A Power Horizontal. The Public–Private Enforcement of Judicial Decisions in Russia

Based on fieldwork done in Ekaterinburg, this article deals with the enforcement of legal decisions about economic disputes in the late 2000s in Russia. As state employees, bailiffs are responsible for the implementation of court decisions but their efficiency depends on the cases they deal with. In the most successful cases, they are backed by private enforcers, hired by the claimant and often coming from the law enforcement agencies. This common work reflects an informal public–private partnership from below in which bailiffs and private enforcers co-execute judicial decisions. Such autonomous public–private power configurations at local level challenge the governmental claim to build a ‘power vertical’ in Russia from the top.     

At the limits of spatial governmentality: A message from the tip of Africa

Urban studies scholars drawing on Foucault's analysis of governmentality have investigated how urban social orders are increasingly more concerned with the management of space rather than on the discipline of offenders or the punishment of offences (Merry, 2001). This paper examines the 'rationality' and efficacy of spatial governmentality in post-apartheid Cape Town, and shows how the city has increasingly become a 'fortress city' (Davis, 1990), much like cities such as Los Angeles, Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro. These 'global cities' are increasingly characterised by privatised security systems in middle class suburbs, shopping malls and gated communities (Caldeira, 1999). These spatial forms of governmentality draw on sophisticated security systems comprising razor wire and electrified walls, burglar alarms and safe rooms, as well as vicious guard dogs, neighbourhood watches, private security companies, and automated surveillance cameras. On the other side of the race and class divide are urban ghettoes characterised by growing poverty and everyday violence. These socio-spatial inequalities continue to be reproduced despite urban planning initiatives aimed at desegregating the apartheid city. Although the media and the middle classes highlight the dangers of crime and violence, they tend to ignore the structures of inequality that fuel the growth of crime syndicates and violent drug economies that are reproducing these urban governance crises. Given the diminished resources of the neo-liberal state, the policing of middle class residential and business districts is increasingly being 'outsourced' to private security companies. In working class neighbourhoods of Cape Town such as Manenberg, the state has attempted to re-establish governance by resorting to new forms of spatial governmentality. The paper draws attention to the limits of these attempts to assert state control through the management of space. Spatial governance in places like Manenberg will continue to be relatively ineffectual given existing levels of social inequality and racial polarization. Such processes are reproduced by massive unemployment and racialised poverty resulting from socio-spatial legacies of apartheid and Cape Town's shift from a manufacturing to a tourist, IT and financial services economy. Although this paper focuses on attempts at re-establishing governance in a crime and gangster-ridden working class neighbourhood of Cape Town, it addresses these issues in relation to city-wide shifts to new forms of spatial governmentality after apartheid.     

"Global Civil Society" and the Political Depoliticization of Global Governance

Activists, officials, and academics alike have often linked observations about an emerging global civil society to an incipient democratization of world politics. Global civil society is assumed to bring public scrutiny and "bottom-up" politics to international decision making "from outside" formal political institutions. Based on an analysis of uses of the concept of global civil society in 1990s global governance discourse (especially related to the major UN world conferences), this paper argues that the presumed democratization of world politics is better understood in terms of a double movement: on the one hand, "global civil society" depoliticizes global governance through the promotion of "human security" and "social development"; on the other hand, the emerging international public sphere (in the UN context) operates as a subsystem of world politics rather than opposing the system from outside. Practices of depoliticization are thus part of the political logic of (neo-)liberal global governance. The argument draws on Luhmann's systems theory and Foucault's analysis of governmentality.     

A Heterotopian Analysis of Maritime Refugee Incidents

Given the persistent significance of states in the determination of legal identities of people on the move, a consideration of the construction of people as legal (or illegal) migrants, refugees, or asylum-seekers must also recognize that these determinations take place in conjunction with the simultaneous processes through which spaces such as sovereign states or ships carrying asylum-seekers are constructed. A heterotopian analysis of the Tampa and the SIEVX of 2001 allows for a consideration of the ways in which notions of sovereignty, territory and governmentality work to stabilize ambiguous situations produced by the conflictual discourses of human rights and state power.     

Politics of responsibility: governing distant populations through civil society in Mozambique,Rwanda and South Africa

This article presents and analyses the findings of a research project on power relations in the context of development partnerships with civil society on HIV/AIDS in Mozambique, Rwanda and South Africa, and engages in a critical dialogue with governmentality analysis. It argues that contemporary neoliberal government needs to be understood as context-specific articulations of three forms of power discussed by Foucault – sovereignty, discipline and biopower – and, in the global domain, a fourth form of power – (new) imperialism. Further, the analysis demonstrates how the introduction of a ‘package of (de-)responsibilisation’ shapes CSOs’ activities so that they become competitive service providers, use evidence-based methods and produce measurable results. Addressing the issue of resistance, it shows how the transfer of responsibilities may involve tension and struggle – a politics of responsibility.     

Social Agency, Spatial Practices, and Power: The Micro-foundations of Fragmented Sovereignty in the Occupied Territories

The study of the relationships among social agency, spatial practices, and political power opens new directions for empirical inquiry and theorization of current modalities of sovereignty. Yet, recent research has overemphasized external variables, such as globalization and international forces, as conditioners of sovereignty and state power, with diminished attention on national and local realms. In the following article, I investigate state power beyond the limits of its official boundaries, by examining how intruder states produce, manage, and sustain effective authority over occupied territories and populations. I use the example of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank to demonstrate how such cases of political authority are based on fragmented sovereignty: comprised of multiple, localized, and relatively autonomous cores of power, instead of an all-encompassing structural and centralized modality of control. I propose that fragmented sovereignty is shaped and operated through the increasing autonomous power of ground level state agents and in the ways spatial perceptions and practices are interwoven into localized political processes.

What can security do for food? Lessons from Brazil

What are the analytical benefits of using the security vocabulary when addressing issues of human well-being? And to what extent can a security framing of these issues be useful in the normative and political sense – that is, when making judgements about existing policies and when formulating and implementing alternative ones? This article uses the case of food security to engage with these questions. It argues for a shift away from conceptual fine-tuning of what food security should mean and towards an appreciation of how security functions as a political modality. Whilst acknowledging that this modality can work to encourage international conflict, enable governmental control and empower global capitalism, the idea that security has an inherent logic which denies progressive politics is refuted. Drawing on the idea of emancipation in critical security studies, and applying it to empirical examples from contemporary Brazil, it is shown how food security can help expedite action to address harm and vulnerability, reinforce the public sphere and widen the scope of social concern.     

The Uses of Sovereignty in Twenty-first Century Russian Foreign Policy

Contemporary Russian foreign policy demonstrates a dual approach to state sovereignty, using a Westphalian model of sovereignty outside the former Soviet region and a post-Soviet model inside it. This approach performs three functions in contemporary Russian foreign policy: securing Russian national interests at domestic, regional, and international levels; balancing against the United States; and acting as a marker of ‘non-Western’ power identity in an emergent multipolar order. The conflict between these two models increasingly appears to threaten the last of these objectives, however, and as a means of advancing foreign policy objectives the approach thus appears caught in a self-defeating logic.     

State Project Europe: The Transformation of the European Border Regime and the Production of Bare Life

Giorgio Agamben refers to a basic problem in the constitution of the modern nation state: the state as a nation implies that "bare life" becomes the foundation of sovereignty. With the loss of their citizenship, refugees lose not only all their rights, but more fundamentally the "right to have rights" (Arendt). This dilemma of modern statehood does not vanish under conditions of European integration; it is rather re-scaled. Applying a state-theoretical approach to the European border regime, we will concentrate on the two main techniques by which the EU produces "bare life": the "camp" and the invisible "police state." It will become apparent that the institutionalization of "the right of every human being to belong to mankind" is still lacking. Yet, in contrast to Agamben, we do not trace this constellation back to the collapse of the concept of human rights, but to hegemonies and power relations.     

Overcoming Constraints of State Sovereignty: global health governance in Asia

Abstract

In an increasingly globalised world effective international communicable diseases control requires states to embrace basic norms informing global health governance. However, recent international public health crises have shown that states continue to use national sovereignty to justify non-compliance with these norms. In this article we use three recent high-profile examples from Asia in which the tight hold of state sovereignty cut into the effective implementation of international communicable disease control efforts. Taken together, the three cases illustrate a wider trend in which states historically diminished in structural power or subject to imperialist intrusion contest the legitimacy of global governance initiatives if they are perceived to be another vehicle for the imposition of exogenous norms that do not reflect the values or goals of that state. In response to these challenges, three strategies are posited for how the actors involved in protecting public health might overcome the constraints of state sovereignty to more effectively address global public health threats created by the fluid movement of pathogens across borders.     

PRIVATE POLICING: A VIEW FROM THE MALL

In many Western democratic societies the primacy of the police has begun to diminish with a proliferation of alternative service providers, particularly within the private security sector. This raises questions about how such bodies can best be mobilized and integrated within policing. This paper reports findings from three ethnographic case studies of private security teams operating within areas of semi‐public space, to advance understanding of their nature and operations. It shows how the character of security work is determined by vastly differing structural arrangements to those of the police, but by a similar heterogeneity of function. While private security is seen to have a valid place within the ‘extended police family’, it is depicted as a low status sector whose authority in undertaking policing derives from the autonomy of other more powerful players. Future ethnographies, it is therefore argued, need to focus on the corporate users that govern its activities.     

African Green Revolution,food sovereignty and constrained livelihood choice in Mozambique

This article examines the complicated food security agendas of the African Green Revolution and the food sovereignty models in Mozambique. Drawing on fieldwork conducted by the author in Mozambique in 2014 and 2015, the paper analyses how smallholder farmers engage with these two agrarian models. Whereas the literature frequently presents the African Green Revolution and the food sovereignty in oppositional frames, this paper finds that farmers in Mozambique utilize some of the tools that these models offer in complementary rather than competing ways. One such area is the use of commercial hybrid seeds and herbicides by some farmers associated with food sovereignty, an approach that runs counter to food sovereignty’s principles of agroecology. In Mozambique, farmers’ “lived experience” of food sovereignty is more a strategic response to their limited livelihood options, using whatever tools are available to them, rather than a resistance to power.     

National security and domestic policy-making: the similarities and the critical differences

This analysis focuses on the discussion of whether (and how) national security and domestic policy-making processes are similar and/or different. Though many similarities are evident, it is the contention of this article that there are critical differences between national security and domestic policy-making that fundamentally affect the output from each of them. In addition, it is essential that public administrators develop a fuller understanding of national security policy-making processes since these processes do have theoretical, practical, and organizational impacts on institutional effectiveness, democratic processes, and governmental productivity. Let's remember that in the immediate post-Vietnam period many of us in the public management sectors--federal, state, and local-- dreamed of vast amounts of money being mainstreamed into the domestic coffers. Today that expectation is called the “peace dividend”. Little did we understand how much policy-making sophistication was embedded in the DOD. Therefore, as we move into the 1990s, this analysis reminds public administrators of their responsibilities to understand the national security arena in order to detect both the unique features as well as the broader generalizations attending this microcosm of public policy-making. All of us in public administration must make certain that this fertile laboratory of public policy is researched and investigated so as to ensure that the proper policy trade-offs are made in the 1990s.     

Justifying military intervention: Yemen as a failed state

The Saudi-led military intervention into Yemen began on 26 March 2015, and it has largely been supported by the international community despite resulting in the world’s largest current humanitarian disaster. The paper explores the emergence of the failed state concept, particularly as it has impacted the norm of sovereignty. It shows how being defined as a failed state can undermine the norm of sovereignty. This article argues that Saudi Arabia has utilised the failed state concept to legitimise its military intervention into Yemen by framing the intervention as necessary to establish a strong executive power and protect the Yemeni people.     

TOWARDS GOOD GOVERNANCE: A HALF CENTURY OF INDIA'S ADMINISTRATIVE DEVELOPMENT

Since independence, India has undertaken a number of efforts to establish an effective development-oriented, citizen-friendly and responsive system of administration to contribute toward good governance. While the traditional system of public administration was appropriate for the pre-independence period, subsequent social, economic and political changes necessitated radical changes in policies and their implementation. A set of new issues called for a thorough reorientation of the system of public administration. Administrative development had, therefore, to be planned and executed in the face of ever-growing conflicts between various non-state actors/institutions and the state. The strategies for administrative development adopted not only included evolving appropriate politico-administrative institutions for democratic governance, but also a consistent effort on reorienting the formal and informal aspects as well as improving the techno-professional skills of bureaucracy at all levels. In addition to this an appropriate balance and cooperation between the public and private sectors was essential in the context of growing liberalization and globalization.The experience of India emphatically demonstrates that an active and consociational association of citizens at all levels of the governmental structure is critical to the process of modernization of the state and administration. The dispersion of political and administrative power among various groups and regions emerges as a useful strategy for ensuring the continuity of the state and democracy in a vast country with numerous ethnic, religious and linguistic divisions.     

The Public Administration Reform in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Reform Process Embedded in a Sovereignty Paradox

As the post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina has turned its interest towards a European Union membership, it has entered an accession process requiring it, among other things, to reform its public administration system. The European Union's involvement within the reform has been placed under critique, as it has been claimed to have placed Bosnia and Herzegovina's sovereignty at risk by presenting contradicting behaviors leading to a sovereignty paradox. By examining the European Union's role in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and its possible relations to a sovereignty paradox in the process, the article finds sovereignty paradox indicators to exist along its processes.     

The Strategic Re-view of China’s Territorial Sovereignty

This paper re-examines the status quo of China’s territorial sovereignty security from a strategic perspective.Territory is the most basic physical where-about for a country to express national sovereignty.It is the territory that the national sovereignty derives its physical basis from.In the context of globalization,however, the traditional national territorial sovereignty space is continually squeezed and constrained,but the national territorial sovereignty is still the cornerstone of the international relations.And the inviolability of national territorial sovereignty is still the most important principle of modern international law.In this regard,the primary goal of Chinese national security today remains as a goal to safeguard the unification,integrity and security of China’s territorial sovereignty.At present,the integrity,unification and security of Chinese national territorial sovereignty have yet to be achieved on the strategic level.As one of China’s basic national conditions,it should be taken seriously and paid adequate strategic attentions.     

Intersectoral Police Collaboration: An Exploratory View from the States

Modern policing in the United States is best conceived as a joint undertaking between public and private sectors. Over the last several decades there has been a gradual movement away from monopolistic state provision of police services toward a greater reliance on the private sector for protection and security. While the current activities of public and private police are well chronicled in the research literature, little is actually known about the coordination of policing activities across sectors. The purpose of this article is to describe the range of public-private police partnerships that have developed recently in the United States.     

Health and human security: a wrinkle in time or a new paradigm?

Since it was first advanced in the 1994 Human development report of the United Nations Development Programme [United Nations Development Project. (1994). Human development report. New York: UN], the concept of ‘human security’ has evolved as a holistic development-oriented acuity [Nef, J. (1999). Human security and mutual vulnerability: The global political economy of development and underdevelopment (2nd ed.). Ottawa: International Development Research Centre]. The human security concept reinforces the right to health, drawing on both the role of states and the global community's commitment to human rights. Yet, health and human security, long the purview of state power and responsibility, increasingly include alliances of state and non-state actors. This paper proceeds in three parts. The first looks at health and human security linkages, charting the trajectory of the health and human security relationship. The second deals with policy and operational implications. It explores the health–human security link, paying particular attention to the allocation of responsibility and accountability, including through private–public partnerships and rising powers such as China. The third provides a theoretical and technical analysis of the status of health and human security since 1994, taking into account its evolution vis-à-vis human rights’ development and development more broadly, also asking whether it represents but a wrinkle in time or a new sustainable development paradigm.     

Russia's Post-Orange Revolution Strategies to Increase its Influence in Former Soviet Republics: Public Diplomacy po russkii

The role of public diplomacy in Russian foreign policy has grown in recent years. There are two distinctive strands of Russian public diplomacy: one directed mainly towards Western states, and one towards the former Soviet republics. Despite the rhetoric of mutual interests and high respect for state sovereignty, the post-Soviet strand of Russian public diplomacy has more in common with the Soviet practice of ‘active measures’ than with the soft power of attraction commonly connected with public diplomacy. Russia's current policy runs the risk of eating away the soft power potential that Russia still enjoys in many post-Soviet states.