Imagining Europe: political identity and British television coverage of the European economy

The article considers European economic news coverage on British television and its relationship with the UK public's perceptions of and identity with Europe. Stress is placed on the symbolic content of news about Europe; stories about the economic entitlements offered to citizens within the European Union; and portrayal of material benefits or losses for Britain. The results suggest that coverage offers mixed signals about Europe. As yet, they offer an unlikely platform for the development in the United Kingdom of European solidarity or identity. The results are assessed in the light of the way journalists approach political issues. The implications for statistical modelling of the media's relationship with attitudes towards Europe are also considered.     

Berl Katznelson and the theory and practice of revolutionary constructivism

This study examines the effects of the first globalization on the late period Ottoman economy as well as the impact of the second globalization on the Turkish economy for the last three decades. Since the demand of Western industrial countries for Ottoman agricultural products was high, the production and export of such goods increased. Improved terms of trade had some positive short term impact on the exporting agricultural sector, but resulted in a massive deindustrialization all around the Empire. Again during the second globalization, Turkish foreign trade has increased, and a few manufacturing sectors have shown improvements because of the global competitive forces. However, Turkish agriculture has suffered, and trade and current account deficits have grown persistently, with foreign debt displaying certain similarities with the infamous Ottoman public debt.     

Liberal International Theory and Imagining the End of the Cold War

Liberal international theory foresaw neither the end of the east–west rivalry nor the fall of the Soviet Union. However, from the 1960s up through the 1980s, several liberal international theorists put forward insightful analyses of the evolution of the cold war, its changing importance in world affairs and the problems that increasingly confronted the Soviet Union. Well before the fall of the Berlin Wall, several liberal international writers sensed that the cold war was abating, that this abatement was important for world politics and that the Soviet Union was having serious problems in maintaining its status as a superpower with an Eastern European empire.     

Imagining globalisation: The world and nation in Chinese communist party ideology

The study of migrant workers in Hong Kong has given attention to Filipinas. There has been just one published study of Thais in Hong Kong, despite the fact that they are a significant minority, and about half of them are domestic workers. This article presents the results of a survey of Thai workers, assessing a range of issues: scale of migration for work, remittances, roles and aspirations in Hong Kong, and perceptions of work. The survey indicated that the Thais interviewed were reasonably satisfied with their life in Hong Kong. While most are involved in “low status” activities, Thais appear to do better than Indonesian migrant workers in terms of the wages and conditions they achieve, and report less abuse. In broader terms, migrant labour is one option amongst many for working class Thais seeking better incomes but seldom achieving upward class mobility].     

Living in the Marikana world: The state,capital and society

Abstract

The ‘Marikana massacre’ that happened on 16 August 2012 at Lonmin mine near Rustenburg in the North-West province of South Africa, in which the South African police shot dead 34 mineworkers for protesting against low wages and other unbearable employment and/or living conditions, cannot be understood as merely an accidental event. It may therefore be useful to view the massacre as one of those tragedies that dramatises, in visible ways, the generally hellish conditions which the peoples of the non-Western world have come to endure ever since the advent of Western modernity. The ‘voyages of discovery’ undertaken by figures such as Christopher Columbus after 1492 marked the commencement of a world system characterised by a Western-centred modernity whose ‘darker side’ inflicted hellish conditions on the non-Western subject, while its ‘brighter side’ in the West saw positive developments – from the 16^th-century ‘rights of people’ to the 18^th-century ‘rights of man’, up to the late-20^th-century ‘human rights’. This article is a decolonial critique on the Marikana massacre and seeks to explain how the modern world system has, since its advent in 1492 as global power structure, been producing a series of ‘Marikana-like’ conditions and events on the part of the non-Western subject that underlies its hierarchical arrangement. The article's point of departure is that rather than understand the Marikana massacre as a unique event or accident, it can better be characterised as a sign of the non-Western subject's subjection to Western-centred modernity. The article explicates how the modern South African state and capital are part of the same ‘colonial power matrix’ (Quijano 2000a), hence the two were bound to be on the same side against labour during the Marikana massacre.     

Imagining Aboriginal Nations: Early Nineteenth Century Evangelicals on the Australian Frontier and the “Nation” Concept

This article evaluates the extent that Aboriginal societies in early nineteenth century Australia were known by Europeans coming into early contact with them as Aboriginal nations rather than as tribes. The study demonstrates that early nineteenth century Evangelicals saw the Aboriginal societies that they encountered on the Australian frontier as nations because the Evangelicals’ view of the world was based on that found in their Bible, in which it is described how God had divided the world up into different nations. The article draws the conclusion that seeing Aboriginal people as nations was common among the Evangelicals. However, the practice of mapping and delineating individual Aboriginal nations was limited to a few Evangelicals, such as George Augustus Robinson and Edward Parker, who had acquired an intimate knowledge of Aboriginal culture.     

Negotiating state and society: the normative informal economies of Central Asia and the Caucasus

ABSTRACT

This special issue introduces new research on informal markets and trade in Central Asia and the Caucasus. The research presented here was conducted in Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as Beijing, Guangzhou, Yiwu and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China. The following eight articles illustrate how informal markets and trade in Central Asia and the Caucasus provided spaces for people across the region to negotiate state and society in the last three decades; the articles also suggest that informality should be seen as constitutive of a normative order for polities in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Informal markets and trade in Central Asia rest on three factors: the inability of the state to measure commercial transactions; markets and trade becoming places from which citizens built personalized networks that required individualized networking and oral agreements based on social relations, particularly trust; and markets being embedded within states in which clientelism frequently thrives.     

Civil society and state-centred struggles

This article is about civil society and state-centred struggles in contemporary Zimbabwe. I first identify and outline three current understandings of civil society. Two understandings (one Liberal, one Radical) are state-centric and exist firmly within the logic of state discourses and state politics. A third understanding, also Radical, is society-centric and speaks about politics existing at a distance from the state and possibly beyond the boundaries of civil society. This civil society-state discussion frames the second section of the article, which looks specifically at Zimbabwe. It details civil society as contested terrain (from the late 1990s onwards) within the context of a scholarly debate about agrarian transformation and political change. This debate, which reproduces (in theoretical garb) the key political society (or party) fault-lines within Zimbabwean society, has taken place primarily within the restricted confines of state-centred discourses.