Ecologies of relation: post-slavery,post-apartheid,and rethinking race across the Atlantic in Zakes Mda’s Cion

This article will argue that Zakes Mda’s 2007 novel Cion stages a dialog, one where two “Souths” – South Africa and the American South – speak to one another and give a critical voice to an under-acknowledged history of transatlantic discursive exchange on race and racial governance. Mda’s fictional South African critique, of an America still struggling with the cultural and political legacies of slavery, gestures towards a history of exchange between the two countries that in many ways is representative of a more global dialog on racial segregation during the first half of the twentieth century – of which both southern (US) segregation and apartheid are seminal examples. Moreover, this article explores various conceptualizations of race as well as the governance of racial relations as they have been articulated through ecological imaginaries, and especially between South Africa and the Southern United States over the course of the twentieth century. In this article, I argue that not only can apartheid (as well as pre-apartheid segregation) be rethought of as part of a global conversation on race and thus less as a South African anomaly, but also that the United States through its examples of various racialist technologies was highly influential across the colonial and apartheid worlds.     

Economic Governance Beyond State and Market: Islamic Capital Markets in Southeast Asia

ABSTRACT

Islamic finance has become an integral part of the financial systems of the Muslim-majority countries of Southeast Asia. At the same time, Southeast Asia has witnessed the emergence of new capital market governance practices and arrangements that are both multi-scalar and multi-sited. This article suggests that rather than only looking at the scale and rescaling of capital market governance in the region, more attention needs to be paid to the shifting balances between regulatory expertise, market practice and societal expectations. Indeed, for governance practices to be considered effective, they have to straddle at times competing demands of authority and legitimacy. This dynamic is nowhere as visible as in the case of Islamic finance, which explicitly involves Shariah experts, trained in Islamic law, in its governance structures. This article explores the novel forms of governance to which this new market has given rise. It argues that Islamic finance – rather than the product of privately held beliefs – has become increasingly bound up with the state apparatus. This facilitates the embedding of Islamic financial principles and ethical concerns throughout capital markets in the region. Yet, Islamic finance has also become increasingly submerged within national development and competitiveness agendas.     

Democracy,development and chieftaincy along South Africa's ‘Platinum Highway’: some emerging issues

South Africa's ‘Platinum Highway’ (Generally referred to as ‘the platinum belt’.) – ‘a 150?km continuation of platinum group metals (PGM)-bearing reefs’ [Havenstein, R. (2004). “The Platinum Highway – Where Does It Lead?” Accessed May 10, 2011. http://web.up.ac.za/sitefiles/file/EBIT-Innovate/The_Platinum_Highway-where_does_it.pdf, 1] – has ushered in a new era of considerable accumulation of mineral revenues by a few traditional authorities on whose communal lands platinum ore is extracted. The Royal Bafokeng community in the North West province stands as an epitome of this phenomenon. However, not much is known about the relationships at local governance level, particularly the interface of mineral wealth and community development. Adopting the Bafokeng community as an empirical case in this article, I argue that, despite some observed benefits, vast mineral wealth is likely to deepen tensions between local power holders within the sphere of rural local governance, thus paradoxically hampering development, particularly in a context where traditional authorities are the architects and champions of resource-engendered community development.     

The bazaar in ruins: rent and fire in Barakholka,Almaty

ABSTRACT

Since 2013, there have been multiple fires in bazaars in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Most of these fires have occurred in Barakholka, the largest bazaar in Central Asia, known for wholesaling in apparel, shoes and low-quality household and office supplies. Ownership of Barakholka is opaque. Using recurrent Barakholka fires as my point of departure, this article contributes to scholarship by describing how the clearing of old bazaars is followed by new property developments and the imposition of new rent regimes. In doing so, I argue that fire – a form of ruination that not only destroys property but also severs networks and people's relationship to a place – is illustrative of how the bazaar, as a new institution within an emerging post-Soviet market economy, was moulded by private interests, and repeated, often ruinous assertions of control over property. I also argue that this process was embedded in a larger political economy that sought to ‘civilize’ the earlier marketplaces. This article is based on ethnographic interviews and repeated visits to the Barakhola between 2016 and 2018, and media accounts of the fires.     

Debating Latin American Aesthetic Theory. Beatriz Sarlo on the Autonomy of Art

For quite some time, Beatriz Sarlo has been at the forefront of the debate over the possibility of ascertaining the aesthetic value of art. The Argentine critic's dismissal of value‐neutral approaches to art has been often criticised as a repackaging of the aestheticist tradition inherited from the European Enlightenment. Using Sarlo's own critical practice – a selection of Sarlo's key texts on Argentine literature written since 1980 – as a testing ground for her theoretical insights I argue in favour of re‐evaluating Sarlo's project as an aporetic discourse with positive implications for cultural politics that should be refined rather than abandoned.     

Are European Elections Second-Order Elections for Everyone?

Second-order election (SOE) theory has been used to explain voting behaviour in European elections. Voters believe that less is at stake in some elections and some voters hence tend to cast a protest vote. However, most studies on the topic have focused on the demand side of SOEs – i.e. on the voters – and have ignored or only partially tackled the supply side – i.e. the strategic behaviour of parties – and excluded small and marginal parties (SMPs). However, SMPs may have greater incentive to seriously compete in SOEs. The 2019 European Parliament elections in Germany were particularly interesting to SMPs as there was no voting threshold, thereby increasing the chances of SMPs. To capture whether SMPs view European elections as first-order elections and therefore expend more resources than parliamentary parties on these elections, I analysed campaign expenditures and manifestos. Results indicate that SMPs act within a rational actor framework, though not unequivocally.     

Politik als Markt

In this article, I argue that instead of speculating about voter preference, political actors observe each other in a social role structure in the public sphere. Historically developed social cleavages define the positions in this role structure. The public sphere serves as a stage on which political actors define their roles in relation to each other. I find empirical evidence for this market model by investigating the debate surrounding a reference to God in the European Constitution, a debate that does not fit into the cleavage lines. If the market model for political behavior holds true, political actors won’t be able to articulate positions in the absence of cleavages defining political behavior. In this case, the debate will show symptoms of narrative uncertainty. Consequently political actors will produce narrative chaos and relinquish their role in public communication. As a consequence, they will remain in silence.     

How international competition reinforces corporate governance and product market strategies: The case of Bosch

This paper analyses the impact of intensified international competition on the German corporate governance system by investigating corporate governance and corporate strategy at Bosch. Being a non-listed but highly internationalised company, the case study of Bosch allows one to disentangle the effects of financial and product market globalisation. In order to assess theoretical claims about convergence of German corporate governance towards Anglo-Saxon patterns or continuing divergence – put forward by convergence theory and the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ approach – four dimensions of corporate governance and strategy are investigated: internationalisation strategy, industrial relations, portfolio policy and product market strategy. The paper argues that international competition in isolation leads to a reinforcement of traditional features of German corporate governance. It finds that Bosch has internationalised vigorously, but followed its traditional style of internationalisation, that co-management of the employees has not come under pressure, that long-pursued diversification attempts have been continued and that Bosch has deepened its product market specialisation.     

The Eurasian Economic Union: a case of reproductive integration?

The Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) appeared in January 2015 as the latest and most ambitious attempt at reconnecting the post-Soviet space. Building on the Customs Union between Belarus, Russia, and Kazakhstan (2010), and successfully extending membership to Armenia and Kyrgyzstan (2015), the EAEU not only connects a market of over 182 million people, but has the stated aim of utilizing European Union experience to achieve deep integration in a fraction of the time. Based on original fieldwork conducted in Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia, this article examines the kind of integration project currently under construction, as well as the EAEU’s ability to make a significant impact in the region. As argued, despite early achievements, the EAEU is very much limited to reproducing sovereignty rather than transforming it, marking a clear disconnect between rhetoric and reality. Moreover, when viewed from the perspective of the three “I”s – institutions, identity, and international context – even this modest reality faces significant barriers.     

Russia's energy governance transitions and implications for enhanced cooperation with China,Japan, and South Korea

A Tokyo-based economist and a noted western economic geographer, both specializing in the hydrocarbon resources of Russia, apply the framework of governance studies in an effort to gain a deeper understanding of the recent changes in the country's energy policy-making. The authors argue that, unlike the international relations paradigm prevailing in studies of Russia's energy policy, the country's multiple roles in the international energy arena (as producer, consumer, exporter, importer, and transit state) warrant a more nuanced approach, reflecting Russian energy policy's flexibility over time and diversity across space. This paper endeavors, therefore, to apply a political economy and governance perspective to an understanding of the significant changes in Russia's energy policy-making regarding its dynamic energy relations with the Northeast Asia (NEA; China, Japan, and South Korea). In exploring the complex interactions between Russia's internal energy policy-making and its emerging energy relations in NEA, the authors addresses three key questions, namely: (1) how Russia's Asian energy policy corresponds to its domestic needs, (2) how much coherence in energy governance and cooperation exists between Russia and the Northeast Asian states at the institutional and organizational levels, and (3) the extent to which Russia's expectations for increased energy cooperation with the Northeast Asian states are likely to materialize.     

Zwischen institutioneller Innovation und Reproduktion

This contribution addresses the question of whether the German corporate governance regime has changed towards the angloamerican corporate governance model in the 1990s. While most approaches within this field of research tend to exclusively focus on functionalist models, this article stresses the impact of power relations on processes of institutional change. Looking at an ambiguous and incremental transformation process, it becomes clear that the dichotomy between continuity and change is not well suited to depict the process adequately. Categories as ?hybridization“ or ?institutional layering“ seem more useful here. While market forces became more important for corporate governance in Germany, traditional mechanisms were — to some extent — reproduced simultaneously. The upshot is a hybrid corporate governance system which is located between coordinated and liberal market economies.     

Circumventing Sovereignty: Extraterritorial Sanctions Leveraging the Technologies of the Financial System

US extraterritorial sanctions are implemented with comprehensive global reach, despite allies and adversaries opposing and rejecting them as violations of international law. I argue that this staggering reach rests on more than just the central position of the US in the global financial system, as existing accounts indicate; it builds fundamentally on the financial system’s operational autonomy. Enabled by technologies such as the ‘risk‐based approach’ and automated screening procedures, this globalized network of private actors observes its regulatory environment through its own logic. It translates sanctions into risks susceptible to mitigation beyond the political system’s territorial borders, as the cases of Switzerland and the European Union show. These jurisdictions took futile measures to defend against foreign encroachment of their authority. Unless the financial system’s increased autonomy from the state system is recognized conceptually, analyses of international sanctions will remain deficient and attempts to counter their extraterritorial reach ineffective.     

The State-Legal Administration and the Politics of Redundancy

The main aim of this study was to investigate whether the competition and cultural theoretical models that have received solid empirical support in the context of Western European societies can explain anti-foreigner sentiment in post-socialist Russia as a society searching for new national identity borders. Data obtained from the third round of the European Social Survey (2006) indicate a high level of anti-foreigner sentiment in contemporary Russia – more than 60% of Russians claimed that immigrants undermine the cultural life of the country, and almost 60% claimed that immigration is bad for the economy of the country. Our multivariate analysis showed that the two sets of individual-level predictors of anti-foreigner sentiment – the socioeconomic position of individuals (as suggested by the competition model) and conservative views and ideologies (as suggested by the cultural model) – are not meaningful in predicting anti-foreigner sentiment in post-socialist Russia. The results are discussed from a comparative sociology perspective and in the context of the Russian society.     

Endogenous Versus Exogenous Rules in Water Management: An Experimental Cross-country Comparison

This paper draws on institutional and experimental economics to investigate the role of exogenous and endogenous rules in irrigation systems. The hypotheses we examine argue that despite the differences between socio-economic and political settings, (1) endogenous rule-crafting can help water users to overcome appropriation and provision dilemmas in water-scarce environments like in the East Mediterranean countries and that (2) in market-like water governance systems, institutions other than the market itself, are less influential for overcoming appropriation and provision dilemmas than in hybrid governance systems. These hypotheses are being tested comparing the results of field experiments conducted in Jordan, the Republic of Cyprus and North Cyprus with 70 farmers. Field experiments simulate asymmetric access to resources and are based on variations of the irrigation game by Cardenas et al. to model and test asymmetric distribution of investment, harvest and revenue that favours upstream users. Empirical evidence shows that externally imposed allocation rules are able to bring in more equal distribution of revenue among upstream–downstream users but is likely to reduce the volume of investment and revenue, without resolving issues of free-riding. The authors argue that given the opportunity, water users (small farmers in our experiments) are able to craft their own rules improving the overall performance of the group in terms of investment and revenue, with a parallel improvement of equity in distribution. The implications and policy relevance of such findings are briefly discussed as they contradict typical practices of top-down policy delivery in the selected cases.     

Redefining the Crisis/Redefining Democracy: Mobilising for the Right to Housing in Spain's PAH Movement

European anti-austerity movements are challenging fundamental assumptions about the role of the market and the state. In Spain, the twin claims of the movements are a demand for ‘real democracy’ and an end to austerity measures resulting from the global financial crisis. I argue that these demands are intertwined. Using critical discourse analysis, I explore the Platform of Those Affected by Mortgages' controversial escrache campaign to show how social movements actively resisting austerity measures transcend the specific issues around which they mobilise to contest hegemonic definitions of crisis and of democracy, laying the groundwork for the reconfiguration of Spain's political landscape.     

The Sinicized self: prejudice,epistemology and Uyghur perceptions of their bodies

ABSTRACT

The ‘Sinicization’ of the Uyghur world – that is, the pervasive progression of Chinese influence into it – is a familiar topic of both Uyghur complaint and academic writing on Xinjiang. In this article, I discuss the striking appearance of this same motif in reference to the Sinicization of the physical Uyghur body, and use this example to argue that the communally enforced moral separation of the Uyghur from the Chinese, and the particular understanding of history that underpins this, have epistemological consequences for how the Uyghur people see themselves and the world.     

Governing the Safety and Security of the Malacca Strait: The Nippon Foundation between States and Industry

ABSTRACT

Despite long-standing sovereignty sensitivities, the Malacca and Singapore Straits have been the site of co-operative governance and regime building. Of note is the 2007 Co-operative Mechanism of the Straits of Malacca and Singapore, characterised as a milestone achievement in regional co-operation towards improved safety and security in the Straits. Yet, well before the Co-operative Mechanism were also earlier instances of co-operation dating to the 1970s – specifically between the Straits’ littoral states under a tripartite framework and Japanese actors through the Malacca Strait Council. In addition to providing a template for the Co-operative Mechanism, these arrangements offer alternative models of governance and regime building that challenge conventional characterisations of “regional governance” – what it looks like, as well as its driving actors. This article considers the significance of these early efforts, with attention to the ways that the region’s developmental context bears on the actors, structures and processes of governance in Southeast Asia. Not only does this historical process of co-operation give expression to alternative governing arrangements composed of mixed actors and obligations, but an unconventional governance agent – the Nippon Foundation – has played an especially defining role in bringing actors to the table and substantiating the co-operative process.     

Good governance as a precondition for subsidiarity: human rights litigation in Nigeria and ECOWAS

ABSTRACT

Similar to the European Union, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) evolved gradually from little more than a customs union to a supranational organisation with sophisticated governance arrangements. As a consequence, subsidiarity has become an inevitable adjustment mechanism to align individual member state policies with objectives of the Community as a whole. In particular, since the inclusion of a protocol on good governance and democracy in 2001 an increasing number of policy areas require a delineation of competencies between state and Community organs. Moreover, the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice confines itself to the vertical application of human rights law and does not accept human rights claims against private persons since the extension of its mandate in 2005. Many cases involving the Federal Republic of Nigeria illustrate well a double procedural effect of the principle of subsidiarity in the human rights litigation within the ECOWAS legal order.     

Die Wiederherstellung des Marktsubjekts

The UK is generally considered a laboratory for styles of governance influenced by New Public Management: outsourcing, internal markets, targets, auditing. The shifts in governance style, and the new instruments that have accompanied them, were once synonymous with “Thatcherism” but have since been adopted and refined by New Labour. Early critical social scientific analyses deployed the Gramscian notion of hegemony to analyse this shift. This was followed by Foucault inspired analyses of “governmentality”. The latter focused more explicitly on the micro-level of conduct. This article follows that lead, but seeks to address the central puzzles thrown up by this experiment through Max Weber’s conception of a “bureaucratic revolution” and Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the constitution of a “market subject” via a “double movement”: a simultaneous loosening and tightening of control. The Weber-Polanyi approach allows us, we argue, to make the link more explicit between micro-level changes in the “conduct of life” (Lebensführung) and the meso-level instruments designed to bring about such a re-orientation of conduct. The article makes the case with reference to empirical material from a number of public services, notably education and health. Overall, the decisive factor is not a weakening of the state, but a change in its capacities and instruments.     

From Rebels to Rulers: The Challenges of Transition for Non-state Armed Groups in Mindanao and Myanmar

This article presents a critical comparison of the ongoing peace processes in the southern Philippines and Myanmar (Burma). It does so by examining two key armed groups: the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) on Mindanao, and the Karen National Union (KNU) in Myanmar. We identify common elements that help to explain the relative – albeit incomplete – success of these two groups in navigating their respective peace processes. The MILF and KNU are ethnonationalist armed groups struggling for self-determination against states that are experienced by ethnic minority communities as culturally alien, and economically and politically dominant. Both conflict actors are characterized by complex combinations of “greed” and “grievance” factors but nevertheless enjoy significant (albeit contested) political legitimacy among the communities they seek to represent. We explore the complex relationships between armed ethnic groups, conflict-affected communities, and civil society actors. We argue that engagement with civil society is a key element of success in the Mindanao peace process, which could be replicated in Myanmar. We examine the roles and changing nature of the state in the Philippines and Myanmar, and contrast the degrees of international involvement, as key variables in these peace processes. We observe that negotiations of comprehensive peace settlements are threatened by “the tyranny of elections” in Myanmar (2015) and the Philippines (2016), and observe the importance of including national parliaments in peace processes in a timely manner. The peace process between Manila and the MILF represents a rare example of a Muslim minority pursuing its political objectives through structured dialogue. The article focuses on the challenges faced by armed groups moving from insurgency to reinvent themselves as credible political actors and governance authorities. Our analysis draws on peace-building literature, specifically the phenomenon of “rebel governance.”