Economic Aid: The End of Phase II and the Impact on Sustainable Peacebuilding in Northern Ireland

Abstract

Economic aid has been a critical component of the peace process in Northern Ireland allowing for community-based interventions, employment, social inclusion and regional stability. With the second round of funding coming to a close this essay explores the thoughts and perceptions of civil servants, fund administrators and community group leaders in Derry, Belfast and the Border Area to consider peoples reflections on the outcome of funding, concerns for the future once funding ends, what vital work is still needed and what strategies exist to continue the work of peace after the cessation of Phase II.     

Legitimacy and Coercion in Peacebuilding: A Balancing Act

ABSTRACT

Despite the tendency of the power literature to analyse legitimacy and coercion in isolation, both theoretical and empirical evidence suggest that coercion and legitimacy are not parallel lines but can interact in different ways, supporting or undermining each other. A methodical exploration of the relationship between legitimacy and coercion is important not only for improving the theoretical literatures on power and legitimacy but also in the light of the increasing interest in the power of legitimacy in statebuilding and peacebuilding. This article first analyses the overall interaction between coercion and legitimacy, and then explores the question that emerges from the interaction analysis; what level of coercion is permitted or required in order for a mission’s local legitimacy to be sustained? Finally, for the practice of peacebuilding, the article shows that an operation needs to understand its initial legitimacy standing with the local population, as this determines how much coercive force it can employ without undermining its overall legitimacy.     

Political institutions and Central Bank independence: A cross-country analysis

Using three quantitative measures of Central Bank independence, we apply OLS and TSLS regression methods to investigate the possible correlation between political liberty, political instability and central bank independence. For a sample of Western democracies and highly democratic developing countries we show that Cukierman's legal independence index is positively correlated with political freedom and regime political stability. It is negatively correlated with party political stability. For a sample of developing countries that excludes dictatorships we show that a special index of legal central bank autonomy is positively associated with political freedom and political stability. Finally, we observe that, for the same sample of nations, the turnover index of central bank independence is not sensitive to our political variables.     

Understanding the Political Economy of Cross-Strait Security: A Missing Link

This paper explores how and why China has been perceived as an economic threat in Taiwan through an examination of Taipei’s post-Cold War economic policy with respect to the mainland. While Taipei’s restriction on trade and investment across the Taiwan Strait until mid-2008 was widely considered a failure by both opponents and supporters of closer cross-Strait economic ties, this analysis points to an overlooked function of Taiwan’s economic policy that was not just about tackling the problems of the security externalities or promoting the island’s economic development. What appeared to be an ineffective policy can be understood as a successful boundary-drawing practice that discursively constituted a vulnerable Taiwan under Chinese economic threat, hence conducive to the (re)production of Taiwanese national identity.     

Localizing Peacebuilding: The Arizona Market and the Evolution of U.S. Military Peacebuilding Priorities in Bosnia

ABSTRACT

This article examines peacebuilding localization, in particular how encounters with local contexts and actors shape external peacebuilders' priorities and practices. My vehicle for exploring this dynamic is the rapid emergence of a massive black market in northeast Bosnia, the ‘Arizona’ market, which developed on territory controlled by U.S. peacekeeping forces. I argue that the military's relationship with the market contributed to a shift from an initially minimalist, peacekeeping-centric, conception of the peacebuilding process toward the embrace of broader post-war political and economic initiatives, and identify three factors that influenced its unfolding in the case of Arizona: adaptation, embeddedness and place.     

Federal Aid to Local Governments in the West: An Irony of the Reagan Revolution

Despite the fact that the Reagan election was viewed as a power shift toward the West, the decade of the 1980s produced cruel disappointment. The region was generally left out of the economic recmery of the nation because of the bust in the agricultural and mineral industries. These state and local gmernments which sufferfrom high costs and low resources were particularly dependent on the national gmernment at the very time when the Reagan Administration was cutting federal aid and transferring power to the states. Unlike Nixon's New Federalism which helped the state and local governments of the West, Reagan's policies caused their relative position in federal aid flows to deteriorate. Although the Reagan revolution in cutting domestic programs was viewed as the embodiment of western rugged individualism, the region lost in terms of federal aid to small rural local governments.     

The Political Economy of State Failure: A Social Contract Approach

By employing the contract approach of state theory, this article provides a conceptual framework for the analysis of state failure phenomena which puts the emphasis on structural conditions as the root cause of state fragility and state failure. The article argues that the deep social fragility of some post-colonial societies, augmented by self-serving external interventions by foreign powers, is at the heart of their failure. Deep social fragility makes societies unable to cooperate and thus renders them powerless to discipline their leaders. Meanwhile, by linking leadership survival to the decisions and policies of a self-serving foreign power, intervention provides flawed incentives to the state leaders, which increases their predatory behaviour. In such situations, state leaders, rather than strengthening formal state institutions, again intensify the collective action problem and increase social fragility as mechanisms for survival.     

Economic Actors' Political Activity in 'Overlap Issues': Privatisation and EU State Aid Control

This article considers the political activity of economic actors in what we refer to as 'overlap issues'. The cases examined here are the domestic level privatisation policy-making processes in Spain, France and Ireland, and the subsequent European Commission decisions on state aids given during the sales. Although the influence of economic actors is crucial in understanding the domestic-level privatisation aid negotiations, such actors' participation is absent in the supranational decision-making process. In order to explain this limited political activity of firms at the EU level, attention is focused on both the role of the member states and the paradoxes in EU policies that simultaneously guide and constrain the Commission from making a decision against capital.     

Political participation and parliamentary careers: Women's quotas in West Germany

Drawing on a survey of women candidates and parliamentary handbooks, this article examines the effects of women's quotas in West German political parties. Since the mid‐1980s, the number of women members in Land parliaments and in the Bundestag increased sharply, in particular for the SPD and Greens. In the CDU and SPD, women require a track‐record of office‐holding before their nomination, while the party organisation carries little weight in FDP and Greens. CDU and FDP women tend to link political success to personality while women in the SPD and Greens look for an end to a male‐dominated party culture. The focus on women appears to favour the academically qualified, especially in the Greens and in the SPD.     

Resilient Peace: Exploring the Theory and Practice of Resilience in Peacebuilding Interventions

ABSTRACT

This introduction provides a conceptual and theoretical background to the more detailed analyses contained in the articles of the Special Section. The introduction firstly presents a critical overview of the rise of resilience and its increasing role in shaping the terms of international interventions. It identifies a set of interrelated conceptual themes relevant to theorising the relationship between resilience and peacebuilding and evaluates how appropriate a resilience approach might be in promoting sustainable peace and what might be its main dangers and pitfalls.