Comparing Putin’s and Brezhnev’s Policies toward the Middle East

This article compares Moscow’s and Washington’s foreign policies toward the Middle East in 1982 and 2008. In 1982, Moscow and Washington each had a distinct set of friends and foes. In 2008, Washington still has a distinct set of friends and foes, but Moscow has relatively good relations with all governments and most major opposition movements in the region—the only exceptions being Al Qaeda and its affiliates. It is argued that Putin’s policy toward the Middle East is not really aimed at displacing the U.S. in the region, but protecting Russia and Russian interests from Al Qaeda and its allies. Indeed, a continued American presence in the region serves to protect Russian interests in the region.

Brazil’s political and economic crisis

Brazilian Interim President Michel Temer will probably serve out impeached President Dilma Rousseff's term. He is compelled to deal urgently with Brazil's distressed economy and scandalous corruption. But his lack of an electoral mandate, unpopularity and initial obduracy in appointing an all-white, all-male cabinet – perceived negatively as 'business as usual' backroom politics – cast doubt on his ability to do so effectively.     

Socialism and Kornai’s revolutionary perspective

Public Choice - In this paper, I argue that the principal message of Janos Kornai’s work was to underscore that the dysfunctional properties of socialism are endemic and systemic, and cannot...     

Responsible Government and Capitalism’s Cycles

This article explores the tensions Peter Mair identified between responsible and responsive government in relation to the constraints and opportunities of an internationally integrated and instituted economy. Drawing on the example of the short period of democratic stability and its subsequent breakdown in the Weimar Republic, the article argues that in Weimar Germany’s ‘golden twenties’, governments could bridge the gap between responsibility – defined as a commitment to deep international integration – and responsiveness to its citizens mainly through the availability of cheap credits. With the onset of the Great Depression, responsible government became tantamount to increasingly drastic austerity policies. These policies were not only an economic failure, they also made the gap between responsible and responsive government unbridgeable. The article also shows how a similar cycle of good and bad times, with similar consequences with regard to the tensions between responsible and responsive government seem to have occurred in the crisis that has been affecting the Eurozone since 2009.     

Jordan’s pragmatism and current challenges

Historically, Jordan has handled the challenges of being located in a contested region with effective pragmatism. It now faces refugee pressure and the threat of jihadist infiltration from Syria, as well as a weak economy. Amman will have to strike a delicate balance between security cooperation with the United States against the Islamic State and cooperation with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab states against the Assad regime to ensure it gleans maximum strategic rent.     

History and Thought in China’s Traditions

The recent turn to China??s traditions has the potential to correct for the Eurocentrism of Political Science theories. Nevertheless, the overwhelming emphasis on political thought, especially Confucianism, may have its drawbacks. This article suggests that political scientists who are interested in building theories and drawing policy implications should study the verifiable, i.e., history. Unless the purpose is to study philosophy for its own sake, political scientists should study political thought in practice, rather than political thought divorced from history. This article first discusses why it is important to examine history beyond thought. It then analyzes why scholars should not conflate political thought with historical practice. It anchors the analysis with a high-profile recent book on ancient Chinese thought.     

Commentaries on Brunner and Willard’s ‘professional insecurities’

Commentary

Commentaries on Brunner and Willards professional insecurities     

Totalitarianism and justice: Hannah Arendt’s and Judith N. Shklar’s political reflections in historical and theoretical perspective

We locate Arendt’s and Shklar’s writings within what Katznelson has identified as an attempt to create a new language for politics after the cataclysm of the twentieth century, and Greif has called the new ‘maieutic’ discourse of ‘re-enlightenment’ in the ‘age of the crisis of man’. More specifically, we compare and contrast two related, but in many ways also differing, ways of thinking about totalitarianism and its legal repercussions. To this end, we examine two sets of studies: Arendt’s The origins of totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil and Shklar’s After utopia: The decline of political faith and Legalism: An essay on law, morals, and politics. While The origins of totalitarianism and After utopia discussed totalitarian ideology and its consequences for modern political thought, the Eichmann report and Legalism dealt with the question of whether and how justice is possible after the extreme experience of totalitarianism. We argue that the maieutic impulse led Arendt and Shklar to find distinct routes to address a common concern. Our paper ends with a discussion of some of the surplus meaning that was generated by the different maieutic performances of the two thinkers.     

Beyond the ‘Auschwitz syndrome’: Holocaust historiography after the Cold War

ABSTRACT

The end of the Cold war has seen an explosion in Holocaust history, and some significant changes in the main historiographical explanations. The ‘return of ideology’ that began displacing the ‘functionalist’ or ‘structuralist’ dominance of the 1980s remains strong. But it is being supplemented by very detailed regional and local studies, by analyses of different experiences of ghettoization in different places, and by a focus on the widespread plunder and corruption that accompanied the killing process. This enormous attention to detail reveals that the Holocaust unfolded differently in different places; but it also demonstrates the existence of an overall framework in which all the operations took place, what we might call an ‘antisemitic consensus’. Simultaneously, historians have broadened the discussion of the Holocaust, situating it into a transnational or world-historical context of imperialism and colonialism. Stone outlines in broad brush some of these themes, and asks what effects they have had and will continue to have on Europeans' self-understanding in an age in which the post-war anti-fascist consensus has been dismantled while Holocaust-consciousness is officially enshrined into European identity.     

Joseph’s Squinting Eye: Race and Individualism in Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country

Peter Matthiessen’s novel Shadow Country offers a fictionalized account of the life of real-life character Edgar Watson. Matthiessen’s portrayal illustrates Jack Turner’s argument in Awakening to Race that atomistic individualism both justifies an individual’s success as a product of that person’s hard work and masks the racial inequality on which that success is actually predicated. Turner advocates an “awakening to race” as an important step toward replacing atomistic individualism with democratic individualism in American society. Matthiessen’s work deepens Turner’s analysis by showing that the whiteness of Watson’s atomistic individualism is inflected by masculinity. Further, Matthiessen depicts the difficulty of awakening to race for many white Americans. The Edgar Watson narrative serves to show that while closing one’s eyes to race may appear to be an advantage for most white people, not awakening to race actually exacts a devastating psychological tax. That kind of insight, which approaching political theory through literature affords, may help white Americans circumvent psychological mechanisms of denial and acknowledge the difficult history of their country.     

Militarized occupations: evolution of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s 1920s intersectional conversation

Abstract

This article brings together transnational feminism, intersectionality, and militarized occupations by recovering Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s (WILPF) 1920s intersectional conversation. Mary Church Terrell, Helen Curtis, Addie Hunton, Jane Addams, and Emily Balch negotiated WILPF’s stance on two occupations: the controversy over the French use of colonial troops in its occupation of Germany, and the US occupation of Haiti. My argument is that through the evolving intersectional conversation, WILPF came to understand the necessity of weaving racialized sexual politics into its analysis of and activism around the politics of militarized occupations. To develop the argument, I construct and apply an ideal type of an intersectional conversation that incorporates a notion of unbracketing substantive inequalities during the conversation. I conclude with some implications for today about what we can learn in the twenty-first century from a moment in an early twentieth-century genealogy of intersectional transnational feminism.     

Iran’s nuclear programme and diplomacy under pressure

A recent explosion at the Natanz nuclear complex set back Iran’s nuclear development by one to two years but may encourage Iran to move its centrifuge production underground, where it will be hidden from international supervision. While Iran is also under diplomatic pressure, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) of 2015 is likely to survive until the US presidential election in November.     

Hajer’s institutional void and legitimacy without polity

Maarten Hajer’s “Policy without polity? Policy analysis and the institutional void” (2003) was a harbinger of an age of uncertainty. Instead of a classical-modernist model, where political institutions dominate policy-making structure, regulated actors and provided clear legitimation norms, he outlined a new form of policy-making, devoid of settled norms. This essay provides a summary of the article’s impact on scholarly research over the past 14 years along three lines—ontology, processes and outcomes. In relation to the latter, which has attracted the most research efforts, it argues that recent research on the new design orientation can shed some light on why policy-making in the institutional void can lead to poor outcomes. This completes the ideational turn required by Hajer’s interpretive ambition.     

Kornai’s Overcentralization and naïve empiricism

Public Choice - This paper addresses Janos Kornai’s early work on the socialist economy as summarized in his first book, Overcentralization in Economic Administration. In this context, I...     

China’s shaky trade figures and their ramifications

Statistical problems and anomalies are arising with respect to China's troubled economy, bringing into doubt some bedrock economic indicators. Perhaps the most important one is China’s trade surplus, which may be significantly overstated. This possibility makes a currency crisis, once considered highly improbable, less so. Such a crisis could reveal that much of what investors and analysts have assumed about China’s economy has been exaggerated.     

Paul Hirst’s encounters with Economy and Society

Abstract

This article examines the construction of the homo economicus in Argentina in the context of the last military dictatorship (1976–83). While the worldviews of the military and neo-liberal economists of the time were very different, their common concern for distortions in economic and political life made them translatable. These economists provided a new economic identity that would be in tune with monetarist theory, replace ‘distorting’ collective identities and allow individuals to be governed from a distance. I argue that the homo economicus was performed through two sets of tools: consumer campaigns and the financial press. However, individuals did not always behave as expected. The contradictions of neo-liberalism, between its liberalism and its quest to create self-regulating spheres through active government intervention, led to the financial crisis of 1980. Economists later blamed the crash on the irresponsibility of market actors and expressed doubt regarding the self-regulating model they had promoted. In the conclusion, the legacy of the attempt to perform the homo economicus is assessed.