The Mindanao Conflict: Efforts for Building Peace through Development

In its 2003 Official Development Assistance Charter (ODA Charter), the Japanese government made peace-building one of its areas of focus. Since then, the government and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) have been active in organizing and implementing peace-building support projects in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. One of the government’s initiatives is a peacebuilding project in Mindanao, the Philippines, an effort that represents a break from the traditional mold: the development support efforts started contributing to the peace process before the signing of any peace agreement took place.

This article examines how the development support initiatives by the Japanese government and JICA have contributed to the peace process in Mindanao from 2003 to 2016.

Despite the unfamiliarity and uncertainty clouding the initial stages of the project, the development support efforts by the Japanese government and JICA are considered to have played a substantial role in paving the way toward the signing of the Comprehensive Agreement on Bangsamoro in March 2014.     

This stillness,this lack of incident: making conflict visible in West Papua

This article examines how the ongoing conflict in West Papua between state security forces and Papuan independence activists is made visible in activist social media postings in their attempts to draw attention to the violence, abuses, and problems in Indonesia’s easternmost province. The use of social media may provide new avenues for raising awareness about the conflict and its consequences. However, a social media strategy that contrasts the innocence and justness of the Papuan people with the violence and barbarity of other Indonesian peoples and the state risks entrenching established tropes which may serve to discourage broader support for West Papuan pleas for justice and independence.     

Seyyid Said bin Sultan BuSaid of Oman and Zanzibar: Women in the Life of this Arab Patriarch

Seyyid Said bin Sultan BuSaid, ruler of Oman (1806–1856) and of Oman and Zanzibar (1836–1856) owed his Omani throne to his fraternal aunt. He married her daughter, his cousin, and cast a wide net for nocturnal partners—slaves from mainly the Black Sea and Abyssinia. He married two Persian royals, and courted the Queen of Madagascar. This paper covers the major events in Said's life from the death of his father, Sultan, in 1904 when his aunt stepped in to aid him (and a brother with whom he became co-ruler for a few years), until Said's death at sea in 1856. Suffering losses of territory his predecessors had gained in the Persian Gulf, Said created a domestic empire in Zanzibar.     

Sport for Peace: A New Era of International Cooperation and Peace through Sport

“O Sport, You are Peace!

You forge happy bonds between the peoples

by drawing them together in reverence for strength

which is controlled, organised and self disciplined.

Through you the young of the entire world

learn to respect one another,

and thus the diversity of national traits becomes a source

of generous and peaceful emulation!”

Pierre De Coubertin (The founder of the modern Olympic Movement)

Sport is an excellent and powerful tool to promote peace, tolerance, and peaceful coexistence. Sport can bring together people of different ethnicities, nationalities, race, skin color, culture and religion. Sport promotes values, such as respect, honesty and cooperation. Sport has the power and ability to overcome the intercultural and political barriers. Sport can be the significant component of social integration. This article brings into the discussion the theme of sport for peace and a positive role of sport for international cooperation and peace. There is a limited amount of research and literature on the theme of sport and peace or sport for peace. The unique and positive power of sport for bringing about peace and peaceful solutions is not well researched and understood. Therefore, the reason for this article is to try to fill the gap in the existing literature on the theme of sport for peace and broaden the discussion about it. The article focuses on sport for peace initiatives implemented by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the United Nations (UN) and its agencies, like UNESCO, UNICEF, UNHCR and non-governmental organizations and international sport federations. The article also examines the sport for peace initiatives from Japan, in the example of the Sport for Tomorrow (SFT) Programme of the Japanese Government for Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games and contribution by Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in promoting and fostering friendship, cooperation, and peace in the world.     

A war of perception: the struggle for legitimacy,influence and power through media in post-2001 Afghanistan

The international community and the Afghan government tout the expansion of domestic media in post-2001 Afghanistan as an indication of progress. However, much of Afghan media has been appropriated by powerful ex-warlords to expand their influence and maintain their grip on power. Jamiat-e Islami and Hezb-e Islami – former jihadist groups who continue to wield considerable political influence within the country – are fierce rivals currently wielding their affiliated media outlets to wage a propaganda war against each other. Each seeks to justify its own right to power and to delegitimize the opponent – ratcheting up tension in a country whose future after 2014 remains precarious and uncertain. This study examines the media campaign of each group, analyzing the salient narratives in their media messages, the intended audiences of these narratives, and what the narratives tell us about the intents and concerns of each group.     

Strength through Weakness: State Executive Power and Federal Reform in Austria

Due to the absence of a strong constitutional veto player, comparative research uses to classify Austria as country with weak federal structures, occasionally even as a “federation without federalism”. From an institutional perspective, the assessment is definitely correct, in particular with regard to the nearly insignificant status of the second chamber Bundesrat. Apart from constitutional provisions, however, there are informal forces at work in decision‐making processes. Our thesis is that any approach ignoring the fact that the nominal constitution is paralleled by a real one falls short. Instead, we focus on the Conference of State Governors which, though not established by law, is a strong player in Austria's multi‐layered system qualifying the picture of “weak” federalism. The paper gives on overview of origin and function of the conference and its ambivalent role in making up for the shortcomings of the federal structures. Taking recent attempts of reorganizing fiscal equalization between states and federation as an example, the need of reforming the allocation of rights and duties between the different levels and, at the same time, the obstacles blocking the reform is outlined and analyzed.     

Continuity through Co-optation: Rural Politics and Regime Resilience in Morocco and Mauritania

Morocco and Mauritania's regimes differ radically in their political structures and contemporary histories, yet they employed several similar strategies to secure survival during the Arab uprisings. Besides limited repression, constitutional reforms and palliative concessions, both regimes also used a distinct strategy of co-optation to aid authoritarian resilience. Targeting rural politicians with weak party affiliations for co-optation, regimes used it to build and reinforce loyalist political parties in the late 2000s. Once the uprisings began, both regimes deployed these loyalist parties to undertake counter-revolutionary activities to contain and counterbalance the power of youth and Islamist movements.     

Parroting the past: historical continuity and change through cultures of cruelty in Brazil

ABSTRACT

In the recent Brazilian Netflix series 3% (Aguilera 2016), international audiences were presented with an array of visual reminders about the legacy of historic human rights abuses in Brazil. With the image of the pau de arara as a point of historic and semiotic reference, this paper adopts evidence and ideas from New Capitalist History to extend the interrogation of the historical memory of torture in Brazil in particular, to the rise and predominance of coercive practices in workplace cultures in free societies in general. This interrogation demonstrates the need for paradigm shifts within Western academic disciplines. First, to re-locate historically modern slavery in political philosophy as central to conceptions of “evil,” and second to overturn the notion of discontinuity and incompatibility between slavery and capitalism. Throughout this interrogation, a short story by Machado de Assis and Lissovsky’s critique of processes of memorialisation of human rights abuses open up the possibility of revisionist thinking about technologies of power, under slavery, military rule, and democratic regimes in Brazil; an approach which suggests systematic and sustained “cultures of cruelty” past and present (Giroux).     

A Decade of Lost Growth: Economic Policy in Spain through the Great Recession

In 2008 the Spanish economy sank into recession, returning to growth in 2014. This paper explores the policies that were pursued by two successive governments to escape the recession. It comments on one of the most contentious strategies, that of austerity, and underlines the constraints on policy imposed by membership of the European Monetary Union (EMU) and a decentralised state. The Great Recession and accompanying austerity policy were associated with huge social and economic costs. Policy targets on the debt and deficit were not met. This experience, together with the broader sluggish growth in Europe and the political consequences associated with austerity, pointed to the need for a new policy mix.     

Remaking the public through the square: invention of the new national cosmology in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the formation of authoritarian populism in Turkey by analysing mass mobilization and its repercussions in the symbolic and imaginary realms as authoritarian right-wing populisms have gained global popularity. It scrutinises the AKP government’s mobilization of the masses in the so-called ‘democracy watches’ after the coup attempt on 15 July 2016. During the demonstrations that took place in various locations in Istanbul, authors carried out participant observation fieldwork and field interviews. The paper concludes that democracy watches constitute a significant means of constructing and consolidating a new authoritarian regime, thereby endowing this consolidation process with a popular legitimacy.     

Turkish foreign policy as an anomaly: revisionism and irredentism through diplomacy in the 1930s

This article discusses why Turkey persisted in diplomacy in the pursuit of a proactive foreign policy during the 1930s while use of force and unilateral action were the popular alternatives. Accordingly, first, the prevailing literature will be examined outlining five primary foreign policy practices of the time, namely, revisionism, irredentism, bandwagoning, appeasement and isolationism. The article will then discuss the foreign policy preference of Turkey which stands as an anomaly in comparison to its contemporaries, focusing on two main cases: Turkey’s reacquisition of the Straits and the accession of Alexandretta. After analysing the underlying factors behind Turkey’s persistent attachment to multilateral and bilateral diplomacy, the article will conclude by applying the term ‘Holder of Balance’ to Turkish foreign policy in the 1930s. Overall, it is argued that the Great Depression attributed a new role to Turkey, the holder of European balance, enabling partnership with both aggressors and appeasers and thus facilitating the settlement of disputes through diplomacy.     

State-run media outlets in Central Asia: external regime legitimation through regional conflict and cooperation framing

ABSTRACT

In this article, we empirically examine how the Central Asian states apply external regime legitimation strategies to legitimize their regimes domestically. We used the Central Asia Watch Project’s data from five Central Asian state-run media outlets to examine spatial and temporal changes in regime legitimation strategies. All the Central Asian countries employed external regime legitimation strategies, but those strategies differ based on regime type. Overall, we see continuity and persistence in reporting regional cooperation but underreporting of regional conflict throughout the 2016–2017 timeframe of this study.     

Discovering a sense of well-being through the revival of Islam: profiles of Kazakh imams in Western Mongolia

Throughout Central Asia, the end of communism has been marked by a significant change in the management and influence of local mosques. In many rural areas, small underground mosques operated by informally trained, elderly moldas have been supplanted by newly constructed mosques led by younger, foreign-educated local imams and financed by governmental and private donations from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other countries. From several perspectives, this ‘revival’ of Islam is characterized in a way that implies that increased religiosity and piety is somewhat problematic. In this essay, based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Western Mongolia, we argue that such an approach prevents an understanding of how religious changes are enhancing the social and material well-being of certain actors. We explore the utility of the concept of well-being by focusing on the everyday lives of Kazakh imams in Western Mongolia. Approximately 100,000 ethnic Kazakhs live in the Western Mongolian province of Bayan-Ölgii, where they comprise about 80% of the population. Although a significant portion of the population has been migrating to Kazakhstan in the post-socialist period, the Kazakhs who choose to remain in Mongolia have experienced a significant increase in religious freedom. In this context, the new cohort of imams is playing an important mediating role as members of the local population reinterpret and renegotiate their identity as Muslims. In addition to finding spiritual well-being through their knowledge of Islam, these imams are acquiring social status and economic security from their local roles as religious leaders and through their transnational connections with a broader Muslim community.     

‘Let's Win this Game Together’: Children's Rights Violations,Macro‐Securitisation and the Transformative Potential of the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil

Sport's transformative potential is known to support marginalised children, to deal with traumatic experiences and instil positive values; yet hosting mega sporting events (MSEs) can have negative impacts. Drawing on participatory research with favela‐based children during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, this article argues that MSEs bring a macro‐securitisation of urban life, which causes considerable harm. This paper also suggests that the inclusion of children's voices in advocacy debates can challenge top‐down securitisation and might allow MSEs to foster further positive social transformation. Therefore, juxtaposed with causing harm, macro‐securitisations can open opportunities for children to take action and have their voices heard.