Food security as a political issue: the 2009 elections in Malawi

African electorates are expected to use non-evaluative rationales, like patronage and ethnicity, when casting their vote. In famine-struck countries like Malawi it is however worthwhile to investigate how a salient political issue like food security influences voters’ decisions. At the turn of the millennium Malawi went through a series of famines. In 2005 the government changed its famine prevention strategy and started to subsidise fertilisers. The fertiliser programme was a political success and is used to explain the outcome of the 2009 elections. Although this explanation seems plausible, such analyses should be grounded in thorough analyses of the origin and implementation of the food policy. Through archival studies and fieldwork, this study reveals the importance of the opposition in changing the food policy and the politics of the implementation process. Hence, even if food security increased ahead of the 2009 elections, the election cannot be interpreted as a ‘national referendum’ on the incumbent's fertiliser programme.     

Russian Constitutional Crisis: Law and Politics Under Yel'tsin

This article is a foray into the understudied issue of environmental protest politics in Central Asia. Specifically, it uses Kyrgyzstan as a case study to test the argument that environmental concerns mobilized people to engage in protest and in ways different from other kinds of protest. This essay presents the first systematic study of public opinion about the environment in Kyrgyzstan. It includes results from a 2009 nationwide survey, over 100 expert and elite interviews, and newspaper content analysis. Furthermore, it spatially analyzes these results to identify geographical variation in public perception and political event occurrence patterns. Protest engagement is a complex process determined by the interaction of several factors, and is not explained solely by affluence, rationality, or grievances. Eco-mobilization – collective political action about the environment – represents a class of protest events that offers a different view into mass discontent in the former Soviet Union and neo-patrimonial societies. The study finds that these political actions about the environment are not necessarily elite driven; there is a basic foundation of national concern and salience of these issues, and demonstrated environmental beliefs do help to explain protest behavior.     

Hyper‐Securitization,Everyday Security Practice and Technification: Cyber‐Security Logics in Switzerland

This contribution to the SPSR debate about technology and security in Switzerland looks at how and by whom cyber‐security is constructed in Swiss security politics. Using three securitization logics as developed by reflexive Security Studies – hyper‐securitization, everyday security practices, and technification – it illustrates how Swiss actors have sorted out roles and responsibilities over the years. The article suggests that all three logics are present in the political process, but that ‘technification’ – a way to construct the issue as reliant upon technical knowledge and the supposition that this serves a political and normatively neutral agenda – is currently the dominant one. For democratic politics, technification is a big challenge. Assigning an issue to the technical realm has a depoliticizing influence and makes contestation from those with less technical expertise very hard.     

The Common African Defence and Security Policy

The literature on Africa’s collective security arrangementsfocuses on the African Union’s Peace and Security Counciland the Central Organ of the Organization of African Unity (OAU)before it. This article shows that the Peace and Security Councilis only an implementation mechanism of a broader policy framework,the Common African Defence and Security Policy (CADSP), thatwas adopted recently in Sirte, Libya. The article argues thatthe adoption of such a broader collective security policy frameworkwas made possible by changes within the international system.These changes brought about a shift from realism to idealismin various regions of the world. In Africa, the idealistic undercurrentfound expression in renewed interest in African institutionsand African solutions to African problems. The article alsodemonstrates that the CADSP will confront many challenges rangingfrom general theoretical and normative questions that bedevilcollective security arrangements elsewhere to specific issuessuch as funding and other practical implementation matters.     

Militares Empresarios: Approaches to Studying the Military as an Economic Actor

In the twentieth century, Latin American militaries developed economic industries, organised businesses, and provided security and development assistance in lieu of the state. Despite shifts to democracy and the market, the military remains an economic actor in many countries in the region. This article seeks to open debate and suggest ways to approach the subject theoretically. It examines the concept of military entrepreneurs and scholarship on the topic, and then suggests how three approaches from the domain of comparative politics – rational, structural and cultural – can be useful to develop theoretical frameworks for studying the military's role in the economy.     

Studying African interventions ‘from below’: Exploring practices,knowledges and perceptions

ABSTRACT

This article argues for a shift in researching African interventions: from a top-down study of African regional norms and institutions towards a view ‘from below’ on the actual practices of intervention and how they play out on the ground. Such a view is important in order to understand the contested politics of African interventions as well as disconnects between grand regional architectures and their imprints on the ground. In doing so, this article also seeks to link research on African interventions to the academic debate on peacebuilding and peacemaking interventions more generally. While this literature has increasingly taken the ‘local’ into account, such a localisation in terms of researching African interventions has yet to take place. This article suggests three dimensions in which a view ‘from below’ could be translated into the research agenda on African interventions.     

The writer as social thinker

Social theory in, and social theorising about, Africa has largely ignored African literature. Yet, the works of African writers constitute potential sources for the analysis of social thought and for constructing social theory in the continent. Indeed, African writers offer the kinds of abstractions, comparisons, frameworks and critical reflections on the African lifeworld – and the place of the African in the global context in the longue durée – without which it will be impossible to fully account for the nature of being, existence and reality and the nature and scope of knowledge in the African context. This introduction to the special issue on ‘Writers and Social Thought in Africa’ attempts to bring the social sciences back into conversation with literature (and vice versa) in re-articulating the philosophical dimensions of literature and the social sciences. It re-emphasises the role of African creative writers, not merely as intellectuals whose works mirror or can be used to mirror social thought, but as social thinkers themselves who engage with the nature of existence and questions of knowledge in the continent – and beyond.     

‘Things are not working now’: poverty,food insecurity and perceptions of corruption in urban Malawi

ABSTRACT

Malawi is one of the world's least urbanised countries, but its cities are growing rapidly and poverty in urban Malawi is becoming a prominent political issue. Food insecurity is a widespread manifestation of urban poverty in Africa, especially in informal settlements. This article is based on in-depth interviews with food insecure residents of Lilongwe’s informal settlements who, when asked why they were food insecure, overwhelmingly pointed to the Cashgate corruption scandal as a cause. There have been many political corruption scandals in Malawi, but the Cashgate scandal, which was revealed in September 2013 and reverberated throughout the political culture, has been among the most prominent and consequential of these scandals. The article seeks to contribute to literature on the political dimensions of urban food security in Africa while also presenting a way of understanding corruption from the point of view of vulnerable people whose lives have been directly and indirectly affected.     

Parsing Pegasus: An Infrastructural Approach to the Relationship between Technology and Swiss Security Politics

How do technologies matter for security politics? This article introduces the kind of arguments an infrastructural approach would focus its answer on. It illustrates how the approach would work by focussing on how the spyware Pegasus developed by the Israeli company NSO matters for Swiss security politics. It follows the infrastructural approach showing how and why it would tend to three things primarily: the politics of the infrastructures Pegasus is inscribed in, the politics of the processes of infrastructuring the software generates and the infrapolitics that sustain and transform these processes and infrastructures. The article also discusses the strengths and weaknesses of infrastructural approaches, underlining that since they are relational, processual and radically open epistemologically and ontologically, infrastructural approaches are suitable for opening new agendas, re‐problematising and re‐imagining the politics of security technologies. They are less suited for studies premised on a fixed understanding of the politics of security technology.     

Peril and promise: a survey of India's strategic relationship with Central Asia

This article outlines the growing importance of India's relations with the Central Asian region. In particular, it explores security, economic, and cultural dimensions of the relationship. Important considerations for India in dealing with Central Asia include terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, energy security, and new export markets. Of equal gravity, however, is the nature of great power competition in the heart of Asia. The argument presented here is that India's relations with Central Asia are calculated to gain strategic depth in the region. However, relationships with Pakistan, the United States, and the Asian great powers tend to constrain these ambitions. The future direction of India's strategic relationships with Central Asia remains fluid.     

The security culture of the ECOWAS: origins,development and the challenge of child trafficking

This article explores the relationship between the security culture of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and how it has responded to transnational challenges in West Africa. To do so, it provides an overview of how the ideas, norms and principles that constitute the embryonic security culture of ECOWAS have evolved historically. Against this backdrop the article focuses on how the regional organisation has dealt with a specific contemporary security challenge: child trafficking. The concluding part of the article seeks to explain ECOWAS's collective action on child trafficking with reference to the region's different threat perceptions and security priorities. This article argues that although the decisions and policies of ECOWAS on child trafficking are influenced by certain shared ideas, norms and principles, a breakdown of collective political will and continuing differences on the key security referents and appropriate approaches to the security of individuals have led ECOWAS member states to fail in effectively addressing this particular transnational security challenge.     

Whatever happened to the rare earths weapon? Critical materials and international security in Asia

In 2008, rare earth minerals (REMs) shot to the top of the international agenda. When China began restricting exports of these critical materials, many claimed it was threatening a “REMs weapon” against the US and Japan. Yet by 2014, the crisis had quickly abated, as China shelved its policies in the face of pressure from consumer governments. This article examines why REMs emerged – and then quickly disappeared – as a threat to international security in Asia. It first conceptualizes the geopolitics of critical materials, before analyzing the politics of the REMs crisis between Japan, China, and the US. It argues that China’s ability to use REMs for diplomatic coercion was inherently weak and is unlikely to pose a similar threat to international security in future years.     

Pursuing Post-democratisation: The Resilience of Politics by Public Security in Contemporary South Korea

This article analyses the disputed election of President Park Geun-hye and her administration’s confrontation of left-nationalist politicians and other social movements during her first year in office. We argue that the Park administration’s policies resonate with contemporary discussions of “post-democratisation,” a process whereby social rights are increasingly subordinated to market logics and state power insulated from popular challenges. Under the conservative governments of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, this process has been animated by a mode of confrontation known in South Korea as “politics by public security.” This politics targets social conflict and political dissent as threats to national security and has involved both illegal interventions by state institutions – such as the 2012 electoral interference by state agencies including the National Intelligence Service – and a cultural politics that affirms but revises the narrative of Korean democratisation by obfuscating the nature of the democracy movement and by attempting to restore the honour of conservative forces associated with former dictatorships. In order to better understand this conjuncture, we explore its origin within a tacit alliance between both former public security prosecutors-cum-conservative politicians and a movement of conservative intellectuals known as the New Right.     

‘When we have nothing we all eat grass’: debt,donor dependence and the food crisis in Malawi, 2001 to 2003

In 2002, Malawi faced a devastating food crisis, an event in which hundreds of people died of hunger, while over a thousand succumbed to a country-wide cholera epidemic. By June of that year, over 3.2 million people needed emergency food aid, one-third of Malawi's population. This article assesses the crisis through the lens of donor–government relations. Beginning with the restructuring of the agricultural sector under a World Bank-sponsored structural adjustment programme, a process that discouraged food production by small-holder farmers, the article explains how the Malawian government's reliance on external sources of funding, and its deteriorating relations with key international creditors, rendered it impotent in the face of the oncoming crisis. Having sold its strategic grain reserve (SGR) to service mounting debts, the government could not rein in a food price spiral that peaked in March 2002. Allegations of financial irregularities surrounding the sale of the SGR served to make matters worse. The United States, Britain, Denmark and the European Union cancelled direct development funding and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank suspended Malawi from the Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative. With limited access to credit, the Government of Malawi could neither re-stock its food reserves nor fund emergency imports in time to mitigate the worst effects of the crisis. Relief aid was further delayed by disagreements between the government and key donors and aid agencies regarding genetically modified (GM) food. While accepting Amartya Sen's basic entitlements framework – the 2002 crisis was one of pricing and access rather than absolute shortages of food – the article posits the following theoretical argument: in the context of highly indebted poor countries, it is a government's relationship with its principal donors and creditors that determines the outcome of food crises by shaping the policy responses available both leading up to and during the event.     

Climate change: Double-edged sword for African trade and development

Abstract

African governments face increasing pressure from major export destinations, primarily former colonial and slave-owning countries, to be climate change compliant. This will certainly be on display at the upcoming December 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, which will seek to strengthen climate change rules agreed on in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, and adopt new protocols on global climate change regulation. Climate change is a double-edged sword: on one side it is hitting Africa's agricultural sector with increased droughts, floods, extreme frost and wildfires; and on the other, African governments are being forced to respond to stringent regulatory regimes imposed by international export destinations. Currently, the per capita greenhouse gas emissions from the highly industrialised nations – the North – is estimated to be four times that of Africa and the rest of the developing world. Twin research questions were investigated in this article: (1) to what extent does climate change impact on African trade and development, and (2) how can African governments stay on a path of sustained trade and development in this era of climate change? The article argues that Africa's survival in these times of climate change compliance rests on a shift to greater intra-African trade, as individual nations move towards cleaner and more organic technologies to become full-fledged partners in the international climate change regulatory regime.     

Jan Christian Smuts (1870–1950) in Context: An Answer to Mazower and Morefield

This article engages with the recent scholarship of Mark Mazower and Jeanne Morefield regarding the South African and Commonwealth statesman Jan Christian Smuts (1870–1950), and in particular with their contention that Smuts was preoccupied with issues of racial superiority, and that this was his main motivator in matters of politics, both internationally and domestically. However, during his lifetime Smuts did not see the ‘Native question’ in the form in which it manifested from the 1950s onwards. It is therefore unfair and inaccurate to over-emphasise the racial question when writing about Smuts. Any historical account of Smuts must keep at least one eye on what Smuts could not have foreseen and must place Smuts in the context of his own time. Progression from smaller to greater wholes – one white nation instead of two language sections; a united South Africa instead of divided colonies and republics; membership of self-governing Dominions in a single British Commonwealth, and membership of international organisations, in particular the League of Nations, and later the United Nations – these were the ends to which Smuts’ energies were unreservedly devoted throughout his career. This is the correct lens through which to view Smuts’ liberal credentials.     

Shrinking democratic space? Crisis of consensus and contentious politics in Uganda

Previously considered a reforming and promising African country, economically and politically, Uganda has in recent years suffered substantial shrinkage of democratic space. This article argues that two factors have been crucial: the gradual breakdown of minimum political consensus forged under a ‘broad-based’ government which climaxed in a relatively progressive constitution in 1995 and, second, the security imperative accentuated by the war on terror. These two are compounded by the exigencies of incumbent president Museveni’s determination to rule for life, the result being erosion of basic democratic institutions, securitisation of politics, criminalisation of political competition and upsurge in contentious politics.     

The 50th Anniversary of The Civic Culture

This article traces the origins of the concept of political culture within the study of comparative politics. After revisiting the circumstances under which it developed, the article highlights some of the key factors that set it apart from other studies in its era – its theoretical exploration of stable democracy, its systematically comparative focus and its use of sample surveys of public opinion. The article shows how these factors were refined and improved in subsequent work on political equality. Overall, it concludes that the basic formulation of The Civic Culture – of congruence between mass attitudes and the type of political system – will be retained and will continue to make a mark upon the future trajectory of comparative research on public opinion.     

Africa and its Diaspora: The principal reciprocal benefits to be derived from the amended Constitutive Act of the African Union

Abstract

Under article 3(q) (Objectives) of the Protocol on Amendments to the Constitutive Act of the African Union, we read the following: ‘invite and encourage the full participation of the African Diaspora as an important part of our continent, in building the African Union (AU)’. According to the AU, ‘The African Diaspora are peoples of African descent and heritage outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and who remain committed to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union’. Not only is this posture entirely consistent with the African development agenda and Renaissance, but it is also congruent with the recent and first-ever AU African Diaspora Summit which was convened on Friday, 25 May 2012, at the Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg. This is so because the Summit provided us with an excellent opportunity to continue to reflect on, and engage with, issues relevant to the development of the continent and, by extension, its multilingual and globally dispersed Diaspora. In this public lecture, it is argued that the current Amendment to the Constitutive Act of the AU in which the African Diaspora is now considered the sixth Region of the AU – an Amendment which has not yet been ratified by the requisite number of African states and one which might still be in need of some degree of disambiguation – provides the framework within which some fundamental and reciprocal benefits can be derived from an ongoing interaction between Africa and its Diaspora – especially its Older or Historic Diaspora. In essence, it is my contention that the principal reciprocal benefits that can accrue from this interaction between Africa and its Diaspora might best be captured in the language of pan-Africanisation and re-Africanisation respectively.     

African tourist art as tradition and product of the postcolonial exotic

ABSTRACT

Figurative art made in Central and West Africa for the global market is a form of tourist art – a category that has been plagued in art historical research by misconstrued concepts such as the authenticity of traditional/precolonial art. Following its categorisation as a commodity, studies focused on the decontextualisation of the object, thus marginalising the producing culture. In this article I investigate the role of the artist in preserving tradition and the role of the trader who, as cultural broker, exoticises the object. Since it can be argued that these are acts of decolonising, African tourist art can be regarded as a product of the postcolonial exotic, as defned by Graham Huggan (2001). Accepting the inescapability of postcoloniality, tourist art can be repositioned as a successful attempt to preserve and promote African cultural traditions and identity in the new era.