Hollywood Must Portray Point of View of Others

In the age of globalization we are no longer home alone. Migration brings other worlds into our own just as the global reach of the mass media transmits our world into the hearts and minds of others. The resulting clashes and fusions are shaping the soul of the first global civilization in the making. In this section, one of Hollywood's top producers, Mike Medavoy, and the Oscar‐nominated director of Babel, Alejandro González Iñárritu share their thoughts with NPQ.     

Trendsetters,Trend Followers,and Individual Players: Obtaining Global Counterterror Actor Types from Proscribed Terror Lists

This article seeks to conceptualize global counterterror actor types by examining the designated terrorist organizations lists of six countries; the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Russia, and China. It is argued that these countries should be placed into one of three distinct categories: Trendsetters, Trend Followers, and Individual Players. Being able to classify countries according to these categories is important for global policymakers. It raises awareness of the differences between countries, and emphasizes that “one-fits-all” policies are inappropriate and have little chance of achieving global endorsement.     

Difference unveiled: Bulgarian national imperatives and the re‐dressing of Muslim women, 1878–1989

Monique Armand and Marguerite Aymard, eds. European Bibliography of Soviet, East European and Slavonic Studies. Vol. IV — 1978. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1983. Pp. 523.

Mary M. Kritz, ed. U.S. Immigration and Refugee Policy: Global and Domestic Issues. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1983. Pp. xxi, 415.

János M. Bak and Béla K. Király, eds. From Hunyadi to Rákóczi: War and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Hungary. New York: Brooklyn College Social Science Monographs, 1982. Pp. xiv,545.     

Will Information Technology Reshape the North-South Asymmetry of Power in the Global Political Economy?

Digital technologies are sufficiently disruptive to current ways of doing things to call into question assumptions about the “inevitability” or “natural state” of many economic processes and organizational principles. In particular, the impact of digital technologies on our conceptions of property rights has potentially dramatic implications for the North-South divide and the distribution of power in the global political economy. Drawing on recent experiences with open-source property rights regimes, we present two scenarios, the “imperialism of property rights” and the “shared global digital infrastructure,” to highlight how debates over property-rights could influence the development of the global digital infrastructure and, in turn, contribute to significantly different outcomes in global economic power. Steve Weber is director of, the Institute of International Studies and professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book,The Success of Open Source, was published in April 2004 by Harvard University Press. Jennifer Bussell is a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research is on the political determinants of information and communication technology access in developing countries.     

From local to global: transformations of Bukharan Jewish community organization in the twentieth century

Zdenek Hojda and Jirí Pokorný, Pomníky a zapomníky (Monuments and Forgetting). Prague: Paseka, 1996, 280 pp. + illustrations.

Vladimír Macura, Masarykové boty (Masaryk's Shoes). Prague, 1993, 99 pp.

Jirí Rak, Bývali ?echové, ?eské historické myty a stereotypy (Once Upon a Time, The Czechs Were. Czech Historical Myths and Stereotypes). Prague: Nakladatelstvi H &; H, 1994, 149 pp. + illustrations.

Vít Vinas, Jan Nepomucky,Ceská Legenda (Jan of Nepomuck. Czech Legend). Prague: Nakladadelství Mladá Fronta, 1993, 283 pp. + bibliography, chronology, illustrations.     

Evolution of the Global Jihad: Female Suicide Bombers in Iraq

Female suicide bombers are increasingly seen in conflicts throughout the world; in recent years, they have become much more prevalent in religious-fundamentalist conflict. Specifically, global jihadist groups are increasingly incorporating female suicide bombers into their operations, a significant ideological and operational shift for most of these groups. Jihadist groups are using women to fill a recruiting void, to achieve tactical surprise, and for strategic purposes. Female suicide bombers are likely to emerge in jihadist conflicts throughout the world, from Nigeria to Pakistan and beyond.     

International Trends in Prison Upsizing and Downsizing: In Search of Evidence of a Global Rehabilitation Revolution

Abstract

Our review of global trends in the use of incarceration reveals that both the number of people incarcerated worldwide and the global rate of incarceration continue to increase in every global region. In addition, there have been sizable global increases in the use of pretrial detention, the proportion of female prisoners, the proportion of foreign prisoners, prison privatization, and prison crowding. After reviewing these global trends, we examine the available data on correctional performance, focusing on global crime trends in the subgroup of countries (n = 20) where three-quarters of the world’s prison population is currently located. While most (17/20) of these countries continued to increase their prison population despite decreases in most crime categories, three countries—the Russian Federation, South Africa, and Pakistan—have reduced their reliance on incarceration (number and rate) while also reducing their crime rates. Compared to other countries with large prison populations, the United States’ overall increase in both the prison population (+14.4% since 2000) and incarceration rate (+2.2) can be described as modest. Our review of global trends in corrections and sentencing policy reforms revealed an emerging focus on offender rehabilitation in both prison and community corrections settings and a growing recognition of the link between community development and crime. Focusing on the potential impact of rehabilitation-rich policy reforms in the United States, we highlight the results of a recent simulation modeling study (Taxman & Pattavina, 2013 Pattavina, A., & Taxman, F. S. (2013). Using discrete-event simulation modeling to estimate the impact of RNR program implementation on recidivism levels. In F. S. Taxman & A. Pattavina (Eds.), Simulation strategies to reduce recidivism (pp. 267–281). New York, NY: Springer.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) designed to estimate the impact of expanding our institutional corrections treatment infrastructure. This study reported significant, but relatively small, long-term reductions in prison populations when treatment capacity and treatment quality are increased. These findings suggest that even major improvement in the quantity and quality of prison programming—by itself—will not fundamentally change the life course of prisoners, resulting in continued high return-to-prison rates for these offenders. We conclude that for the United States to significantly reduce its reliance on incarceration, we will need to rethink our approach to crime and punishment. Our global review of corrections and sentencing strategies identified a number of possibilities. Using the global incarceration rate and the global crime rate as benchmark performance “tipping points,” we call for the development of corrections and sentencing policies—and the hiring of corrections personnel—based on the new goal of corrections: individual and community rehabilitation.     

Foreign Fighters and the Radicalization of Local Jihad: Interview Evidence from Swedish Jihadists

Modern jihadism has experienced two distinct crises. The present study analyzes recent developments in jihadism, which can be seen in connection with efforts to solve the latest recruitment crisis of global jihad, and is based on comparative interviews with eight Swedish jihadists defined as foreign fighters. The study identifies three new trends evident in the interviews comparing jihadists active in Syria with those who fought in Afghanistan and Bosnia: socialization to global jihad, normalization of jihad, and an increasing use of the doctrine of takfir (i.e., ex-communication). This can be described as indicating the radicalization of local jihad, as the territorially based jihad, championed by Abdullah Azzam, and the global jihad of Osama bin Laden meet in the territorial realities of Syria and Iraq.     

Mujahideen Mobilization: Examining the Evolution of the Global Jihadist Movement’s Communicative Action Repertoire

Abstract

Drawing on Tilly’s notion of “repertoire of action,” this article shows how the evolution of the global jihadist movement’s communicative action repertoire has increased the potential resonance of its discourse. It foresees the construction of the global jihadist movement’s discourse of mobilization as the result of the evolution of its network of actors, the context in which its communications are undertaken, and its adaptation to new communication technologies. Accordingly, it argues that the decentralization of the global jihadist movement has led to a widening of its communicative action repertoire and a diversification of its discourse offering.     

On Japan and China: Taking a Stand,Not Taking Sides

In 1990, right after the Berlin Wall fell, NPQ published our Spring edition, titled “The New World Disorder,” about the nationalistic chaos and up‐in‐theair sensibility of that fraught new historical moment. Nearly a quarter of a century later, the regime of globalization that had supplanted the Cold War world of blocs is itself coming apart at the seams. Even Henry Kissinger these days says “the world order is crumbling.” Will this New World Disorder 2.0 revert to a system of conflicting blocs, as during the Cold War, or will we be mature enough to save the interdependence of plural identities that is the foundation of a new global civilization? In this section our contributors offer their perspectives on what the future holds.     

Dependency and Development in a Globalized World: Looking Back and Forward

The principles of analysis proposed 40 years ago by Cardoso and Faletto in Dependency and Development in Latin America provide a fruitful way to understand divergent patterns of development in the contemporary era of globalization. This set of analytic principles combines a focus on distinct modes of national insertion into the global economy with a focus on the balance of domestic class forces, the capacity of state institutions, and contingent choices by political actors to explain the contrasting developmental fortunes of countries. The contributors to this special issue demonstrate the vitality of these principles by harnessing them to the dual task of explaining how countries respond to the challenges of globalization and the consequences of these responses. The critical, macroscopic, and possibilistic approach to political economy taken by the contributors offers an exciting and powerful way to understand the problems of development in our globalized world.     

From the New International Economic Order to the G20: how the ‘global South’ is restructuring world capitalism from within

Abstract

In the early 1970s the G77 and the Non Aligned Movement ( nam ) challenged the material and intellectual pillars of the postwar liberal capitalist system through collective action at the UN to establish a New International Economic Order ( nieo ). The aim was to complete the ‘emancipation’ of the ‘global South’ by creating binding institutional frameworks, legal regimes and redistributive mechanisms correcting historically constructed core–periphery disparities. That ambitious effort failed in the face of ‘Northern’ resistance and national segmentation within the nam . Today re-emerging states of the global South are engaged in a more successful effort to gain voice and alter international hierarchy by claiming a central place in the world capitalist system and restructuring it from within. The vertical late-modern world system centred in the Atlantic and ordered by the ‘West’ is thus gradually giving way to a polycentric international structure in which new regional and transnational ‘South–South’ linkages are being formed. This paper critically reviews the transformation and argues that, while it is creating long sought-for conditions of relative international equality, it has also dampened the emancipatory promise of the anti-colonial struggle.     

Social Capital,Civic Engagement and the Performance of Local Self-Government in Azerbaijan

Victor M. Fic. Revolutionary War for Independence and the Russian Question: Czechoslovak Army in Russia 1914–1918. New Delhi: Albhinav Publications, (E. 37 Hauz Khas), 1977. Pg. xv, 270. $12.

Thomas Spira. German‐Hungarian Relations and the Swabian Problem: From Karolyi to Gömbös 1919–1936. Boulder: East European Quarterly, Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 1977. Pp. 382. $18.50.

Robert A. Kann, Béla A. Király, Paul S. Fichtner, eds. The Habsburg Empire in World War I. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Pp. xiv, 247. $17.50.     

Performing spiritual healing in the here and now: botánicas and holistic health care

Through ethnographic study of midwestern botánicas in Indiana, this research illustrates the multifunctional nature of these spaces. Research findings point to botánicas as working in the ‘here and now’, addressing immediate and emergent spiritual, financial, and health problems in a diverse community. Local religious leaders also perform divinations and healing in this space; thus the botánica both symbolizes and acts as a cross-cultural health system. I analyze a therapeutic form of traditional medicine through a focus on one of the main activities that takes place in botánicas – healings or limpias. Limpias cleanse a person, place, or object of any bad, evil, or harmful energy or sickness. I also explore the role of botánicas as a form of spiritual/medical diplomacy. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that botánicas serve as economically and culturally acceptable health care alternatives, offering a means to address otherwise unmet community needs.     

Rising Powers in a Changing Global Order: the political economy of Turkey in the age of brics

The rise of bric s presents a major challenge to the existing global order. A second category of emerging powers, which may be labelled near- bric s, have also displayed increasing pro-activism in recent years in terms of influencing the regional balance of power politics, in addition to their growing presence in international organisations and global affairs. It is in this context that we aim to examine Turkey as a striking example of a ‘near- bric ’ power, a country that has adopted an increasingly assertive and independent style of foreign policy with aspirations to establish itself as a major regional actor. Using the Turkish experience as a reference point, this paper aims to understand the extent to which near- bric countries possess the economic capacity, sustainable growth performance and soft-power capabilities needed to establish themselves as significant regional and global actors. The recent Turkish experience clearly highlights both the potential and the limits of regional power activism on the part of emerging powers from the ‘global South’.     

Law transformed: Guantánamo and the ‘other’ exception

Guantánamo Bay is almost unanimously seen as an exceptional space inhabited by ‘bare life’. This article unpacks the double rendering of the exception in Carl Schmitt's work and argues that the conceptualisation of the exception in The Nomos of the Earth can help us understand the form of exception that is at work in the ‘war on terror’. The nomos as the junction of order and orientation appears as a way of closing off the space of political decision from Schmitt's earlier concept of the political. The constitution of order is no longer dependent upon the sovereign decision on the exception, but upon the division and appropriation of space, upon the geopolitics of uncontested spatialisations and a philosophy of concrete life. Therefore, Guantánamo will be exposed not as a singular and exceptional occurrence, but as symptomatic of the transformation of law. Law is moulded onto the order of what is; it is sustained by the situational characteristics of spaces and people at a distance from the contingency of sovereign decisions.     

Administrative and regulatory reform of Korea in a time of national crisis

Korea has undertaken all-out efforts to reform its economy and government to be ready for the new era of global competition and overcome the current economic crisis. Public sector reform seeks to liberalize the market economy by removing unnecessary government interventions in the private sector. The realization of the “four S's” - a small but strong government with the smarts to manage future uncertainties and a sensitivity to the people's needs - is the ultimate vision for the public sector reform. Regulatory reform calls for at least fifty percent of all government regulations eliminated by the end of 1998 and the rest of the regulations improved based on a set of rational principles. One key aspect of regulatory reform is focused on removing barriers to foreign direct investment. Epochal changes in the public sector including governmental regulations are expected to bring Korea up to global standards for business competition and government performance.     

Hamas as a Wasati (Literally: Centrist) Movement: Pragmatism within the Boundaries of the Sharia

This article examines Hamas as a test case for the struggle within Islam between two rival ideological streams: wasatiyya, whose principles were formulated by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi (b. 1926), and Salafi-jihadism, which is the wellspring of global jihad. Hamas is a wasati movement, and its wasati principles serve as the basis for its polemic with Salafi-jihadists, who accuse both it and al-Qaradawi of heresy. The article also shows how the principles of wasatiyya afford Hamas flexibility and allow it to adopt pragmatic positions by distinguishing between immutable long-term goals and flexible means of pursuing them. Hamas translates the principles of wasati jurisprudence into practical political and military ones.     

Book notices

Technology and East‐West Trade, Office of Technology Assessment, US Congress. Montclair, N. J.: Allanheld Osmun & Co., and Farnborough, Hants: Gower Publishing Co. Ltd., 1981. viii + 303 pp. £15.00.

Josef C. Brada, Technology Transfer between the United States and the Countries of the Soviet Bloc. Trieste: ISDEE, 1981. 122 pp.

Kálmán Pécsi, The Future of Socialist Economic Integration, Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe Inc., 1981. xvii + 189 pp. $20.00.     

Genealogies of horror: three stories of slave-women,motherhood, and murder in the Americas

ABSTRACT

This article examines three cases of infanticide committed by slave women in the Americas – Margaret Garner (1856) of Ohio, Ignácia (1868) of Paraná, Brazil, and Justina (1878) of Rio de Janeiro. The article argues that each woman sought to dislodge their own as well as their children's place in what I term slavery's ‘genealogy of horror’, making the act of killing their children into an expression of black female agency, love, and insurgence against slavery. The cases of Justina and Ignácia's, I argue, provide a counternarrative to the myth of Brazil's genteel and harmonious slavery, propagated throughout the nineteenth century, by exposing the violence and desperation in which slave women and their progeny lived. In the second half of the article, I examine how cases of infanticide were depicted and used in the nineteenth-century abolitionist poetry of Brazilian poet Castro Alves and noted African American writer Frances Harper.