The perils of empire: nationhood and citizenship in Portugal

After the demise of the Portuguese empire and even more after joining the European Union, the Portuguese state redefined the borders of national belonging. The shift was one from a multi-continental nation, which included parts of Africa, to a more restricted definition of nationhood, one that stressed Portugal's connection to Europe and thus defined belonging by descent. This article, based on research conducted in Lisbon, Portugal in 2003, discusses the impact of this shift on Portuguese citizens of ethnically diverse backgrounds. The Portuguese state, media, academia, and civil society are all involved in constructing, disseminating, and hence consolidating a notion of nationhood that treats ethnically diverse minorities as foreigners, placing them outside the national community. Not producing or disseminating information on ethnic minorities, the Portuguese academia, media, and the state are all actively involved in reproducing a process that perpetuates exclusion and obstructs the construction of political alliances to confront widespread discrimination.     

On the promise and perils of citizenship: heuristic concepts,Zimbabwean example

Increasingly, struggles in the name of citizenship inspire and catch the imagination and support of individuals and groups found in a variety of locales within a nation as well as transnational spaces. At the same time, their consequences may be quite different from the assumptions and dreams of those involved in perpetuating and imagining these struggles. To analyse how new social citizenship claims can embolden and channel struggles in particular directions with varied results – the promise and perils of citizenship more broadly – I suggest that one should pay attention to the promulgators of such visions of citizenship, the techniques of promoting their claims and the cultural politics and political economies of belonging in the locales of mobilization. Drawing on an ethnographic example of a farm labour struggle in the late 1990s in Zimbabwe, I explore the importance of attending to wider shifts in the political importance of citizenship as well as its entanglement in particular localities. Through examining how farm workers are situated through such struggles, I show the promise and limits of citizenship in addressing social justice concerns of a group historically marginalized through racialized, classed and gendered processes.     

Private regulation,public policy,and the perils of adverse ontological selection

What problems can private regulatory governance solve, and what role should public policy play? Despite access to the same empirical evidence, the current scholarship on private governance offers widely divergent answers to these questions. Through a critical review, this paper details five ontologically distinct academic logics – calculated strategic behavior; learning and experimentalist processes; political institutionalism; global value chain and convention theory; and neo-Gramscian accounts – that offer divergent conclusions based on the particular facets of private governance they illuminate, while ignoring those they obfuscate. In this crowded marketplace of ideas, scholars and practitioners are in danger of adverse ontological selection whereby certain approaches and insights are systematically ignored and certain problem conceptions are prioritized over others. As a corrective, we encourage scholars to make their assumptions explicit, and occasionally switch between logics, to better understand private governance's problem-solving potential and its interactions with public policy.     

The perils of hyper-vigilance: the war on terrorism and the surveillance state in South-East Asia

The analysis examines the puzzle as to why the intelligence structures of South-East Asia largely failed to detect the evolving threat of violently inclined radical Islamic groups, despite the existence of elaborate and pervasive internal security arrangements within the states of the region. The article explores this issue by positing contending viewpoints about how authoritarianism in South-East Asia might have affected the awareness of such threats. Answers to these questions enable an assessment of the current ASEAN response to the ‘war on terrorism’ and to discern whether South-East Asia's elites will move either to improve the quality of their intelligence and threat analysis in the future, or whether they will, instead, extend the instruments of authoritarian rule, further curtailing civil and political space under the rubric of combating terrorism. The evidence so far suggests that the latter outcome is the more likely.     

Scotland's Future Political System

Debates on Scottish constitutional reform go hand in hand with discussions of political reform. Its reformers use the image of ‘old Westminster’ to describe ‘control freakery’ within government and an adversarial political system. Many thought that the Scottish political system could diverge from the UK, to strengthen the parliamentary system, introduce consensus politics and further Scotland's alleged social and democratic tradition. Yet the experience of devolution suggests that Holyrood and Westminster politics share key features. Both systems are driven by government, making policy in ‘communities’ involving interest groups and governing bodies, with parliaments performing a limited role and public participation limited largely to elections. The Scottish government's style of policy‐making is distinctive, but new reforms are in their infancy and their effects have not been examined in depth. In this context, the article identifies Scotland's ability to make and implement policy in a new way, based on its current trajectory rather than the hopes of reformers.     

Future generations as rightholders

Many people believe that we have obligations with respect to future generations concerning the state of the environment that we pass on to them. Apart from the practical problem of people not really acting on such beliefs, there are also conceptual or philosophical issues that make these obligations problematic. The so-called non-identity problem is especially difficult: depending on which courses of action we adopt, different people will be born in the future, which means that even future people who due to our behavior will live under fairly poor circumstances might not have any ground for complaint. Had we not behaved as we did, they would not even have existed. It is argued here that, at least within a rights-theoretical approach, the non-identity problem can be solved by moving from considering individual rights to generational rights, rights which future generations hold qua generations.     

The Future of Memory

Reaction to David Rieff’s book is bound to be mixed. Its particulars are brilliant; its flaws, profuse. In Praise of Forgetting is misleadingly titled, for Rieff focuses primarily on the social functions of memory and its relation to history and forgetfulness. In his view, every event and person, no matter how notable today, will be ultimately forgotten. But in the short run, forgetfulness is benign, leading to reconciliation and peace. Memory, in contrast, is always malignant and distorted, yet so influential as to merge with and erode history. Rieff's assertions are matched against the cases he himself adduces, cases which he describes selectively and with minimal regard for evidence. However tendentious his arguments, the insights and vast erudition to which David Rieff treats his readers are undeniable.     

The Future Is Uncentralized

In July 1995, ASPA's Endowment Board established the Donald C. Stone Fund to honor the memory of this public administration legend. Income from this fund is used to sponsor a lecture or symposium at ASPA's national conference which reflects Stone's varied interests and contributions to the field. This year marked the fifth Donald C. Stone Lecture. On April 4, Harlan Cleveland, former ASPA National President, was ASPA's Visions 2000 Stone Lecturer and gave the following speech.