The governance of global security and development: convergence,divergence and coherence

This paper discusses the gaps in the present international system that in the final analysis threaten the objectives of conflict management. It asks if there is the interest and institutional will within the international community to close such gaps. It poses this challenge from the perspective of coherence. As noted in companion pieces to this study, the concept of coherence has at least four inter-related and complementary dimensions, i.e. internal, whole of government, harmonisation and alignment.     

Post-Soviet universities as development in practice: local experience and global lessons

The university holds a privileged place as the site of knowledge production in social development. Simultaneously, traditions of pedagogy drawing from the liberal arts have evolved within Northern/Western post-secondary educational systems which claim to create citizens through developing the skills of freedom; this claim was central to interventions in post-Soviet university reform projects. The author's university development and reform experiences in the former Soviet Union show that a depoliticised liberal arts pedagogy in fact reinforced authoritarian practices, and the promise of a liberal arts pedagogy as an emancipatory project remains an ongoing global task of critical knowledge practices.

Universités post-soviétiques en tant que développement dans la pratique : expériences locales et leçons mondiales

L' université occupe une place privilégiée comme site de production de connaissances dans le développement social. Dans le même temps, des traditions pédagogiques s'inspirant des arts libéraux ont évolué dans le cadre des systèmes d'éducation post-secondaires du Nord et de l'Occident qui affirment créer des citoyens en développant les compétences de la liberté ; cette affirmation a été centrale dans les interventions dans les projets de réforme universitaire post-soviétiques. Les expériences de l'auteur du développement et de la réforme des universités dans l'ancienne Union soviétique montrent qu'une pédagogie dépolitisée des arts libéraux a en fait renforcé les pratiques autoritaires, et la promesse d'une pédagogie d'arts libéraux comme projet émancipatoire reste une tâche mondiale en cours constituée de pratiques critiques d'acquisition de connaissances.

Universidades na era pós-soviética enquanto desenvolvimento na prática: experiência local e lições globais

A universidade ocupa um lugar privilegiado como lugar de produção de conhecimento na área de desenvolvimento social. Simultaneamente, tradições de pedagogia extraídas das artes liberais têm evoluído dentro dos sistemas educacionais pós-ensino médio no hemisfério norte / ocidental, que afirmam criar cidadãos através do desenvolvimento de qualificações para liberdade; esta afirmação foi central para as intervenções nos projetos de reforma da universidade na era pós-soviética. As experiências da autora sobre desenvolvimento e reforma da universidade na antiga União Soviética mostram que uma pedagogia de artes liberais despolitizada, na verdade, reforçaram práticas autoritárias, e a promessa de uma pedagogia de artes liberais enquanto projeto emancipatório permanece uma tarefa global contínua de práticas importantes de conhecimento.

Las universidades postsoviéticas para el desarrollo en la práctica: experiencias locales y mundiales

La universidad desempeña un importante papel en la producción de conocimientos para el desarrollo social. Simultáneamente, se afirma que la pedagogía utilizada en las humanidades de los sistemas escolares universitarios del Norte o de Occidente fomenta la ciudadanía porque desarrolla herramientas dirigidas a la libertad; los proyectos de reforma de la universidad postsoviética se basaron en esta idea. Las experiencias de la autora en el desarrollo y la reforma universitaria de la antigua Unión Soviética muestran que la pedagogía despolitizada en las humanidades más bien fortaleció prácticas autoritarias; la esperanza de contar con una pedagogía emancipadora en las humanidades continúa construyéndose a nivel mundial mediante el ejercicio de prácticas de conocimiento crítico.     

Regionalisation, inter-regional cooperation and global governance

The contradiction between trans-boundary issues largely driven by globalisation and conventional authority based on sovereign state leads to the problem of global governance. Regionalisation emerges as a process in which nation states within geographic proximity take collective measures to cope with problems of global governance. With the increasing tendencies of regional cooperation, a new issue thus arises as to the interaction among regions. In fact, the more regionalized the world, the more necessary, enabled and willing for regions to construct connections with each other. Inter-regionalism and trans-regionalism therefore become a further step which regional blocks take to build one layer in the hierarchy of global governance. The paper takes the Asia–Europe Meeting as the case to analyze the above thesis. In the first section, it presents the observation that the global system is characterized with regionalisation, then analyzes the coordination problems facing regions interdependent upon one another and then formulates a modified framework for analysis of the Asia–Europe Meeting. In the second section of rational design, it analyzes the process in which Europe and Asia rationally establish the cooperation structure of ASEM as a means to tackle the coordination issues between the two regions. In the third section of governing globalisation, it discusses the effects and implications of ASEM’s contribution towards global governance mainly in ways of rationalizing international relations and strengthening regional identity in the era of globalisation.

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Inter-disciplinarity,development studies,and development practice1

The article primarily seeks to show the interconnectedness of diverse academic disciplines and their crucial role in development practice. It sheds light on the meanings of development-related concepts and seeks to delineate between the four inter-related concepts of multi-, inter-, trans-, and cross-disciplinarity. It argues that while inter-disciplinarity is desirable for a broad-based discipline such as Development Studies, the appropriateness of the concept when juxtaposed with trans-disciplinarity seems somewhat inadequate. Buttressing the importance of the contributions of all disciplines and of course development initiatives to Development Studies, case studies of failed water and agricultural projects – which never incorporated vital and cognate expertise – in the South are, thus, provided in the discourse.     

The elite press,the global system,and foreign news attention

This article presents summary findings from a content analysis of the foreign news coverage of four U.S. elite newspapers. Overall, the pattern of foreign news attention in the elite American press tends to reflect the “relative distances” between the United States and other national news targets. The more proximate another society is to the United States along economic, political, and cultural dimensions, the more likely the U.S. press will perceive its activities to be newsworthy. The country‐by‐country distribution of foreign news largely corresponds to existing hierarchical divisions within the international system. The reported foreign news is concentrated among the economically‐advanced, politically‐prominent, and culturally‐western societies; that is, the pattern of foreign news coverage is western‐oriented, big‐power dominated, and Eurocentric.     

NATO, APEC and ASEM: triadic interregionalism and global order

Among the three core regions in today's world, Europe, North America and East Asia, interregional arrangements have been developed in various forms. Transatlantic relations were institutionalized in the form of a security alliance (NATO), although not in the field of economic relations. The transpacific relations were institutionalized in the economic field with the creation of APEC in late 1980s. The Asia–Europe Meeting (ASEM) emerged in 1996, with an aim to strengthen the ‘weak leg’ in the triadic interregional relationship. Although the three sets of triadic interregional arrangements display discernable differences, they tend to share some identical functions, such as balancing, governance and identity building. Interregionalism rests on and promotes multi-polarization, complementing the multilateral system, and could be seen as an indispensable element of the world order, which may be better characterized as a multi-level governance system.     

Civil society,the state,and the limits to global civil society

Just as domestic civil society is widely regarded as serving the greater common good of a national democratic political community, global civil society is also promoted as a vehicle through which a host of humanity's ills may be remedied. This article argues that the pinning of such high hopes on global civil society is mistaken, for its proponents have failed to recognise that global civil society is insufficiently analogous to domestic civil society for it to be a similarly positive force. At the national level, civil society functions in a balanced interdependence with the state. At the global level there is no equivalent of the state to provide the necessary scrutiny and regulation that at the national level prevents constituents of domestic civil society from committing injustices.     

Gender,security and development

This paper examines the links amongst the concepts of gender, security and development. In particular, it seeks to examine how each of the concepts can be critically understood independently and as interrelated. Through understanding each of these concepts as socially and discursively constructed, contingent and fluid, the paper examines the consequences of such a theoretical framework for key issues facing gender, security and development practitioners: Trafficking, Resolution 1325 and HIV/AIDS.     

Trade liberalisation,rural poverty,and the environment: global discussions and local cases

Much has been researched and said about the impacts of international trade liberalisation at the country level; but little is known about its social and environmental local-level impacts. Since national averages can mask the existence of winners and losers, national-level studies may be a poor guide to addressing the plight of the rural poor and the environment that are at the core of the agenda of the social and conservation movement. This article compares the international trade-liberalisation debate with the findings of local rural-based case studies in seven countries, co-ordinated by WWF and the World Bank during 2004–2007. It discusses some actions that the conservation and social movement could take to improve the discussion and the practice of trade liberalisation, poverty alleviation, and environmental conservation.     

Proto-norms and global media ethics

Abstract

Normativity is a problem of modernity. Relativism has emerged with the negation of moral universals. Clifford Christians consistently argues for the concept of proto-norms as a workable basis for normative ethics applied to media practices that operate on a global scale. Christians declares philosopher Charles Taylor to lie in the background of his theorising, but seldom gives a hint as to how Taylor’s thought influences his own. There appears to be sufficient congruence between Christians’ thinking about proto-norms and the articulation of hypergoods, strong evaluation and persons in Taylor’s philosophical anthropology to consider this to be the influence, among other sources Christians draws on. Of particular interest is Taylor’s insistence that persons always exist in normative moral space as an inescapable horizon of existence. The article explores some aspects of Taylor’s thought that may shed light on what proto-norms are and how they may be applied in the quest for a viable global media ethics in an age when moral relativism seems to be the media's only ethical principle.     

Maat and human communication: Supporting identity,culture and history without global domination

Abstract

This article discusses the ancient Egyptian ideal of maat, or moral order, and its implications for human communication. It is argued that the communicator must always be in search of harmony, balance, order, justice, truth, righteousness and reciprocity. Maat opens up possibilities that go beyond tolerance for the Other, towards profound respect.     

Technological capability,NGOs, and small-scale development projects

Technological capability underpins economic development, but analysis of interviews with workers in international, UK-based NGOs suggests that it is rarely addressed explicitly when considering support for development work. Instead, the core values of these NGOs tend to determine their attitudes towards technology, with the result that their impact on the development of technological capability can be contradictory. This is borne out by analysis of eleven small-scale enterprises in Zimbabwe which receive NGO support. Some do have a high potential to develop technological capabilities, but others appear trapped in a vicious circle of low skills, poor entrepreneurial qualities, and an overwhelmingly hostile economic environment. NGOs need to develop appropriate technological criteria in order to exert a positive impact on the development projects they support.     

Academic-community collaboration,gender research,and development: pitfalls and possibilities

Collaboration has become a watchword for development practitioners and theorists. Yet collaboration or partnerships between academics and community-based researchers and activists have often proved difficult. This is particularly true for partnerships with smaller, grassroots community researchers, who are generally less resourced than their academic partners. This paper focuses on such partnerships in gender research, with the aim of reflecting on past problems as well as successes in order to develop strategies for making such projects more truly collaborative, rather than a minefield of broken promises and unspoken (and sometimes spoken) resentments.     

Populist polarization and the slow death of democracy in Ecuador

This article analyses how the interactions between a strong populist government in Ecuador and a weak, divided, and inefficient internal opposition in a context of weak liberal institutions could lead to what Guillermo O'Donnell termed “the slow death of democracy”. Rafael Correa was elected with a substantive project of democratization understood as economic redistribution and social justice. His administration got rid of neoliberal policies and decaying traditional political parties, while simultaneously co-opting social movements, regulating civil society, and colonizing the public sphere. Because the judiciary was subordinated to Correa, social movement activists, journalists, and media owners could not use the legal system to resist Correa's crack down of civil society and regulation of the privately owned media. They took their grievances to supranational organizations like the Organization of American States. When these organizations stepped in to challenge Correa, his government denounced imperialist intervention in his nation's internal affairs, and advocated for the creation of new supranational institutions without US presence.     

Capitalism,uneven and combined development and the transhistoric

What is the status of Trotsky's notion of uneven and combined development within Marxist theory and how might it be fruitfully employed by Marxists in international relations? Is uneven and combined development a transhistoric general abstraction or does it need rooting in the relations, processes, tendencies and counter-tendencies of a particular mode of production? This article rejects Justin Rosenberg's recently drawn conclusion that uneven and combined development is usefully understood as a transhistoric general abstraction that potentially offers the basis of a transhistoric theory of the international. Instead it questions the value of transhistoric categories for Marxist theory and pursues the argument that uneven and combined development is best understood within the relations, processes and tendencies of the capitalist mode of production, arguing that capitalist social relations and political forms are historically unique in their capacity to generate both combination and unevenness.     

Taoism and the concept of global security

Global security is typically discussed in the rationalist termsused to articulate contemporary modernism. To restrict analysisto such articulations, however, is to accept the limits anddistortions that this way of being and knowing creates. Thisarticle seeks to transgress these limits, and to compensatefor these distortions. It does so by discussing the conceptof global security from a Taoist perspective. Initially, itmaps what global security means to rationalists. Then it discusseswhat Taoism entails, and compares Taoist and rationalist epistemologies.Then it compares Taoist and rationalist thinking about globalsecurity, defined first in more general, ‘human’security terms, and second in more particular, politico-strategicterms. It concludes by highlighting the significance of theTaoist concept of wu-wei (‘no unnatural action’),and of Taoism as one way in which to contextualise the rationalistconstruction of global security.