Japan’s approach toward Asian regional security: from ‘hub-and-spoke’ bilateralism to ‘multi-tiered’

This article argues that Japan’s growing activism in promoting multilateral regional security arrangements since the early 1990s stems from the country’s adoption of the ‘multi-tiered approach’; a new policy perspective that packages different types of coordination among region states, including bilateral, multilateral, and minilateral or subregional, in a layered, hierarchical manner. The significance of the approach explains why Japan has retained its enthusiasm for promoting multilateral arrangements, despite continuous criticism of their effectiveness and significance, as well as the marked decline in Japan’s economic power to support financially the country’s activism in regional institution-building. Meanwhile, the multi-tiered approach also explains Japan’s effort to maintain and strengthen its bilateral security relationship with the United States during the last decade. Four factors – a perceived change in the regional security order, growing self-recognition of major-power status, the legacy of history, and constitutional constraints – worked essentially to lead Japanese policy-makers to settle on a multi-tiered approach as a desirable policy choice in shaping the country’s security policy in post-Cold WarAsia.     

Vernacular rights cultures and the ‘Right to Have Rights’

We use a case study of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil and the Via Campesina network of which they are part to develop the concept of ‘vernacular rights cultures’. Vernacular rights cultures calls attention to the way in which demands for the right to have rights call on particular cultures, histories and political contexts in a manner that can transform the rights inscribed in constitutions and political imaginaries. What Ranciere (1999) and Balibar (2002) call the democratisation of democracy, we therefore argue, does not just involve a logic of equality and inclusion through which dispossessed groups demand already existing rights. Rather, it also occurs as mobilisations alter the means through which rights are delivered and transform the content and meaning of the rights demanded.     

International and domestic challenges to Japan's postwar security identity: ‘norm constructivism’ and Japan's new ‘proactive pacifism’

Abstract

Japan today is widely portrayed as on the verge of a significant identity shift that could lead to dramatic new security policies. Yet, Japan's first formal national security strategy, adopted in December 2013, proclaims repeatedly Japan's long-standing ‘peace-loving’ policies and principles. Why does a conservative government with high levels of popular support not pursue policies more in line with views widely reported to be central to its values and outlook? The answer lies in Japan's long-standing security identity of domestic antimilitarism, an identity under siege to a degree not seen since its creation over 50 years ago, but – as evidenced in Japan's new national strategy document – one that continues to shape both the framing of Japan's national security debates and the institutions of Japan's postwar security policy-making process. Relational approaches to identity construction illuminate challenges to Japan's dominant security identity, but a focus on domestic institutions and electoral politics offers the best course for modeling identity construction and predicting its future resilience.     

Devolution and identity: Multidirectionality in ‘Welshness’ and ‘Northern Irishness’

In an era of Brexit and on-going constitutional debates in the UK, questions around devolution and national identifications currently attract scholarly attention as never before. This article focusses on national identification in two devolved regions, Wales and Northern Ireland, never before compared in this way, to explore how devolution can act in a fluid and multidirectional way to produce differing framings of national identification. Using original qualitative research, combining the tools of documentary analysis, structured interviews and focus groups, it considers these theoretical ideas through the prism of both political elites and everyday life to explore and compare the reasoning behind the politicization of key national identifications.     

Intervention and Statebuilding Beyond the Human: From the ‘Black Box’ to the ‘Great Outdoors’

This article analyses intervention and statebuilding as shifting towards a posthuman discursive regime. It seeks to explore how the shift to ‘bottom-up’ or post-liberal approaches has evolved into a focus upon epistemological barriers to intervention and an appreciation of complexity. It attempts to describe a process of reflection upon intervention as a policy practice, whereby the need to focus on local context and relations – in order to take problems seriously – begins to further undermine confidence in the Western episteme. In other words, the bottom-up approach, rather than resolving the crisis of policy practices of intervention, seems to further intensify it. It is argued that the way out of this crisis seems to be found in the rejection of the aspiration to know from a position of a ‘problem-solving’ external authority and instead to learn from the opportunities opened up through the practices of intervention. However, what is learnt does not seem to be able to fit into traditional modes and categories of expertise.     

An introduction to Charles Bettelheim, ‘State property and socialism’

Both Weber and Baudrillard have been concerned with the influence of chance on social outcomes. Their interest in serendipity ties in with the postmodern problem of living with uncertainty and reflexively engaging with risk. However, Weber's interest as reflected in his idea of elective affinity focuses on meaning production as a vital component of non-causal connections, whereas Baudrillard's notion of fatalism is derived from a non-rational approach to the connection between cause and effect. This comparison reveals a tension between the understanding of chance in the world of interpretation and the irony of chance in the world of symbols.It poses a further question concerning the fate of reason in an unfolding contest between the sociology of postmodern and a postmodern fatal sociology.     

From the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ policy design: design thinking beyond markets and collaborative governance

Policy design as a field of inquiry in policy studies has had a chequered history. After a promising beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, the field languished in the 1990s and 2000s as work in the policy sciences focused on the impact on policy outcomes of meta-changes in society and the international environment. Both globalization and governance studies of the period ignored traditional design concerns in arguing that changes at this level predetermined policy specifications and promoted the use of market and collaborative governance (network) instruments. However, more recent work re-asserting the role of governments both at the international and domestic levels has revitalized design studies. This special issue focuses on recent efforts in the policy sciences to reinvent, or more properly, ‘re-discover’ the policy design orientation in light of these developments. Articles in the issue address leading edge issues such as the nature of design thinking and expertise in a policy context, the temporal aspects of policy designs, the role of experimental designs, the question of policy mixes, the issue of design flexibility and resilience and the criteria for assessing superior designs. Evidence and case studies deal with design contexts and processes in Canada, China, Singapore, the UK, EU, Australia and elsewhere. Such detailed case studies are necessary for policy design studies to advance beyond some of the strictures placed in their way by the reification of, and over-emphasis upon, only a few of the many possible kinds of policy designs identified by the 1990s and early 2000s literature.     

Historicising ‘asylum’ and responsibility

Territorial rule ‘begins’ with an assertion of who deserves protection and who does not. The question of responsibility and its limits is integral to the making and maintenance of a nation state. But a modern refugee rights regime externalises the question of asylum. Asylum claims are made by strangers dealt with by bureaucracies. How has this come to pass? How has responsibility become thought in terms of the territorial state and the society and order it begets? In this article, I try to make the case through a historical example that asylum is not external to the constitution of the nation state, rather territorial rule begins by figuring out who to protect and who not to. At the core of these ideas about protection and responsibility is a notion of political subjectivity, which is graduated, hierarchical and centred on the state. The privileging of an ahistorical idea of how political subjectivity has been so limited has contributed to the externalisation of asylum, where the troubling questions of to whom we are responsible and whom not barely figure because asylum claims become the subject of a technicalised procedure. In this article, I focus on the British colonial authority's encounter with native slaves seeking asylum in Perak.     

‘Supreme Emergencies’, ontological holism,and rights to communal membership

This paper highlights the importance to just war theory of ontological questions about the constitution of personal identity. It does so through a critical reinterpretation of Michael Walzer’s invocation of a supreme emergency exemption to the principles of jus in bello. Walzer’s argument has been widely criticised for attaching more importance to communities than to individuals. I argue that his position normatively prioritises individuals, but is grounded in a holistic ontology. He valorises political community only because of its importance to the individuals who comprise it. On this view, each community forms a moral world and shapes individual identity. This gives individuals a highest order interest in being part of an autonomous community and makes threats to communal existence a form of moral disaster. The paper concludes that the debate about supreme emergency should engage with ontological questions, and that such engagement would mean problematising the study of what liberalism demands in international ethics.     

Rethinking ‘Crowding Out’ and the Return of ‘Private Affluence and Public Squalor’

This article traces the history of ‘crowding out’, and its use as a justification for austerity and state deflation from its origins in the 1920s to its latest post-2010 incarnation. It examines why governments have kept turning to austerity and continue to justify it on the grounds that public sector activity crowds out more productive private activity, despite the accumulated evidence that this traditional pro-market formulation has failed to deliver its stated goals. It examines three other embedded forms of crowding out that have been highly damaging—leading to weakened social resilience and more fragile economies—but which have been ignored by both governments and mainstream political economists.     

Interrogating ‘invisibilization’ and ‘instrumentalization’: women and current citizenship trends in Canada

This paper examines current citizenship discourses and practices in Canada, focusing on the implications not only of marketization, but also of growing securitization vis-à-vis citizenship, and the gendered ramifications of such developments. The repercussions of marketization and securitization and their interrelations, for women in general, as well as racialized and immigrant women in particular, are outlined and assessed. In this way, we see how women are at the receiving end of highly contradictory processes in that they are both ‘invisibilized’, in other words, rendered invisible, by the Canadian state, but are also are increasingly ‘instrumentalized’, in other words, used in strategic ways. Yet, women also challenge these trends and tactics, thereby interrogating these processes that serve to limit the terms and scope of citizenship in Canada.     

Theorizing identity: beyond the ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy

ABSTRACT

Yuval-Davis discusses three interconnected questions relating to identity. She first examines whether and in what ways the notion of identity should be theorized, on the one hand, and empirically researched, on the other, focusing on the opposing views of Stuart Hall and Robin Williams. She then examines the contested question of what is identity, positioning it in relation to notions of belonging and the politics of belonging, and in relation to several influential schools of thought, especially those that construct identity as a mode of narrative, as a mode of performativity or as a dialogical practice. Her third interrelated question concerns the boundaries of identity and the relationship between self and non-self. She explores both social psychological and psychoanalytical approaches to that question, and deals with questions such as reflexivity, identifications and forced identities. The last part of the article explores several types of relationships between self and non-self, such as: ‘me’ and ‘us’; ‘me/us’ and ‘them’; ‘me’ and other ‘others’; ‘me’ and the transversal ‘us/them’. Yuval-Davis's basic argument here is that dichotomous notions of identity and difference, when theorizing boundaries of individual and collective identities, are more misleading than explanatory.     

Is ‘competitive’ corporatism an adequate response to Globalisation? Evidence from the low countries

The Dutch practice of negotiated wage restraint and welfare state reform is often held up as a model for effective labour market adjustment. This article examines the distribution of adjustment costs under the Dutch model to determine whether it is stable in the long run ‐ both directly and by analogy with the situation in Belgium. The conclusion is that while the Dutch have succeeded in effecting a remarkable adjustment in the distribution of value‐added, the costs of this adjustment have been skewed against increasingly large sections of society. Should these groups outside the distributional coalition find representation at the national level, the Dutch model for negotiated wage restraint and welfare state reform is likely to revert to political alternation and tit‐for‐tat economic competition.     

‘What is to be done?’ Anticipating the future and mobilizing prudence

Various social and political factors often block the emergence of good ideas — e.g., the presence of an overbearing leader, the loquaciousness of some actors and the shyness of others, conventional and doctrinal thinking, the political climate, etc. — and devices have been invented to overcome some of these obstacles in decisionmaking settings: the Delphi technique, idea writing, and the nominal group technique are all front-end operations designed to encourage the blossoming of possible solutions to problems. Devices for generating ideas have not been helpful in coping with the volumes of ideas produced, however, and this had led some theorists to give up on the human mind as a solver of problems. Following a summary of the factors impeding rationality in decisional settings, the advantages of Q methodology are presented, and a case study is described in which Q, in conjunction with front-end operations, has been used to assist groups in clarifying their own perspectives and in gaining access to collective wisdom (political prudence) for purposes of problem solving.

(Aristotle,Metaphysics)

Revised from a paper read at a meeting of the Policy Sciences Annual Institute, School of Law, Yale University, October 16–18, 1992, and at a meeting of the International Society for the Scientific Study of Subjectivity, University of Missouri, Columbia, October 7–9, 1993. We are grateful for the helpful comments from reviewers for this journal.     

A Case Study in ‘Institutionalisation before Liberalisation’: Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

International attempts to build a sustainable peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina have come close to the recommendations of Roland Paris’ conceptual framework of ‘Institutionalisation before Liberalisation’. The international peace mission in Bosnia has, through this approach, largely succeeded in dampening the dangers posed by the democratization process. This is clearly indicated by progress in stabilizing the civil peace and in democratization. However, this study of international policy highlights that, while the general policy approach of the ‘Institutionalisation before Liberalisation’ framework is a sound one, it is important to caution that care must be taken to avoid negative and unintended consequences.     

‘Back Regions’ and ‘Dark Secrets’ in Singapore: The Politics of Censorship and Liberalisation

The political transition from Lee Kuan Yew to Goh Chok Tong to Lee Hsien Loong has generally been interpreted as a trajectory of gradual liberalisation in Singapore. This discourse of liberalisation is encouraged by a variety of factors such as policy changes over censorship regulations, a younger and more cosmopolitan polity, the government's global city ambition and desire to turn the city-state into a creative hub. Such factors, however, often obscure the contemporary policing dynamics of the People's Action Party (PAP) state. Using Erving Goffman's concepts of the ‘back’ and ‘front’ regions, this paper will demonstrate how the PAP state operates in different social spaces and how it engages in the different politics of these spaces. Using specific cases from the theatre community, this paper argues that the discourse of liberalisation has grown because the PAP state has, in recent times, exercised its censorship powers in the ‘back regions’ of theatre, away from the media and public. Finally, it will examine recent amendments to the Films Act and the Public Order Act which clamps down on acts of civil disobedience, and show that this is consistent with what Goffman calls ‘dark secrets’—that is, facts that are incompatible with an individual's or institution's public image.     

Introduction to special issue on ‘professional insecurities’

Introduction

Introduction to special issue on professional insecurities