Unstable Antistatism: The Left, the Right, and The Outlaw Josey Wales

This essay is an examination of the diverse origins of modern conservative antistatism in the United States through an analysis of the 1976 film The Outlaw Josey Wales, and the book on which it was based. The consolidation of a conservative politics in the 1970s was achieved in part by the Right's appropriation of New Left antistatism via older forms of racial discourse. This emphasis on New Left influence helps explain the rise of the New Right in a way that is missed in conventional accounts, while demonstrating more generally that political discourse is always contingent and unstable, and open to unintended articulations.     

Education for Modernisation? The Impact of Higher Education Member Development Programmes on Councillors’ Perception and Performance of their Roles

The recent ‘modernisation’ process in local government has brought about the most significant, and certainly the most explicit, changes in councillor roles for decades. At the same time – partly as a result of this and partly for other reasons – there has been a significant growth in the provision of training for councillors, and in particular, training – or, rather, education – programmes provided by higher education institutions (HEIs). These accredited programmes, leading to standard, nationally recognised academic qualifications at a range of levels, first appeared in the early 2000s, and have been steadily growing since. The entry of supposedly disinterested institutions and academics and the introduction of accreditation into the field of member development raise a number of questions around potential conflicts of interest between councillors, officers and the academy, councillor motivation and selection processes. Of particular interest is the question of what HEIs and the courses they are providing are doing, deliberately or otherwise, to shape, reinforce or challenge the new (and old) roles explicitly and implicitly being introduced and promoted through the modernisation reforms. This article utilises interviews with councillors, local authority officers, academics and representatives of national bodies representing or with an interest in local government to examine how councillors’ roles and the way that they perform them are perceived by all involved, and whether these are altered by participation in a higher education programme of study.     

Decolonising online development studies? Emancipatory aspirations and critical reflections – a case study

Academics in high-income countries are increasingly launching development studies programmes through online distance learning to engage practitioner-students in low-income countries. Are such initiatives providing opportunities to critically tackle social injustice, or merely ‘mirroring’ relations of global inequality and re-entrenching imperial practices? Building on recent scholarship addressing efforts to ‘decolonise development studies’ and the complex power dynamics they encounter, we reflect on this question by analysing experiences of faculty and students in a United Kingdom-based online development studies programme, focusing particularly on perspectives of development practitioner-students working from Africa. We discuss barriers to social inclusivity – including the politics of language – that shaped participation dynamics in the programme as well as debates regarding critical development course content, rethinking possibilities for bridging counter-hegemonic development scholarship with practice-oriented approaches in a range of social contexts. Our analysis unpacks key tensions in addressing intertwined institutional and pedagogic dilemmas for an agenda towards decolonising online development studies, positioning decolonisation as a necessarily unsettling and contested process that calls for greater self-reflexivity.     

Perception of the relations between former colonial powers and developing countries

People register and process stimuli every day, creating an image of space–time reality involving multifaceted relations between various states. The authors have created a database consisting of articles from the periodical Le Monde diplomatique from 1954 to 2009. This paper focuses on investigating how strong relations are between former colonial powers and developing countries. The authors present an index showing the frequency of coincidence of opinion-shaping content in articles about one of the selected world powers and a developing country; they next establish a quantitative reference to dependency and world-systems theories.     

‘People and personal projects’: a rejoinder on the challenge of teaching development studies

Abstract

In response to Juan David Parra Heredia’s criticism of her earlier article about her use of post-development as a tool in teaching development studies, Wendy Harcourt reflects further on how the course analysed in 2016 has evolved in the last three years and corrects the misreadings of the pedagogical position-taking by the teachers in the course.     

Creating capacities for peacebuilding citizenship: history and social studies curricula in Bangladesh,Canada, Colombia,and México

Public education is one influence on how young people learn to navigate social conflicts and to contribute to building democratic peace, including their sense of hope or powerlessness. Social studies curricula, in particular, introduce core concerns, geographies, governance and civil society, and participation skills and norms. History education narratives frame identity, (dis)trust or peaceful coexistence, and provide exemplars of how social conflicts and injustice have been handled in the past. To shed light on these peacebuilding and peace-blocking choices, this paper examines government-sanctioned social studies and history curricula in contrasting contexts of violent conflict and peace: Bangladesh, Colombia, México, and (Ontario) Canada. Our comparative analysis shows how these official curricula (de)normalize violence and militarism, present national identities as hegemonic/exclusive or plural/inclusive, and create opportunities for teaching/learning peacebuilding citizenship competencies such as conflict dialog, human rights awareness, and engagement in collective processes of civil society and governance.     

Global South rhetoric in India’s policy projection

While an on-going statist project tries to portray India as a ‘rising power’ in world politics, the fact remains that India’s global projection continues to be heavily fashioned by the Global South rhetoric. Such rhetoric is inclusive of irredentism and contestation with western norms and ideals along with cooperation leading to a complex process of interactions shaping up the global order. For countries like India being claimant to the status of ‘civilisational state’, the strong urge for autonomy along with the self-perception of national and cultural greatness is shared by the elite along with a sense of strategic importance. Such identity formation, however, reduces and sometimes obliterates the gaps between ‘internal’ and ‘external’, bringing into academic scrutiny the whole range of policymaking and to what extent it matches the state rhetoric.     

China’s development: a new development paradigm?

The emergence of China as a development actor across the global South has raised significant questions regarding the extent to which the country presents new development opportunities to its compatriots in the South. My aim is to reflect on and parse out the experiences and policies that have shaped China’s development to assess how it can inform the field of development studies. I argue that we need to critically engage in China’s development process, as China’s own development has led to the emergence of many more problems than solutions, ranging from increasing inequality to exclusionary development practices pertaining to ethnic minorities.     

New Public Management Reforms in the Italian Universities: Managerial Tools,Accountability Mechanisms or Simply Compliance?

Since 2009, a cross-sectorial reform based on the New Public Management (NPM) principles introduced a performance management system in Italian universities. On the basis of the analysis of the documents regarding the performance management system produced by 60 public Italian universities as a result of the reform implementation, the paper investigates the performance management tools in relation to both completeness and use of them. The analysis highlights that the universities have implemented performance management tools in an unstructured and nonhomogeneous way. This allows formulation of hypotheses on the main determinants of this unsatisfactory result.     

Thinking and caring about indigenous peoples’ human rights: Swedish students writing history beyond scholarly debate

According to national and international guidelines, schools should promote historical thinking and foster moral values. Scholars have debated, but not analysed in depth in practice, whether history education can and should hold a normative dimension. This study analyses current human rights education in two Swedish senior high school groups, in classes meant to promote what has been described as conflicting ideals of historical thinking and empathy as caring. Content analysis of students’ exam essays shows intertwined relationships between critical thinking and judgements. The results also highlight how students care that people are treated unjustly; can identify different perspectives; link the past to the present and the future; and use corroboration of information to get the best grade. This analysis shows that the students focus on historical empathy as caring rather than sourcing and corroboration. However, all students combine normative judgements with the complicated act of more neutral perspective recognition in their papers. Evidently, students may combine historical thinking and empathy as caring in line with recommendations of international understanding when they write history about indigenous peoples’ human rights. These findings are significant to all researchers, teachers and decision-makers interested in furthering analytical skills or moral values in education.     

Automotive global value chains in Mexico: a mirage of development?

ABSTRACT

International monetary organisations argue the ‘developing countries’ should foster linkages to the world economy as a means to overcome backwardness. In this article we refute the narrative that Mexico has experienced industrial upgrading. Rather, industrial growth in Mexico over the last 40 years has been shaped by neoliberal economic policies which have turned the Mexican economy into an export-led manufacturing platform designed to supply the North American market, sustained by a precarious labour market. As a result, Mexico occupies the most labour-intensive and low value-added segments of regional production chains. To make this argument, we perform an in-depth analysis of the Mexican automotive industry, demonstrating that instead of being an engine for domestic industrial development, the auto industry has become a dominant economic sector through productive hyper-specialisation concentrated in the northern Mexican border states, a reliance on transnational capital, particularly from the United States, a disconnect with domestic markets, and the super-exploitation of labour.