Rights in Action: The Impact of Chinese Migrant Workers’ Resistances on Citizenship Rights

There have been some debates on Chinese migrant workers’ resistances and their rising rights consciousness in the academia. This paper aims to understand the debates and their problems. This paper investigates the extent to which the forms of Chinese migrant workers’ resistance have diverse impact on their citizenship rights. The conception of citizenship rights can be analytically understood in the individual/collective form and with the passive/active nature; such a dichotomy is also applicable for that of resistance according to the action theory. Both conceptualizations and their linkages constitute an analytical framework in this paper. Within it, the various cases of migrant workers’ resistances and their connections with attainment of rights are discussed comparatively. A main finding in this paper is that the individual resistance, whether passive or active, is almost independent of rights; individuals with the PC model only wait passively for the government’s help; and the AC model (e.g. strike) is much more prospective for the attainment of collective rights, which creates a new power to balance those of state and capital in China.     

Deep Presidency: Toward a Structural Theory of an Unsustainable Office in a Catastrophic World—Obama and Beyond

Modern and postmodern theories of the presidency tend to place the American president on a continuum of power, asserting the need for either a more active or less active chief executive. From the seminal work of Richard Neustadt, celebrating the assertive president seeking to maximize power and leadership, through the contrasting view of historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and others who sought to restrict the reach of the executive, scholars have battled over the appropriate balance of power—particularly the executive-legislative scale. From an alternative critical/structural view of the office, this expansive-restrictive debate, while important, misses the central point that regardless of party, personality, or management style, all presidents seek the same structural goals. If, as Theodore Lowi has argued, the president is the “state personified,” then we need to ask how the capitalist state shapes and constrains the imperatives presidents must pursue, given our political economy and the ideology that sustains it. Two core imperatives emerge for the literature on theories of the state: the pursuit of economic growth and the provision of “national security.” This article explores debates over theories of the presidency in the light of twenty-first-century challenges to conventional definitions of “growth” and “national security.” In the face of global climate change and the decline of US military and geopolitical preeminence, can the presidency break free from its imprisonment in orthodox notions of growth and national security to forge a more sustainable path for the nation and the office? And more broadly, if our way of life in fact undermines our way of life in an unsustainable self-defeating logic, absent a cataclysmic crisis, what, if any, role can the president play in fostering a deep change of direction? By challenging the power structure of the political economy, a critical/structural theory of the presidency is best situated to address such questions.     

The Politics of Citizenship Formation: Homeowners’ Collective Action in Urban Beijing

Conventional discourse in citizenship studies tend to assume that individuals are clearly aware of their rights and this rights-consciousness drives them to participate actively. This assumption, however, neglects the cases of interest-driven participation before the advent of rights-consciousness of the participants. By studying the homeowners’ collective action in Beijing, this study finds that the most direct incentive motivating the homeowners to participate in the first place is self-interest rather than strong rights-consciousness. Homeowners become actively involved in the process of democratic participation well before they have acquired a clear and strong sense of rights-consciousness. Nevertheless, despite starting off as interest-oriented, homeowners’ democratic practices have awakened their rights-consciousness and further cultivated a sense of citizenship identity. This interest-driven participation has paradoxically helped to create the democratic ethic of Chinese urban citizens. It has important implications for understanding political participation as well as citizenship formation in China.     

Privatization in Kosovo: ‘Liberal Peace’ in Practice

This article examines internationally led privatization in Kosovo as an example of international statebuilding. It concentrates on the period from 1999 to 2008, when privatization was planned and implemented under formal international management. International statebuilding is typically sought justified with the idea of ‘liberal peace’, and this article shows how the tension between the political and economic tenets of the idea of liberal peace manifested itself in Kosovo's internationally led privatization.     

Citizenship practices of non-citizens in Slovenia: ‘you cannot fight the system alone’

In the period of state formation (1991–1992), the Slovene Ministry of the Interior erased, that is, excluded from legal status, those immigrants from other parts of the former Yugoslavia who did not become Slovene citizens when citizenship was available under initial simplified criteria. Compared with the processes of independence in Estonia and elsewhere, exclusion in the form of erasure from the register of permanent residents in Slovenia extended beyond the creation of foreigners within the country (i.e. foreign citizens with the right to remain and support themselves); this exclusion created outlaws, legal freaks (Arendt) or homines sacres (Agamben) – bare human beings who were expunged from society and deprived of all former rights and roles. This article discusses the citizenship practices of the victims of the erasure and interprets these practices as emancipation processes: the erased used grass roots and legal means to attempt to obtain the right to dignity, the right to stay and the right to compensation for their ‘lost years’. The effects of their struggle went beyond matters of mere utility: by publicly defining themselves as ‘the erased’ and acting upon injustice; the erased challenged the boundaries of citizenship in terms of membership and content.     

The rise of the Chinese ‘Other’ in Japan's construction of identity: Is China a focal point of Japanese nationalism?

Abstract

Since 1945, the United States (US) has served as a focal point of both Left-wing and Right-wing Japanese nationalism. Both sides argued that the US was an arrogant hegemon that unjustly robbed Japan of its autonomy, and prevented Japan from achieving its own ideal national identity. Both sides frequently demanded that Japan should be more ‘resolute’ and resist unfair demands emanating from the US. In recent years, however, both camps are increasingly using the same rhetoric to criticise the Japanese government's China policy. China is also being depicted as an overbearing state that unfairly browbeats Japan into making diplomatic concessions. Given the similarities between the portrayal of China and the US, has China now become a nationalist focal point for both the Japanese Left and Right? Utilising constructivist insights, this article seeks to shed light on this question, by examining how the Japanese Right and Left portray China, and explores the implications for Japan's China policy.     

Canadian Energy Policy in 1985: Toward a Renewed Federalism?

Since the 1984 election of Brian Mulroney in Canada, the federalgovernment has reached three important intergovernmental agreementsin the energy sector. These accords—concerning managementof Newfoundland's offshore resources, oil pricing and taxationin the western provinces, and natural gas pricing in westernCanada—are Mulroney's showcase examples of his "renewedfederalism. " While there has been an increase in the degreeof federal-provincial consultation, enhanced cooperation inthe energy sector has been greatly facilitated by changes inthe international energy situation. An examination of othersectors suggests that the position of the Mulroney governmenton the nature of the Canadian federation may not be much differentfrom that held by the government of Pierre Trudeau.     

Mind the Gap. The Theory and Practice of State Rescaling: Institutional Morphology and the ‘New’ City-regionalism

The repeated reterritorialisation of economic development policy has resulted in a congested institutional environment characterised by a confused, and confusing, nested spatial hierarchy of interventions. Nevertheless, advocacy for perpetual institutional manoeuvring has proceeded largely unchecked leaving important questions unanswered regarding both the desirability of adding to/modifying the institutional landscape of cities and also the viability of such policies in light of existing attachments to long-established administrative geographies. In calling for further research, this paper conducts a preliminary investigation of the mutation of sub-city Urban Regeneration Companies (URCs) into city-regional City Development Companies (CDCs) and suggests the expansive critical realist epistemology as a potentially worthwhile methodological starting-point.     

Loose Cannons or Loyal Foot Soldiers? Toward a More Complex Theory of Interest Group Advertising Strategies

Recent court decisions have encouraged new types of interest groups to become involved in election campaigns. Yet questions remain about whether interest group sponsorship of advertising affects the content of the issues being discussed. The ability of interest groups to influence the campaign agenda has implications for the extent to which politicians can be held accountable by citizens. In this research, we present a new conceptual framework for explaining variation in interest group advertising strategies and examine the factors leading different types of interest groups to be loose cannons (diverging from the issue debates among candidates) or loyal foot soldiers (matching the candidates’ issue debates). We find more evidence of loyal foot soldier behavior among new multi‐issue interest groups and among Republican groups and candidates. Fears of interest groups “hijacking” campaign agendas appear unfounded.     

The Spatial Routines of Daily Life in Low-income Neighbourhoods: Escaping the ‘Local Trap’

Abstract. In recent years, research and policy have become increasingly interested in the relationship between poverty and place. While research has explored the possibility that living in poor places might make people poorer, policy has been drawn to the idea that poverty and social exclusion have their origins in segregated spaces of the poor and excluded. This paper argues that both perspectives fall into the ‘local trap’ of presuming that people living in areas characterised by economic hardship live spatially bounded, neighbourhood-based lives. Drawing on evidence from interviews with 180 people living in six low-income neighbourhoods across the UK, spatial routines of daily life are revealed to extend regularly beyond the residential neighbourhood through processes of engagement, interaction and exchange. This simple but important finding undermines some key presumptions of contemporary policy and points to the need for improvements in the theoretical models underlying analysis of the relationships between poverty and place.     

The Role of “Parallel Institutions” in China’s Growing Participation in Global Economic Governance

China is creating or co-creating new international economic institutions in areas such as trade, development finance, currency settlement and credit rating that parallel those that arose out of the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 or are tied to the interests of rich, developed countries. What are its reasons for doing this? What are the characteristics of the new institutions? How do the new institutions relate to the old institutions? Will China’s initiatives lead to better global economic governance? This paper attempts to answer these questions. Its main conclusions are that China is trying to create a new international economic order in which its political power is more commensurate with its economic power, its creation of new international institutions is an important part of this strategy, the institutions that China is creating are meant to be open and inclusive and to introduce “better practices”, and it is possible – though not necessarily probable – that China can make a major contribution to global economic governance provided it can overcome operational challenges, skepticism about its intentions and too narrow a view of its national interest.     

Toward a ‘harmonious society’ through corporate social responsibility

The objective of this paper is to examine how corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices of foreign multinational enterprises in China contribute to China's national priorities, by discussing the relationships between CSR and the building of a ‘harmonious society’ in China. This paper is based on personal reflections, extensive literature review, and 8 years of experiential field work in China by the author. Many CSR programs are found to superficially complement China's harmonious society policy. Only four exemplars out of 20 multinational enterprises surveyed are committed to fostering green growth, improving livelihood, developing outwardly into the west, and promoting a general integration of Chinese business into global markets through social innovations and collaborative projects. The paper posits that it is possible to use CSR as a change agent in China when enlightened public concerns are brought back to business operations through the involvement of non-government organizations, local government, and local citizens and a greater degree of transparency of information. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Europe as a Beacon of Democracy? Citizenship Policies Relating to Youth and Migrants in Portugal

Abstract

This article aims to compare discourses about national and European policies on active citizenship and democratic participation, with a particular focus on youth and migrants. For this purpose we analysed official documents of public institutions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in order to assess how the process of Europeanization has influenced national policies with regard to increasing political participation and citizens' civic awareness. Additionally, we conducted interviews with policy makers and NGO leaders in order to integrate and compare different levels of discourse and thus identify potential dissonances. Analysis of the documents shows that there is a strong concern to match national policy priorities with those established by international organizations. Notwithstanding positive perceptions, NGO leaders and policy makers criticize the ways policies have been implemented, stressing the need to adopt a strategy that bridges the gap between the prescribed and the real, as well as the importance of overcoming the hegemony of economic factors in policy decisions. In this regard, NGO leaders criticize the cynicism of political leaders and policies motivated by demographic and economic concerns. In relation to European identity and integration, NGO leaders argue that Europe must be collectively constructed; yet, policy makers stress that the failure of the Constitutional Treaty in 2005 resulted from a deficit in the negotiation process. In sum, this article suggests that it is necessary to promote greater involvement of civil society in the design and implementation of policies which, in turn, may contribute to the strengthening of shared democratic principles.