The ‘Crisis’ in political development theory

The authors argue that high borrowing costs discourage many rural poor in low income countries from using formal loans. Borrowing costs are defined as nominal interest payments, plus borrower loan transaction costs, plus changes in the purchasing power of money. Farm level information from Bangladesh, Brazil and Colombia is presented to show that small borrowers incur substantially higher borrowing costs on formal loans than do large borrowers. It is suggested that higher nominal interest rates may induce lenders to reduce overall borrowing costs for the small and new borrower.     

The politics of post-conflict space: the mysterious case of missing graffiti in ‘post-troubles’ Northern Ireland

Why is there so little graffiti in Northern Ireland compared to cities in North America and Europe – including Great Britain, to which it is constitutionally connected, and Ireland, with which it is geographically connected? This question is particularly perplexing given the highly developed political mural tradition on both sides of the sectarian divide in the North, and the almost 15 years that have passed since the signing of the Peace Agreement ending some three decades of militarized conflict. This paper explores the connections between the absence of graffiti, and the street-level structures and processes of reconciliation or conflict – with a specific focus on the geopolitics of paramilitary control within communities throughout Northern Ireland. The contributions of the paper are three-fold: (1) it highlights the importance of graffiti as a (usually neglected) lens for assessing the degree to which the expected benefits of a peace agreement are experienced at the street level; (2) it addresses the methodological challenge of how to examine something that is not there (specifically, it studies the absence of graffiti in Northern Ireland by comparing it to the logic, mechanics and meanings of graffiti elsewhere); and (3) it questions the well-marketed representation of Northern Ireland as a unqualified case of successful post-agreement peace.     

The geopolitics of ‘Enclavisation’and the demise of a two-stateSolution to the Israeli – Palestinian conflict

This paper argues that Israel's military strategy since the outbreak of the second Intifada, in September 2000, has been one not merely of ‘security’ or ‘counter-terror’ but part of a longer-term strategy of spatial demolition and strangulation. This strategy seems predicated on two aims: unilateral separation from the Palestinian population, and its concomitant territorial dismemberment. Withdrawal from a totally controlled and isolated Gaza, in effect the latter's enclavisation, is part of this strategy. Such an enclave will in effect be functionally and spatially sundered from another chain of Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank. From an Israeli perspective, driven by its own distinctive territorial imperative, such separation will ensure Israeli control of and sovereignty over the best land and water resources, and control of all borders and border areas. It is further argued that the policy of unilateral separation and strangulation, the destruction and planned enclavisation of Gaza, and covert and overt settlement expansion in the West Bank—its dismemberment through exclavization, has in effect shattered the spatial basis of a two-state solution.     

Going Underground: the political economy of the ‘left turn’ in South America

This article argues that South America’s ‘revolutionary’ left turn can be best explained by its assertion of state property over natural resource extraction. The recent history of the leftist movements in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador relates to the failures of the neoliberal reforms applied in the region decades before, hence the dismantling of core orthodox policies has been critical for them once in power. This has been possible through the expansion of state action in the economy, but mainly through the governance of hydrocarbon extraction and the control of subsoil rents. Resource extraction has been central to the political economy of Andean left-wing revolutionaries, responsible for many of their successes but also their impending challenges. This rearticulation of underground governance is linked to global transformations that give prominence to emerging economies and reinforces these countries’ position in the world economy as providers of primary commodities.     

Harsh State Repression as a Cause of Suicide Bombing: The Case of the Palestinian–Israeli Conflict

Although students of social movements have established that state repression strongly affects protesters’ choice of tactics, this finding has been ignored by most analysts of suicide bombing. Based on data collected from various sources, including 88 interviews the author conducted in 2006 with senior leaders of six Palestinian political organizations and close relatives and friends of Palestinian suicide bombers, this article argues that harsh state repression is a major cause of suicide bombing. It shows that understanding the effect of state repression is crucial to clarifying many of the unsolved puzzles concerning the rationales of organizations that employ suicide bombing, the motivations of individual suicide bombers, and the reasons why this tactic has become popular in some societies. The article concludes that there are three types of organizational rationales underlying the use of suicide bombing. Suicide bombing may be an extreme reaction to extreme state repression, a combined reactive and strategic action, or a purely strategic action. Different contexts and organizations typify these organizational rationales.     

The case of the ‘other India’ and Indian ir scholarship

ir scholarship in India has focused on the borders, territory and sovereignty of the Indian state, overlooking the rich complexity of interior border formation between colonial and independent India. The paper argues that the study of the princely states under the British paramountcy (1858–1947), neglected so far, is valuable to ir scholarship on three grounds. First, in mapping colonial India’s engagement with the outside world, the focus has been solely on British India. The princes were equally participative and perceptive of the outside world. Second, the princely states represent yet another challenge to the Westphalian notion of sovereignty, demonstrating the limited capacity of European categories to understand the ‘non-West’. Third, incorporating the paramountcy system in the genealogy of sovereignty of the Indian subcontinent offers a fresh account of border construction inside the state.     

‘State of exception’ or ‘state in exile’? The fallacy of appropriating Agamben on Palestinian refugee camps

To refer to Palestinian refugee camps as states of exception, appropriating the paradigm of Giorgio Agamben, is definitely tempting. Agamben argues that in times of crisis, individual rights of citizens are diminished and entire categories of people kept outside the political system. Nevertheless, there are flaws in applying Agamben’s perspective on Palestinian camps. It acquits the camp residents from the autonomy over their own political agency. Historically, in Lebanon, camp residents experienced an almost limitless access to free political organisation. But this access has not been converted into the development of representative, legitimate political structures.     

The ‘end of diaspora’ is just the beginning: music at the crossroads of Jewish,African, and Ethiopian diasporas in Israel

ABSTRACT

The ‘return’ of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in the last three decades provides an alternative case. In this presentation, I focus on the prominent role of music as ethno-racial information for Ethiopian Israelis as they engage with the process of homing and integrating in Israel. I explore their experience as black Jews through the musical tastes of young Ethiopian Israelis. For these youths, far from leaving their Ethiopianness behind, music is the fodder for actively reinventing it. I explore how they claim their place as Jews in Israel through participation in the musical communities of Ethiopian and African diasporas.     

Violent Narco-Cartels or US Hegemony? The political economy of the ‘war on drugs’ in Mexico

Mainstream analysis and commentary on drug trafficking and related violence in Mexico focuses overwhelmingly on the narco-cartels as sources of the problem and presents the US as a well intentioned player helping to conduct a ‘war on drugs’ out of concern for addiction, crime and violence. This article offers an alternative interpretation, grounded in critical political economy, showing that in addition to fuelling the narcotics industry in Mexico thanks to its large drug consumption and loose firearms regulations, the US shares much responsibility for its expansion thanks to its record of support for some of the main players in the drugs trade, such as the Mexican government and military, and by implementing neoliberal reforms that have increased the size of the narcotics industry. The war on drugs has served as a pretext to intervene in Mexican affairs and to protect US hegemonic projects such as nafta, rather than as a genuine attack on drug problems. In particular, the drugs war has been used repeatedly to repress dissent and popular opposition to neoliberal policies in Mexico. Finally, US banks have increased their profits by laundering drug money from Mexico and elsewhere; the failure to implement tighter regulations testifies to the power of the financial community in the US.     

Reconstruction as modernisation: the ‘post-conflict’ project in Afghanistan

This paper examines the post-war reconstruction programme in Afghanistan, arguing that it contains the seeds of radical social change. The paper analyses the tensions of the present reconstruction project in light of the past experience of similar programmes launched by Afghan rulers and their foreign supporters. The central argument is that the conflation of post-war reconstruction with a broader agenda for development and modernisation has brought out a wide range of tensions associated with social change. Simultaneously the prominent foreign role in the undertaking has increasingly had negative effects. As a result, the entire project shows signs of severe contradictions that are adding to the problems caused by the growing insurgency.     

‘The new Europeans’: the image of the African refugee in European literature

Abstract

This essay examines the representation of African refugees and asylum seekers in European literature in general, as well recent life writings and literature for young adults in particular. Examples will be drawn from writers as diverse as Benjamin Zephaniah and Senait G. Mehari. It is argued that the selected refugee stories invest in narrating an imagined community of ‘the new Europeans’ and thus invite readers to a plural reading of history. Following this train of thought, I am particularly interested in the interplay between images and motifs that evoke and shape various nation-states while illuminating an imagined European community. I therefore seek to excavate a transcultural imagery that characterizes refugee and asylum seekers as the ‘new Europeans’ by utilizing narrative strategies which reflect Paul Ricoeur's ideas about a new ethos for Europe.     

The paradoxes of the ‘everyday’: scrutinising the local turn in peace building

With the advent of the local turn in the mid-2000s, critical approaches have attempted to rethink peace building from the bottom up, placing local agents at the centre of the debate, declaring the end of top-down governance and affirming the fragmented, complex and plural nature of the social milieu. While local turn approaches have become popular in peace-building theory, this article invites the reader to question and problematise the local turn’s use of the concept of ‘everyday’, in order to explore paradoxes and contradictions that indicate the need to think more deeply about the impact of the local turn’s project of critique.     

Public–private efficiency in the delivery of services of general economic interest: The case of urban transport

This paper studies urban transport, a public service with extensive initiatives towards deregulation and privatisation throughout the European Union and in other developed and developing countries. The relative merits of deregulation, public or private provision and the implications of different policies for the performance of public services have become important issues. A crucial question is what type of operating and regulatory environment is best suited to stimulate efficiency in public service delivery. This paper analyses specifically the effect of privatisation and deregulation on the technical efficiency of bus services in 73 cities, in order to compare performance in cities with bus services provided by public operators, private operators, both types simultaneously or in which the service is deregulated. The behaviour of the different types of operators analysed in this paper shows that competition – total or partial – is effective in controlling costs.     

The ‘Ankara Moment’: the politics of Turkey’s regional power in the Middle East, 2007–11

Around 2007 Turkey became a regional power in the Middle East, a status it has maintained at least until the outset of the Arab Revolt in 2011. To understand why Turkey only became a regional power under the Muslim akp government and why this happened at the specific point in time that it did, this article highlights the self-reinforcing dynamics between Turkey’s domestic political-economic transformation in the first decade of this century and the advantageous regional developments in the Middle East at the same time. It holds that this specific linkage—the ‘Ankara Moment’—and its regional resonance in the neighbouring Middle East carries more transformative potential than the ‘Washington Consensus’ or the ‘Beijing Consensus’ so prominently discussed in current global South politics.     

Regionalisation as a Driving Force of EU Widening: Recovering from the EU ‘Carrot Crisis’ in the ‘East’

This article focuses on the ‘globalisation-cum-regionalisation’ process in the European Union that has led to the emergence of functional macro-regions. It provides first a classification of regionalisation, and describes the organisational and mental barriers of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). The second part traces the shift of the ENP from the South to the East that has also activated the EU's pre-accession policy in the West Balkan region and the Eastern Partnership programme. Finally, it argues that the Baltic Strategy and the Danube Strategy as functional macro-regions are the main instruments to overcome the weaknesses of the incentive-based approach in the EU's conditionality (or, as it is described here, its ‘carrot crisis’).     

Advocating for the cause of the “victims of Communism” in the European political space: memory entrepreneurs in interstitial fields

The European Parliament (EP) adopted, between 2004 and 2009, a series of resolutions calling for recognition of Communist crimes and commemoration of their victims. This article focuses on an overlooked aspect of anti-Communist activism, the awareness-raising activities carried out by some Central European Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to perpetuate the cause through networks that enable them to exchange institutional credibility, scientific legitimacy, and policy-oriented knowledge with Institutes of National Memory, parts of academia, and victims associations. Although they use the techniques of expertise and scandalization that are often effective in European institutions, these memory entrepreneurs have largely failed to further their claims in the European Union (EU) after 2009. In line with the turn toward “practice” in EU studies and the increased attention paid to agency in memory politics, this article contends that the conditions of production of their narrative of indictment of Communism accounts for this relative lack of success. Because their demands produced a strong polarization inside the EP while colliding with established Western patterns of remembrance, these MEPs’ reach remains limited to their Conservative peers from the former Eastern bloc. This weak national and ideological representativeness hinders their capacity to impose their vision of the socialist period in the European political space.     

An education in homecoming: peace education as the pursuit of ‘appropriate knowledge’

In this paper, we argue that two key trends – an unfolding ecological crisis and a reduction in the amount of (cheap) energy available to society – bring into question both the relevance and the resilience of existing educational systems, requiring us to rethink both the content and the form of education in general, and peace education in particular. Against this background, we consider the role education might play in enabling citizens and societies to adapt peacefully to conditions of energy descent and a less benign ecological system, taking seriously the possibility that there will be fewer resources available for education. Drawing on Wes Jackson’s and Wendell Berry’s concept of an education in ‘homecoming’, and on E.F. Schumacher’s concept of ‘appropriate technology’, we suggest a possible vision of peace education. We propose that such education might be focused around ‘appropriate knowledge’, commitment to place, and an understanding of the needs and characteristics of each local context. We then consider an example of what this might mean in practice, particularly under conditions of increasing resource scarcity: Permaculture education in El Salvador, we suggest, illustrates the characteristics and relevance of an education that aims to foster ‘appropriate knowledge’ within a particular and very challenging context. The paper concludes by considering the wider implications of our argument.     

The myth of ‘independent judiciary’: the evolution of judiciary-executive relations in Turkish politics

The position of judiciary in politics is an important area of discussion for both legal and political experts. The issue has particularly been on Turkish political agenda for the past decade with the emergence of a strong single-party government under the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi-JDP) rule. This article aims to analyse the evolution of relations between the judiciary and executive in Turkey from a historical perspective by examining the Republican era until the JDP rule. The struggle over the control of institutions becomes more visible during periods of strong government and the analysis shows that the idea of an independent, apolitical judiciary is a myth that was created by the institutional and legal design of the Republic in the Turkish case and is not peculiar to the JDP government.