European Union civil society support and the depoliticisation of Turkish civil society

Despite growing critical literature on external funding, the link between EU funding to Turkish civil society organisations (CSOs) and their depoliticisation remains understudied. This article fills this gap. This article explores EU funds in Turkey and shows the incentives it creates for a depoliticised civil society. Drawing on an original set of interviews with 45 CSOs, this article analyses how Turkish CSOs interact with EU funding and how this support impacts on Turkish civil society. This article argues that EU funding’s short-term, activity-based, measurable outcome and visibility-oriented structure contributed to the depoliticisation of those CSOs benefited from EU funds.     

The Syrian wars of words: international and local instrumentalisations of the war on terror

Abstract

This article presents a study of the ‘wars of words’ among selected parties involved in the Syrian conflict. Based on a combination of content analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA), it examines actors’ discourses within the United Nations Security Council (2011–2015), the global arena of confrontation and international legitimisation of armed actions. Here, it investigates their instrumentalisation of the word ‘terrorism’ and the war on terror narrative, and it explores the dynamics of discursive (de)legitimisation of the use of violence in Syria. The article shows how parties instrumentalised this narrative to criminalise their enemies while legitimising their own violent actions. By doing this, the paper also offers a broader reflection on the global narrative on terrorism, and its different reception and instrumentalisation by core and peripheral actors.     

Privatising the war on drugs

A defining feature of the ‘9/11 wars’ has been the prominent role played by private military and security companies (pmsc). The growth of this market for military and security services has not gone unnoticed. Yet the role pmsc have played in supporting the US-led war on drugs has largely gone under the radar, both literally and figuratively. The aim of this article is to look at the activities of pmsc funded by the USA in Latin America, and to consider the specific consequences that arise from employing them in the field of counter-narcotics. It is argued that the use of pmsc further entrenches a costly and unsuccessful way of dealing with drugs. There is a need to move from a strict prohibitionist stance and consider alternatives to the war on drugs approach, but the use of pmsc creates another strong vested interest in maintaining an increasingly problematic and costly status quo.     

Contested war remembrance and ethnopolitical identities in Kosovo

This paper examines the relationship between political power and war remembrance by considering the way war remembrance occurs in a divided society. The purpose of this paper is to explore memory of the violent past and its uses as an ongoing arena of disputes between former adversaries and within ethnopolitical groups pushing their distinct versions of memory. Moreover, this paper examines three key aspects of the politics of remembrance: prevalent narratives, arenas of commemoration, and agencies of war remembrance, based on the case study of Kosovo. The postwar narrative and commemoration in Kosovo have evolved along ethnic lines, perpetuating antagonism and conflicting identities. Memorialization in Kosovo raises serious challenges for comprehensive transitional justice and reconciliation between these ethnic groups. The paper concludes that through appropriate civic education, critical inquiry of commemoration practices, and especially through evidence-based adaptation of the history curriculum, there is a chance to promote a culture of shared memory and to establish inclusive politics of remembrance in Kosovo, as crucial components of reconciliation and peace-building.     

Soviet war memorials and the re-construction of national and local identities in post-communist Poland

This article proposes to look afresh at the legacies of communism in urban spaces in post-1989 Poland. Specifically, it investigates the fate of Red Army monuments and explores how these public spaces have been used in the multifaceted and multileveled process of post-communist identity formation. The article suggests that Red Army monuments constitute sites for the articulation of new narratives about the country's past and future which are no longer grounded in the fundamental division between “us” (the nation) and “them” (the supporters of communism) and which are far from being fixed in the binary opposition of the banished and the embraced past. The reorganization of public memory space does not only involve contesting the Soviet past or affirming independence traditions but is rather the outcome of multilayered processes rooted in particularities of time and space. Moreover, the article argues that the dichotomy “liberator versus occupier,” often employed as a viable analytical tool by scholars investigating the post-communist memorial landscape, impedes our understanding of the role played by Soviet war memorials in the process of re-imagining national and local communities in post-1989 Eastern Europe.     

Contagious insecurity: war,SARS and global air mobility

Neglect of the cross-cutting confluences between different domains of security can lead to insular notions of global security as well as to lost opportunities for security sensitive contributions to the adjoining issue areas. This article attempts to overview the patterns of interactions during three security scenarios of early 2003: wars, as, for example, the War against Terror and the war in Iraq; pandemics such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS); and air mobility. The overview approach is meant to draw attention to the synoptic interplay between global security scenarios that go beyond the usual disciplinary and conceptual boundaries separating security studies, global health and mobility infrastructures. How does the context of war amplify other security concerns? What were the synoptic interactions within temporally situated ‘bundles’ of security-related concerns? How did global air mobility politics and pandemic politics construct their combined security problematiques? The main research findings point to the relatively unique yet momentary qualities of the emergent nexus of security scenarios. This sheds light on the difficulties of managing pandemic diseases as purely epidemiological processes, on the complexities of securing global air mobility networks, and on how tense situations are prone to lead to speculative projections as people's fears find different somatic, material and political manifestations. The primary material for the textual analysis is provided by World Health Organization's SARS chronology.     

Funding,capabilities and the use of child soldiers

Recent years have seen increased scholarly attention given to the issue of child soldiering. Primarily dedicated to the decision-making calculus of rebel groups, this body of work has generally emphasised supply-side versus demand-side arguments. We contribute to this growing literature by explicitly investigating a previously untested aspect of the latter. Prior scholarship has made vague references to a potential association between economic endowments and child soldiering, including natural resource wealth, but scant empirical attention has been given. We argue that the specific type of endowment has important consequences for the decision to utilise child soldiers. We argue access to and exploitation of lootable natural resources (e.g. gemstones) to be especially likely to promote the use of child soldiers due to their ease of access, the low skills required to harness them and the heightened likelihood that groups will become more profit-oriented. A systematic cross-national investigation of rebel groups provides robust evidence that lootable resources such as diamonds and gemstones are strongly associated with the use of children, while non-lootable resources such as oil are not.     

Humanitarianism,civil society and the Rohingya refugee crisis in Bangladesh

Abstract

This paper reflects on responses to Bangladesh’s Rohingya refugee crisis in the weeks that followed the increased numbers of Rohingya refugees who arrived from Myanmar after 24 August 2017. Drawing on literature on the local and international dimensions of humanitarianism, and the analytical lens of performance, it explores narratives of helping in relation to the shifting character of Bangladesh’s civil society, changing expressions of local and international religious sentiments, and the importance of understanding both formal and informal responses historically in the context of Bangladesh’s own experiences as a country born from a crisis in which citizens became refugees fleeing state-sponsored violence.     

Hearing the voice of Donbas: art and literature as forms of cultural protest during war

This paper analyzes literary, visual, and street art works of writers and artists from Eastern Ukraine produced during 2014. Two Donetsk artists, Serhii Zakharov and Anzhela Dzherikh, and two Luhansk writers, Serhii Zhadan and Olena Stepova, play with the myth of the proletarian Donbas, on the one hand, and debunk the popular perception of Donbas people as being in consent with the politics of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, on the other. They explore familiar tropes and images of Donbas and use guerrilla tactics (shock effects, provocativeness, and deception) to initiate public reaction to the war. Their works are united by their search for a shared communication space and direct access to the audience on occupied territories. These artists challenge the accepted perception of Donbas as a free but uncivilized space and participate in the creation of a new Donbas text. The interaction between politics, art, and activism makes their voices and vision powerful and infectious and can help achieve civic consolidation in Donbas.     

Sectarianism and conflict in Syria

This article challenges the sectarian narrative of Syria’s current civil war, which relies on several false assumptions about the nature of political identity. It first questions how sectarian the uprising and civil war actually are, suggesting that the conflict is ‘semi-sectarian’, given the multiple other fault lines of contention, notably class, ideology and other non-sect, sub-state ties. It then draws on the theoretical debates between primordialists, ethno-symbolists and modernists to historicise political identity development in Syria. In doing so, it reasserts the modernist case, emphasising how political identities in Syria, both national and sectarian, have developed in a complex interrelated manner in the modern era and how the recent violent mobilisation of sectarian identity is the result of long- and short-term structural, economic, socio-cultural and political factors rather than unchanging ancient animosities. Of these, the most vital remain structural changes and elite reactions to them, with the prospect of state collapse in Syria’s future the most likely cause of a descent into further sectarian chaos.     

Modes of transition and the timing of separatist war onset: a comparative analysis of South Ossetia and Kosovo

This paper compares the escalation of civil war in South Ossetia and Kosovo and shows how different modes of transition deeply influenced the timing and type of conflict in these two cases. It argues that regimes resulting from a transition from above – when the elite in power leads the process of regime change and imposes its political agenda on other social actors – are more likely to ensure political stability in the short term, since governments are more cohesive internally, enjoy the support of the military, and can rely on a loyal bureaucracy. In contrast, regimes that emerge from transitions from below are more likely to experience civil war with an ethnic minority in the short term because of an intrinsic weakness of the elite in power. Under these circumstances, the newcomers need to win the loyalty of the military and of the bureaucracy, and separatist groups can take advantage of the incumbents’ weaknesses and try to build resources to militarily challenge the state.     

Managing civil society: democratisation and the environmental movement in a Russian region

The stalling of civil society development within the Russian Federation and its attendant causes have been a focus of academic study since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Alongside the emergence of a fragmented and chronically under-funded community of advocacy groups, the literature points to a rejection of democratic structures by the Russian populace and an absence of active civil engagement. Consequently, the international community has sought to bolster the growth and development of the Russian third sector by funding projects and organisations with a view to increasing public participation.Utilising research undertaken in Samara oblast of the Russian Federation, this paper examines the role played by overseas donor agencies within the Samara Environmental Movement (SEM). In examining both the quality and quantity of donor assistance received, it reveals a number of dysfunctions arising from this aid, and in particular, a lack of contextualisation and mis-direction of the assistance offered vis-à-vis citizen participation, alongside other behavioural impacts of donor funding within the SEM itself.     

Authority in rebel groups: identity,recognition and the struggle over legitimacy

This article asks how rebel leaders capture and lose legitimacy within their own movement. Analysing these complex and often uneasy relations between elites and grassroots of insurgency is important for understanding the success or failure of peace processes. This is because internal contestation over authority between rival rebel leaders can drive a movement’s external strategy. Based on ethnographic research on the Karen and Kachin rebellions in Myanmar and insights from Political Sociology, the article suggests that leadership authority is linked to social identification and the claim to recognition among insurgent grassroots. If rebel leaders manage to satisfy their grassroots’ claim to recognition, their insurgent orders are stable. Failing this, their authority erodes and is likely to be challenged. These findings contribute to understanding insurgency and peace negotiations in Myanmar and civil wars more generally by showing how struggles over legitimacy within rebel groups drive wider dynamics of war and peace.     

Grasping the Syrian War,a view from Albanians in the Balkans

Reactions to the brutal Syrian War from European governments and Europe’s Muslims have been diverse and subject to many shifts over the past few years. This paper focuses on how Albanian political and Islamic religious figures living in the Balkans have come to interpret the war. I focus on discourse, the ways in which these different agents communicate with their audience, and the wider contexts they evoke. Government sources and religiously themed lectures delivered by prominent imams on the social networking site YouTube are used to assess these trends. The most obvious aspect of these debates is the ways in which these agents use the war to press their own agendas, the government to affirm their commitment to the “West” and an ethnicized view of Islam, while Islamic religious leaders use it to reconnect their audiences to a more cosmopolitan vision of their past. War thus becomes a catalyst for a resurgent contestation between different groups vying for control over what it means to be “Albanian” and “Muslim” in the twenty-first century.     

Humanitarianism in intra-state conflict: aid inequality and local governance in government- and opposition-controlled areas in the Syrian war

This article argues that humanitarian aid in intra-state conflict plays a crucial but largely unrecognised role in shaping the preconditions for negotiations for peace and post-conflict reconstruction. Drawing on a spatial theory approach, it identifies the role of humanitarian aid as not being temporary and independent, but as forming an integral part of the daily lives of local communities and of continuously evolving structures of governance during conflict. As a result, significant imbalances in the distribution of aid between different geographical areas, as highlighted in the current Syrian war, threaten not only the immediate survival of civilians, but also their future.     

The rise of an anti-politics machinery: peace,civil society and the focus on results in Myanmar

‘Results’, ‘value for money’, ‘effectiveness’ and similar buzzwords have become commonplace in development cooperation and peace building. The use of technical instruments such as project cycle management and evaluations is hardly questioned anymore: these are presented as a minor shift of focus to make current practice more effective. This paper argues that there is far more to this shift: a machinery of practices and institutions has been installed that removes political questions on development or peace from the political realm and places them under the rule of technical experts. Drawing on a Foucauldian understanding of discourse analysis, the paper analyses how this machinery prioritises gradual reform, subjugates other approaches to societal change and reproduces power/knowledge networks in both the global South and North. Based on ethnographic field research in Myanmar, it also explores discursive strategies of local actors and assesses how they are aiming to create spaces to challenge this machinery.     

Disabling dissent: the colour revolutions,autocratic linkages,and civil society regulations in hybrid regimes

State elites in hybrid regimes have increasingly sought to manipulate the legal regulation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as part of the growing backlash against democracy assistance in nondemocratic countries around the world. Sophisticated laws detailing burdensome NGO registration procedures and complex regulations enabling invasive government oversight of NGOs represent upgraded forms of civic curtailment and democracy resistance. This paper analyses these significant developments in a systematic, cross-national fashion over time by constructing a new dataset of NGO legal barriers in hybrid regimes from 1995 to 2013. It demonstrates that the expansion of repressive NGO regulations are shaped by international factors, particularly autocratic linkages, in the form of trade or defence pacts with Russia and China, as well as authoritarian learning from the colour revolutions. It thus contributes to debates on autocracy promotion and authoritarian resurgence by moving beyond the regime level to focus on the sub-regime dimension of freedom of association.     

Political Change and Adaptation in Yorubaland in the Nineteenth Century

This article examines the role played by strongmen in Côte d'Ivoire's post-conflict reconstruction. While many acknowledge the unhindered or even the enhanced political influence these actors often enjoy as a result of their relationship to the state in post-conflict contexts, existing debates in Côte d'Ivoire, as well as elsewhere, often remain couched in terms of the implications of these kinds of relationships. Does working with rural strongmen tied to former insurgencies enhance the authority of the central state? Or do such alliances wither state institutions capable of providing long-term political order in peripheral areas? This article downplays these questions. Instead, it examines the alliances which form between strongmen and other actors amidst conflicts over local authority during post-conflict reconstruction. It suggests that the specific configuration of these alliances matter in determining the utility of allying with local strongmen during war to peace transitions. This article examines these struggles through the case of Morou Ouattara and the local Forces Nouvelles (FN) administration in Bouna, Northeastern Côte d'Ivoire.     

From the ASEAN People's Assembly to the ASEAN Civil Society Conference: the boundaries of civil society advocacy

Civil society organisations (CSOs) have asserted their claim for participation in regional governance in Southeast Asia through multiple forums held since the late-1990s. The two most enduring are the ASEAN People's Assembly (APA), organised by ASEAN-ISIS and held seven times from 2000 to 2009, and the ASEAN Civil Society Conference (ACSC), organised by the Solidarity for Asian People's Advocacy network and held nine times from 2005 to the present. Through comparative analysis of the boundaries of CSO participation in these two events, this article explains why the APA was superseded by the ACSC, and it highlights states' growing intrusions into the ACSC. It argues that states' expanding repertoire of tactics to direct the ACSC has seen the structure of CSO participation in this event recast, challenging the view of the ACSC as an independent space for advocacy and indicating the hollowness of ASEAN's commitments to creating a ‘people-oriented’ Association.