asia has brought about the end of developmental forms of state governance and the emergence of less directly market interventionist states pursuing economic ‘competitiveness’. In this paper, I note how notions of competitiveness are increasingly fused with ideas regarding the contribution of gender equity and women's empowerment to national economic success. However, drawing upon a case study of Malaysia, this paper highlights how government policies stressing both the marketisation of social reproduction and the need to expand women's productive roles are constantly brought into tension with embedded social structures. Such an emphasis is essential to any understanding of the role of the Malaysian state in economic development – a role that has been fundamentally shaped by a localised politics of ethnicity. The paper draws upon examples from government policy-making that conceptualise women as key workers in the emerging knowledge-driven economy and as microentrepreneurs driving pro-poor economic growth and illustrates how such policies are brought into tension with traditionalist discourses concerning the appropriate role of women in society.     

The politics-violence frontier

ABSTRACT

This article analyses how early twenty-first century political activists in Italy construct the frontier between politics and violence. It puts these constructions into the context of more conventionally theoretical accounts of violence and politics. Analysis of internet discourse published by left/anarchist bloggers and group members focusses on how activists criticize the conventional view that electoral politics is non-violent, and endorse the view that violence is politics’ main means. This means that the role of violence in oppositional politics then has to be negotiated. Discourse analysis shows how ideas of resistance, and anti-state force, are articulated in such a way as to draw distinctions between us and them, and their politics and ours. The article discusses the significance of these articulations of the politics-violence distinction for the construction of political agency, and for the justification of forms of political action, seeking to show that boundary work is fundamental to political agency.     

The story of two administrative states: state capacity in Hong Kong and Singapore

Abstract

Hong Kong and Singapore are both typical administrative states with an efficient administration and a vibrant market, which had achieved rapid economic growth in the past decades. This article examines the trajectory of their state capacity, highlighting recent problems and challenges. Based on a conceptual framework that captures and links up four dimensions – namely polity, bureaucracy, economy and civil society – their commonalities and differences in response are discussed. Their experience should be of particular relevance to transitional authoritarian states in Asia such as China, which faces similar challenges to reform in the arenas of politics, administration, economics and society.     

Neo(liberal) citizens of Europe: politics,scales, and visibilities of environmental citizenship in contemporary Turkey

The aim of this article is to critically interrogate articulations of environmental citizenship in contemporary Turkey. Specifically, I analyse articulations of environmental citizenship through citizen and activist narratives taken from interviews and focus group discussions. I argue that first, scalar focus on local spaces and individuated responsibility for action that emerge from the narratives are crucial to understand future environmental politics and possibilities in this context. Invoking recent discussions related to the politics and performativities of scale, in particular, allows consideration of the politics of visibility and other consequences of these scalar foci. Second, themes from narrative analysis show key convergences with Europeanization- and neoliberalization-related discourses and shifts. The resonance and overlap between these discourses and practices is significant, particularly as it shows citizen receptivity towards broader ideas related to increased citizen responsibility. As such, the research contributes to efforts to move away from theorization of processes such as neoliberalism as top-down, instead enabling examination of ways that these ideals are taken up, expressed, and refashioned by everyday citizens. The third argument that emerges from the analysis, following from the first two, is the need to theorize power more fully in discussions of environmental citizenship. Bridging with neoliberalism discussions is one possible way to move such a project forward.     

Producing knowledge in productive spaces: ethnography and planning in early socialist Romania

Abstract

My paper explores the forms of knowledge which laid the ground for the first economic plans of Romanian socialism, between 1949 and 1955. Building on factory and local Party Committee documents from the city of Cluj archives, I focus on processes of knowledge production within the space of the factory, following industrial management as a fundamental dimension of the exercise of state power in socialism. Against James Scott's concept of ‘legibility’, my research shows that the Romanian Party officials were fully aware of the limitations imposed by standardized knowledge and statistics in their planning activity and tried to counteract these limitations by producing in-depth ethnographic knowledge about economic units, production and people. Narrative and interpretative accounts of factory life proved to be the most efficient tools for a state which managed not only populations and resources, but also social production processes. Investigating the fundamental ways in which knowing was inextricably tied to planning as a condition of possibility for the exercise of state power reveals how the project of transforming economy and society into a totalizing historical configuration depended upon essentially anti-totalizing forms of knowledge.