Anti-globalization movements: The developments in Asia

The development of neo-liberal globalization and its socio-economic effects has led to the strengthening of social resistance and protest against it both in the 'North' or 'West' and in the 'South' and--to a lesser extent--in the 'East'. This resistance appears in the form of the so-called 'anti-globalization' or 'globalization-critical' movements. As these are international in their origin and nature, it is not easy to separate the anti-globalization movements of Asia from those of other continents. Nevertheless, Asia has its own movements, which are stronger than we in Europe might think. This article gives a comprehensive view of the different organizations of Asia by theme: neo-liberalism, speculative capital, environment, ownership of land, children's and gender emancipation, peace and imperialism. It also includes some commentary on debates within the movement.     

Nationality and Nationalism in Africa: the Uganda case

Depuis 2006 et l'exode de migrants ouest-africains tentant de rejoindre l'Europe à bord de pirogues, la lutte contre l'émigration clandestine a été mise à l'agenda des relations afro-européennes. A partir de l'étude du tissu associatif et non-gouvernemental sénégalais, plus particulièrement d'une initiative féminine de la banlieue dakaroise, cet article souhaite revenir sur les conditions d'émergence et de possibilité d'un tel agenda et des mobilisations collectives y ayant trait. Le consensus relatif entre acteurs du Nord et du Sud concernant la lutte contre l'émigration irrégulière provient de l'articulation, dans une conjoncture d'urgence, de facteurs qui tiennent aux conditions structurelles d'insertion à l'international des acteurs du Sud, d'effets d'aubaine et de cadrages interprétatifs rendus compatibles. L'internationalisation d'acteurs sénégalais en charge de cet agenda a alors eu pour conséquences de générer un registre d'action victimaire, contraignant toute action protestataire, et de nourrir factionnalisme et concurrence au sein des champs associatif et politique, locaux et nationaux.     

Third World Military Spending

This article critically examines the concept of 'partnership', ubiquitous in contemporary development aid discourses. It investigates whether the language of 'partnership' signifies a change in aid relations away from the stark exertion of power characteristic of the conditionality decades of the 1980s and 1990s, or, conversely, whether 'partnership' is merely the latest guise behind which power-based relations continue to operate. A conceptual framework facilitates the deconstruction of the recently established 'Partnership for Governance Reform' in Indonesia, posited as a co-operative venture between national stakeholders and the international community. Elements of partnership or of power are sought through an examination of decision-making structures and activities. Findings are of the largely rhetorical and instrumental use of 'partnership' by international actors. Although there is nominal control by Indonesian actors, decision-making bodies are constructed in a manner which ensures that the reform agenda of international agencies remains relatively unchallenged, both in terms of what is included and excluded. Contrary to the official discourse of partnership as encouraging locally formulated reform strategies, the notions of 'partnership' and 'local ownership' simultaneously disguise and legitimise the interventions of international agencies in domestic reform processes, serving to mystify power asymmetry.     

L'évolution de la justice traditionnelle dans l'Afrique francophone

L'histoire du football Rwanda commence avec la colonisation du pays. En une cinquantaine d'années, ce jeu sport d'origine anglaise, en intégrant une société agro-pastorale et guerrière, est devenu une pratique culturelle locale. Comprendre ce phénomène nécessite d'articuler l'ancrage colonial d'une activité cosmopolite aux [ré]inventions culturelles locales suscitées par son implantation. Ce texte vise à montrer comment un jeu de balle, en traversant une société en cours d'occidentalisation, a marqué l'édification d'une modernité guerrière reçue et façonnée par les joueurs de l'époque. En traversant les transpositions ludiques d'enjeux sociaux et politiques plus larges, on observe que cette pratique, tout en participant du procès de "civilisation" que s'administra l'institution coloniale, constitua l'un des fers de lance de la lutte pour l'émancipation.     

Louis-Paul Aujoulat: Figure controversée de la vie politique camerounaise, 1935-56

L'évocation de son nom aujourd'hui suscite diverses controverses, traduisant parfois l'estime mais généralement l'antipathie dans les différentes couches de la population camerounaise. Le docteur Louis-Paul Aujoulat foule le sol camerounais par l'entremise de l'association Ad lucem en 1935. Sous le manteau de la charité chrétienne, il marque sa présence au Cameroun par un humanisme débordant qui lui a valu le sobriquet Aujoulat l'africain. Cette popularité le propulse dans l'arène politique:, il est élu député à la première Assemblée constituante de juin 1946. Parlementaire, il se donne corps et âme à la tâche d'arrimer le Cameroun à l'Union française et, surtout, à former une élite camerounaise garante des intérêts de la France. C'est ainsi qu'il se mettra en travers des aspirations des nationalistes camerounais. Il tombe en disgrâce en 1956, face à son filleul André-Marie Mbida. Le docteur Aujoulat a laissé au Cameroun les stigmates d'une part de l'homme qui aura combattu avec détermination la conquête d'une indépendance réelle, telle que revendiquée par les nationalistes, et d'autre part de l'architecte de la politique tendant à intégrer et à maintenir le Cameroun sous le joug de la France par le biais d'une indépendance factice.     

Book reviews

Improving the quality of public participation in council decision making continues to be a key goal of local government 'modernisation'. Different rationales for this have been advanced, including consumerist aims of service improvement, participation as an important value in itself, and participation as a survival strategy for local government. Based on surveys of, and interviews with, councillors and senior officers in Scottish local government, this article explores the ways in which concepts of 'consumerism' and 'citizenship' inform councils' approaches to public participation.     

The Cultural Logic of Work: Explaining Labour Deployment and Piece-Rate Contracts in Matar Taluka,Gujarat - Parts 1 and 2

This two-part essay seeks to explain why group-based and individual piecework arrangements have become the modal form of payment for a variety of agricultural tasks in central Gujarat, India. Part 1 of the essay reviews New Institutional Economics (NIE) and Marxist Political Economy (MPE) approaches to the labour process, and claims that while the 'efficiency' and 'disciplinary' considerations emphasized by NIE and MPE in their explanations of contractual change are important influences on the labour process, specific institutional outcomes depend heavily on the cultural realities of actors' practices. Part 2 challenges the epistemological assumptions of NIE and MPE narratives, specifically that agents with stable identities perform actions with fixed meanings. Instead, the recent surge in piecework employment must be viewed as part of an ongoing tussle between the dominant Lewa Patel caste and the subordinate Baraiya/Koli caste to alter their relative standings in the social order. Their unceasing attempts to reinvent their group identities have involved shifting understandings of 'work' - with direct implications for labour contracts. As a corrective to NIE and MPE, the essay proposes a semiotic approach to the labour process that bundles the notions of 'social regulation' and 'self-regulation' into the concept of 'work governmentality'.     

African-Caribbean women, (post)? Diaspora,and the meaning of home

ABSTRACT

Drawing on bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Carole Boyce-Davies, this paper develops an ethical framework to provide a gendered analysis of relative power inside and outside the home. In doing so, it considers the ways in which our view of home as African-Caribbean women, impacts our understanding of '(post) diaspora' (Dunn, Leith, and Suzanne Scafe. 2019. “African-Caribbean Women: Migration, Diaspora, Post-Diaspora.” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 13: 1–16) in the UK. Insofar as home is central to the idea of diaspora, I suggest that home must be conceptualised as an interdependent 'adult's' home rather than a dependent 'child's' home. On this reading, in the context of global power relations, I caution that while offering a useful and necessary point of departure from diaspora, the use of 'post' could be deployed to undermine an unapologetically intersectional black politics. As such, I claim the (Post) Diaspora Network's methodology, rather than the term itself, best demonstrates the liberatory intent and importance of a (post) diaspora subjectivity.     

Didactic Realism in Ousmane Sembene's Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu

La Republique islamique de Mauritanie a la triste réputation d'être l'un des quelques pays au monde ou des formes traditionnelles d'esclavage persistent malgré les multiples tentatives de les éradiquer. Mais on ne connait que peu de choses sur le mouvement social de contestation de l'esclavage créé dans ce pays par des activistes d'origine servile depuis la fin des années 1970. Cet article cherche à combler cette lacune en retraçant la trajectoire heurtée de ce mouvement en mettant l'accent sur les transformations successives de ses modes d'action. On s'intéressera surtout au mouvement des Haratines suivant les formes d'organisation qu'il est amené à adopter, les modes d'action qu'il met en oeuvre et les débouchés de son activisme.     

Locating black feminist resistance through diaspora and post-diaspora in Edwidge Danticat’s and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short stories

ABSTRACT

Migrating to the US is transformative in the short stories in Edwidge Danticat's Krik? Krak! and Chimamanda Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck. The currents of Blackness, gender and class alter their characters' experiences of the world, shaped by the global flows of migration taking place under neoliberal capitalism. This essay explores the nuanced and conflicting ways diaspora and post-diaspora spaces can facilitate Black feminist resistance in Danticat's ‘Caroline's Wedding' and Adichie's ‘Imitation'. I offer a Black feminist analysis, paying attention to the literary body as the site where tensions are dramatised. My reading of Danticat's and Adichie’s short stories leads to a progressive reconsideration of diaspora.     

Local Government Reforms in Great Britain,Sweden, Germany and France: Between Multi-Function and Single-Purpose Organisations

This four-country comparison has four sections. First, some remarks on appropriate definitions and concepts are made (inter alia by introducing and emphasising the distinction between 'traditional' and New Public Management-inspired administrative reforms). Then, country by country accounts of the pertinent reforms are submitted 'in a nutshell'. Third, with the 'convergence or divergence?' question in mind, the conclusion is put forward that significant differences persist (and even increase), particularly between Sweden and Germany, on the one hand, and England and France on the other. In the final section, an attempt is made to assess the 'performance' of the different local government systems in looking at their capacity to 'co-ordinate' policies and activities. It is argued that Sweden's and Germany's traditional type of democratically accountable, multi-functional and territorially viable local government does relatively well in achieving policy co-ordination, democratic participation and political accountability. Great Britain and France, however, could do better.     

Strategic Culture,Representations of Nuclear (In)Securities,and the Government of India: A Critical Constructivist Perspective

In this article, I use Alastair Johnston's concept of strategic culture re-visited through a critical constructivist perspective to analyze the representations of India's strategic culture and nuclear policy choices. In doing so, I explore how the representational practices of (and the mutually-constitutive relation between) India's nationalist identity/Self and its strategic environment, facilitated via its political leaders’ ideological lenses, have produced shifting representations of India's strategic environment to justify the nation's nuclear policy choices. In exploring this representational linkage between India's strategic environment and its nuclear (in)securities, I am cognizant that anarchy is a challenge facing India's task of nation-making and thus realism serves as a partially valid explanation for understanding the logic proliferation. Yet, my study demonstrates how culturally guided interpretations of what constitutes the Indian Self have divergently re-interpreted India's strategic environment and (in)securities to define the nation's nuclear policy choices.     

China's Engagement with Neo-liberalism: Path Dependency,Geography and Party Self-Reinvention

China's post-Mao market reform, even after the Asian crisis, does not conform to the standard IMF/World Bank model and the state continues to mediate market reform. Three principal factors have influenced how the state mediates China's market reform: path dependency, a result of China's communist and nationalist revolution; China's geography, which favours developmental-state-type industrialisation; and most important of all, the Chinese Communist Party's successful post-Mao self-reinvention that has enabled it to remain in power as a monopolistic party. These factors determine that China's engagement with neo-liberalism will be a loose hug rather than an intimate embrace.     

Is It Ideology or Desperation: Why Do Organizations Deploy Women in Violent Terrorist Attacks?

Why do some terrorist organizations deploy women on the front lines and in violent attacks? This study explores the social conditions, economic factors, and organizational characteristics that might explain women's participation in violent terrorist activity. With a new data set of 395 terrorist organizations, women's participation in terrorist attacks was quantified and coded. The logistic regression analysis results suggest that women's educational attainment, social rights, terrorist organization's age and size, and the level of a country's economic development are important predictors of the deployment of women in terrorist violence while a terrorist group's ideological or religious orientation and the level of democracy do not significantly influence the likelihood of women's participation.     

Globalising Russia? The neoliberal/ nationalist two-step and the Russification of the West

This paper argues that the major ideological dynamic of the post-cold war era is the conflictive complicity of neoliberalism and various authoritarian and racist nationalisms. This is nowhere more apparent than in post-Soviet Russia. Indeed, far from being 'exceptional', contemporary Russia actually provides an exemplary instance of where the neoliberal road to the market is really taking a great number of countries - in the first instance, the debt-ridden countries of the so-called 'Third World'. But perhaps the lessons of Russia's experience extend somewhat further. Might it not be the case that, in an epoch in which IMF-style 'structural adjustment' policies are extended to all and sundry, those pathologies which at first seemed the exclusive preserve of 'backward nations', are coming increasingly to install themselves in the very heartlands of the 'West'? If this describes an important aspect of the historical process today, it is a process that has an additional, often neglected, negative condition of possibility: the more-or-less comprehensive defeat of the Left world-wide: the defeat, in other words, of progressive anti-capitalist models of modernisation and development. Any viable challenge to neoliberal globalisation and racist nationalism will therefore depend, to begin with, on an accurate diagnosis of that defeat. Here the case of Russia is once again significant, above all for what Russian history dramatises, especially over the past decade, about the 'subjective factor' in political and social change. My exploration of these issues is pursued here with reference to the recent impressive account of globalisation advanced by Russian political scientist Boris Kagarlitsky. However, the mismatch in Russia between the huge scale of the recent social catastrophe and the small size of the popular protest points to what Kagarlitsky's account misses. To begin to advance an alternative to the neoliberal/nationalist two-step, to disarticulate a progressive response to neoliberal globalisation from racist nationalist responses, it will be necessary to develop a more careful relationship to another two-step, that of Marxism/'postmodern identity politics'. We can make a start in this respect by foregrounding the psychoanalytic dimension of fantasy.     

Fezzes in the river: identity politics and European diplomacy in the Middle East on the eve of World War II

This article analyzes how the Poles and Jews who disappeared from the western Ukrainian city of L'viv as a result of the Second World War are remembered in the city today. It examines a range of commemorative practices, from monuments and museums to themed cafes and literature, and analyzes how these practices interact to produce competing mnemonic narratives. In this respect, the article argues for an understanding of the city as a complex text consisting of a diverse range of mutually interdependent mnemonic media produced by a range of actors. The article focuses in particular on the ways in which Ukrainian nationalist narratives interact with the memory of the city's “lost others.” The article also seeks to understand L'viv's memory culture through comparison with a range of Polish cities that have faced similar problems with commemorating vanished communities, but have witnessed a deeper recognition of these communities than has been the case in L'viv. The article proposes reasons for the divergences between the memory cultures of L'viv and that found in Polish cities, and attempts to outline the gradual processes by which L'viv's Polish and Jewish pasts might become more widely integrated into the city's memory culture.     

The Taliban's 'other' crimes

This paper explores possible legal responses to the Taliban's 'other' crimes--those inflicted against Afghans during Taliban rule. This criminality largely has been rendered invisible by virtue of the international community's focus on punishing the Taliban's support of transnational terrorists, in particular al-Qaeda. This invisibility is problematic given that carefully constructed prosecutions of these 'other' crimes could play an important role in post-conflict reconciliation and national reconstruction in Afghanistan. Such reconciliation and reconstruction can legitimise a representative post-conflict state and curb terrorist recidivism.     

Notes on contributors

This short article explores the introduction of directly elected mayors in England and identifies that the case for mayors, as made within New Labour's agenda of 'modernisation', has proceeded on the basis of inconsistent arguments. The article suggests the failure of the reforms either to deliver empowered 'big hitters' or to transform levels of interest in local electoral politics. It explores the diminishment of the public discourse of mayoralty, from one of high ambition and capacity to a more beleaguered discourse of enfeeblement and disenchantment. It argues that while it is easy to explain the project's lack of early impact as being the result of effective resistance by vested interests, critical attention must be paid to the problematic nature of the proposals themselves and that the experience of mayors is symptomatic of a broader incoherence within the 'modernisation' agenda.