They are from within us: CVE brokerage in South-central Somalia

ABSTRACT

This article explores how societal actors in Somalia take part in a transnational politics of countering/preventing violent extremism (CVE/PVE) through a political sociological approach to militarisation. We argue that the transnational politics of CVE represents an extension of global militarism by some states, institutions, donors and brokers. CVE works to adapt global militarism and to reconfigure the global-local relationships that sustain it. We explore the roles and influence of local ‘CVE brokers’ in deradicalisation efforts in South-central Somalia. They inadvertently merge the counter-terrorism approach to Somali people, values and territory with non-military means. We show that their key practices – co-ordination, translation and alignment – advance, but also disrupt, alter and transform CVE policy objectives.     

Transnational citizenship: problems of definition,culture and democracy

There is widespread disagreement over whether transnational citizenship provides defensible extensions of, or meaningful complements to, national citizenship. A significant strand of criticism relies upon empirical arguments about political motivation and the consequences of transnationalism. This paper addresses two questions arising from empirical arguments relating to the nation state and democracy. Do the alleged cultural requirements for effective political action provide an insuperable barrier to transnational citizenship? Does transnational citizenship necessarily require a commitment to transnational democracy? I argue that these largely empirical criticisms do not succeed in casting doubt upon the normative plausibility or practical viability of transnational projects. On the first question, I point to a growing transnational political culture that serves to motivate transnational citizens. On the second question, I argue for a legitimate category of transnational citizenship that, although inspired by cosmopolitan morality, is different from it, and that does not require transnational democracy.     

Globalisation,Transnational Political Mobilisation,and Networks of Violence

This article examines how globalisation processes provide new incentives and opportunities for non-state political entrepreneurs to build transnational political movements. Drawing on the literatures on non-violent social movements and transnational networks, the article examines terrorism and political violence as components of the ‘repertoires of contention’ used by radical transnational groups seeking political change. Examples from both the pre- and post-9/11 periods are provided, and the implications for traditional models of state security are discussed. The article concludes by contending that the combination of increased levels of globalisation and the emergence of new networks of violence is creating a fundamental shift in the international security environment, in which the distinction between internal and external security threats is increasingly blurred. While state security strategies are reflecting these changes, less attention has been paid to the political implications of these changes. New security responses need to also be matched by new sets of political strategies at the global level.     

Contesting Women's Rights: Charting the Emergence of a Transnational Conservative Counter-network

In recent years it has been claimed by human rights advocates that an “unholy alliance” has emerged internationally to counter the equality claims of the transnational women's rights movement. Using the literature on transnational social movements and counter-movements, this article assesses the interaction between what are conceived of as state and non-state-based conservative patriarchal actors with the transnational women's movement at a series of UN conferences throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium. It suggests that a transnational counter-network has indeed emerged and outlines the prevailing political opportunity structures that have made its mobilisation possible. It also outlines the alternative frames which the counter-network has used in presenting its arguments. The paper indicates that accounts of domestic-level counter-movements hold some explanatory power for studying the emergence of such a movement at the transnational level, but it also suggests that the literature needs to be supplemented with an analysis of the crucial role played by governments as allies or even as network members in influencing this process.     

‘It’s not just the economy,stupid’. The multi-directional security effects of the private sector in post-conflict reconstruction

Using a human security lens, this article explores the interface between transnational corporations (TNCs) and post-conflict, post-crisis societies. It demonstrates how TNCs influence political and economic transition, through impacting the everyday experience of security, creating multiple and ambiguous effects on individuals and communities. Examples of two foreign corporate engagements: carmaker Fiat’s investment in Serbia and steelmaker ArcelorMittal’s takeover in Zenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina are used to illustrate the density of relationships between global companies, host governments, civil society and local communities whose effects extend beyond economics to broader aspects of the conflict space, and have a bearing on the transition and reconstruction agenda. Our findings question the quality of development and industrialisation policies championed by post-conflict reconstruction approaches, and challenge the assumption that economic growth and investment, by foreign companies in particular, will necessarily deliver peaceful transition. The article contributes to the scholarly debate about the connection between security and development, and to policy discussions about appropriate means for reviving economies within externally led peace-building and conflict prevention initiatives.     

States versus Corporations: Rethinking the Power of Business in International Politics

Over 25 years ago, Susan Strange urged IR scholars to include multinational corporations in their analysis. Within IR and IPE discussions, this was either mostly ignored or reflected in an empirically and methodologically unsatisfactory way. We reiterate Strange’s call by sketching a fine-grained theoretical and empirical approach that includes both states and corporations as juxtaposed actors that interact in transnational networks inherent to the contemporary international political economy. This realistic, juxtaposed, actor- and relations-centred perspective on state and corporate power in the global system is empirically illustrated by the example of the transnationalisation of state ownership.     

Stabilizing Somalia: can the EU's comprehensive approach work?

States with limited statehood such as Somalia can cause transnational security challenges. The emergence of an insurgent group with links to Al Qaida and piracy emanating from its coast are cases in point. In this article, we tackle the question of whether the EU's comprehensive approach toward Somalia is working. To do this, we analyze its effectiveness, its legitimacy, and the influence of power by appraising three characteristics of the security governance concept in a critical manner. We conclude that the result is mixed. Even if the EU's comprehensive approach were perfect in a technical sense, it would still face restraints, because any solution has to come from Somali themselves. Not only should they be an integral part of it, they should become the real owners of the state-building process in the first place.     

Religious Institutionalism: A Domestic Explanation for External Support of Rebel Groups

ABSTRACT

What motivates state support for rebel groups? The literature on state support for rebel groups has made critical developments. In particular, scholarship has shed light on the impact of religious identity links. Less work, however, examines the level of religious institutionalism in external states. I argue that the impact of religious links is conditional on the extent to which religion is institutionalized in the external state. Religiously institutionalized states allow domestic religious forces more space in the political arena, which increases pressure on state leaders to support co-religious rebel groups. Using statistical analysis, I find that the interaction of religious institutionalism and religious links affects the likelihood of support. When an external state and rebel group have religious links, and the external state has a high level of religious institutionalism, the likelihood of support is high. In contrast, without a high level of religious institutionalism in the external state, religious links do not increase the likelihood of support. The relationship is driven by cases where the external and target states do not share a religion. This article contributes to existing literature by moving beyond transnational religious links and focuses on how religious institutionalism increases domestic pressure to support co-religious rebel groups.     

Conceptualizing and evaluating (new) forms of citizenship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism

In an age of transnational flows and interdependencies, democratic citizenship can no longer be conceptualized exclusively within national boundaries. This paper presents a conceptual map that allows tracing emerging and proposed forms of citizenship within and beyond the nation state in a comprehensive and differentiated way. We disentangle two anchor points: membership in a political community as the fundament of citizenship and the arena of political decision-making as the focal point of citizenship rights, identities and practices. For the former we differentiate between a single national community, the universal community of humankind and multiple (national) communities. For the latter we distinguish the national, supra-national and transnational arena. Our typology thus consists of nine different forms of democratic citizenship. It is used to provide a brief overview over normative proposals and empirical findings leading to the following insights: while membership in a particular national community still dominates the reality in all three political arenas, in the normative discourse it is perceived as deficient. Membership in the universal community of humankind is widely endorsed in the normative discourse, but almost nonexistent. In contrast, membership in multiple communities is not only a growing reality but also normatively promising for democratizing a transnationalizing world.     

Statecraft and Migration: A Research Note on American Strategies to Use Immigration in Foreign Policy from the Founding Era through the Early Twenty-First Century

How has the United States used migration as part of its statecraft and foreign policy? This question is significant because migration is an important contemporary transnational policy area for the United States; and because a state’s foreign-immigration policy nexus remains an under-explored vantage point for examining diplomatic and international history. This review article answers the question and lays conceptual and empirical ground in the area by examining the historical record and extant research to show that American leaders from the country’s founding through the early twenty-first century have used migration as an instrument of statecraft by primarily attempting to reach three foreign policy objectives: pleasing, harming, and bargaining with states. For each of these categories, the analysis explicates relationships between statecraft and migration for the United States, identifies policy instruments used by American leaders to influence migration for diplomatic and foreign policy objectives, and presents historical cases of American migration policies designed for foreign policy goals. The conclusion provides the research and policy implications of its findings.     

Buufis amongst Somalis in Dadaab: the Transnational and Historical Logics behind Resettlement Dreams

The Somali word buufis is commonly used in the Kenyan refugeecamps of Dadaab, referring to a person's dream of resettlement.It is an ambiguous phenomenon, bringing hope and remittancesinto the camps but also removing investments from the regionand, when the dream cannot be reached, sometimes having adversepsychological effects. Buufis is triggered by the fact that,due to transnational flows of remittances and information, refugeesin remote camps like Dadaab can compare their lives in the campsto those of others elsewhere. This illustrates how the opportunities,constraints, hopes and dreams that refugees experience locallyare often determined by transnational factors. Whereas the resettlementdreams analysed in this article are thus likely to occur inother contexts as well, it is argued that they are more intenseand elaborate amongst refugee communities with a strong cultureof migration, like the Somalis.     

International Recognition and Religion: A Quantitative Analysis of Kosovo’s Contested Status

Recognition from other recognized states is the key to becoming a fully fledged member state of the international system. Although many new states are quickly and universally recognized, the recognition of other aspiring states remains highly contested. In these cases of contested sovereignty, some countries but not others extend recognition. However, research on what shapes a country’s decision to recognize a claim to sovereign statehood remains relatively sparse. This article focuses on how religion shapes the incentives of states to extend or withhold recognition to aspiring states in cases of contested sovereignty. It posits two mechanisms, one at the domestic level through religious institutions and one at the international level through transnational religious affinities. The article uses new data on all state decisions regarding the international recognition of Kosovo to test these propositions. The results provide strong support for these two pathways through which religion shapes state decisions regarding international recognition.     

Online Political Debate,Unbounded Citizenship,and the Problematic Nature of a Transnational Public Sphere

Citizenship has always been a dynamic notion, subject to change and permanent struggle over its precise content and meaning. Recent technological, economic, and political transformations have led to the development of alternative notions of citizenship that go beyond the classic understanding of its relationship to nation states and rights. Civil society actors play an important role in this process by organizing themselves at a transnational level, engaging with issues that transcend the boundaries of the nation state and questioning the democratic legitimacy of other transnational actors such as international and corporate organizations. They also allow citizens to engage with “unbounded” issues and to construct a transnational public sphere where such issues can be debated. It is often assumed that the Internet plays a crucial role in enabling this transnational public sphere to take shape. Empirical analysis of discussion forums and mailing lists developed by transnational civil society actors shows, however, that the construction of such a transnational public sphere is paved with constraints. To speak of a unified transnational public sphere is therefore deemed to be problematic. It cannot be seen or construed without taking into account the local, the national, and enforceable rights in order to materialize the ideas and hopes being voiced through civil society.     

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much”: the essential role of EU agencies in combatting the sale of counterfeit goods

This article demonstrates the role and importance of EU agencies in the EU’s regulatory environment, and considers the consequences of an absence of cooperation through agencies for internal security. It does so by exploring the case study of the anti-counterfeiting activities of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), and what happens when a state no longer benefits from membership of an EU agency. The effective protection of consumers from counterfeit goods is dependent upon identifying best practices, sharing information on counterfeiting trends, and coordinating responses, activities undertaken through EU agencies. This article demonstrates that the ability of states to effectively counter the sale of counterfeit goods is dependent upon the existence of EU agencies due to the need for transnational cooperation. In the absence of EU agencies, states are likely to suffer diminished operational expertise and a lack of in-depth knowledge concerning counterfeiting trends. It concludes that the EU agencies form an essential part of EU security governance, with states not party to these cooperative endeavours rendered vulnerable and unable to combat at a national level what is ultimately a global problem.     

Reification and Theoreticism in the Study of Globalisation,Imperialism and Hegemony: Response to Kiely,Pozo-Martin and Valladão

This commentary critiques the nation-state framework of analysis that informs papers published by Ray Kiely, Gonzalo Pozo-Martin and Alfredo Valladão in a section appearing in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 19:2 (2006), on the theme of globalisation, imperialism and hegemony. Kiely, Pozo-Martin and Valladão reify the state and the inter-state system by giving them an agency independent of historical social forces. They fail to put forward a conception of agency and institutions that could address the central problematic of the political management, or rule, of global capitalism. They presuppose a state-based understanding of global politics that ignores the reality of transnational capital and transnational social forces and that reduces global capitalism to international capitalism. We should focus not on states as fictitious macro-agents but on historically changing constellations of social forces operating through multiple institutions, including state apparatuses that are themselves in a process of transformation as a consequence of collective agencies.     

Criminalizing Consequences of Sanctions: Embargo Busting and Its Legacy

The upsurge in the use of economic sanctions in the post-Cold War era has prompted much scholarly and policy debate over their effectiveness and humanitarian consequences. Remarkably little attention, however, has been devoted to their criminalizing consequences and legacy for the post-sanctions period. In this article, I develop an analytical framework identifying and categorizing the potential criminalizing effects of sanctions across place (within and around the targeted country) and time (during and after the sanctions period), and apply and evaluate this framework through an in-depth examination of the case of Yugoslavia. For comparative leverage and to assess the applicability of the argument beyond the Yugoslavia case, the analysis is briefly extended to other cases both within and outside the Balkans (Croatia and Iraq). The article suggests that sanctions can unintentionally contribute to the criminalization of the state, economy, and civil society of both the targeted country and its immediate neighbors, fostering a symbiosis between political leaders, organized crime, and transnational smuggling networks. This symbiosis, in turn, can persist beyond the lifting of sanctions, contributing to corruption and crime and undermining the rule of law. The article is one of the first efforts to integrate the study of sanctions and transnational crime, and suggests that the criminalized collateral damage from sanctions and its post-sanctions legacy should be made a more central part of the evaluation of sanctions.     

Political Investment Cycles in Democracies and Autocracies

Extant research has shown considerable interest in whether host countries’ political uncertainty impedes foreign direct investment (FDI). Building upon the scholarly consensus on the adverse impact of political uncertainty on FDI, this article demonstrates that the extent to which investment climates are unpredictable varies cyclically, on the basis of election timing in democracies and leadership turnover in autocracies. The empirical results show that in presidential democracies, FDI tends to slowly increase after an executive election and then decline as the next executive election nears. However, I find that an electoral investment cycle is not found in parliamentary democracies where election timing is irregular, less predictable, and endogenous to domestic economic conditions. I also find that a similar political investment cycle exists in autocracies not through electoral cycle but through leadership tenure cycle. The level of FDI inflows tends to be relatively low early in autocrats’ tenure when political uncertainty is high and rise as autocratic leadership tenure increases over time but eventually wane again as autocratic leadership is destabilized in the late period of power transition. The findings indicate the existence of heterogeneous political investment cycles, depending on regime type.     

Staff and status in international bureaucracies: a Weberian perspective on the EU civil service

Recent studies in international relations (IR) have devoted little systematic attention to the personnel of international organizations. This article argues that the works of Max Weber could provide an orientation for future research on the cohesion and autonomy of the staff in international bureaucracies. In his writings, Weber highlights the role of bureaucratic officials as an “occupational status group” or Berufsstand distinguished by their professional ethics, privileged positions, practices of social closure and a particular style of life, which is expressed in a claim to social prestige. Weber suggests a sociological analysis of bureaucratic staff, whose group character is determined by their occupation and profession. The article outlines Weber’s understanding of the administrative official by revisiting his seminal sociological and political writings. The added value of Weber’s conception for IR is demonstrated with an empirical sketch of the EU civil service, which can be analysed as a transnational status group in the making.     

Location "Authority" in the Global Political Economy

This article addresses the problematic nature of "authority" in the global political economy. Focusing on the rules governing international commercial relations, which today form part of the juridical conditions of global capitalism, the location and structure of political authority are argued to be historically specific. They have changed with the emergence of different historic blocs and as a result of consequent alterations in state-societyrelations. The article emphasizes the significance of private corporate power in the construction of the global political economy and hegemonic authority relations. However, the significance of private authority is obscure and little understood by students of international relations. This gives rise to analytical and normative grounds for adopting a historical materialist approach to theanalysis of global authority that incorporates national, subnational, and transnational influences.     

Leaders Without Borders: Familiarity as a Moderator of Transnational Source Cue Effects

The role of source cue effects in transnational persuasion (in which a foreign actor attempts to persuade an audience in another jurisdiction) is largely unexplored in both the political communication and international relations literatures. This article investigates transnational source cue effects using two source cue experiments that test the persuasiveness of German chancellor Angela Merkel and UK prime minister David Cameron in a Canadian context. The experiments were embedded in an online survey administered to student participants at a Canadian university in January 2011. As might be expected, the foreign leaders exerted positive source cue effects among participants who held positive impressions of the leaders and backlash effects among those who held strongly negative impressions. These effects, however, were moderated by participants’ level of political awareness, with the largest effects observed among participants who had an intermediate level of awareness. It is argued that this nonlinear moderating effect can be attributed to the countervailing effects of attitude stability and source familiarity (both of which are associated with political awareness) on individuals’ susceptibility to source cue effects. Finally, cueing David Cameron had approximately equivalent source cue effects on participants’ attitudes towards government spending on foreign aid and welfare, suggesting that foreign leaders may be able to move opinion on domestic as well as on foreign policy issues. Overall, these results validate existing models of source cue effects in a transnational context and point to the scope and limitations of national leaders’ ability to engage in direct public diplomacy.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resources: Appendix: Question Wordings for Survey Experiments; Table A1: Balance Tests for Afghanistan and Cameron Cue Experiments; and Table A2: Underlying Salience of Domestic and Foreign Policy Spending.]