The 'nameless fever': The HIV/AIDS pandemic and China's women

HIV/AIDS is fundamentally an issue of human rights. To the right to medical provision must be added rights to the provisions of social justice necessary to the prevention and alleviation of HIV/AIDS. China has become the focus of international concern over HIV/AIDS. Applying the concepts of 'capabilities poverty', 'discursive democracy', gender construction, 'structural violence' and the 'hypermasculine state', the study identifies the threat to China's women from HIV/AIDS; evaluates the factors contributing to this threat with reference to issues of human rights; and assesses the quality of the national and international response to the HIV/AIDS threat. It is argued that there is a growing threat to women from HIV infection in China; that there are gender-specific factors that render women in China especially vulnerable; that the belated epidemiological response is weak and its capability to meet the threat seriously weakened by social patriarchy; and that, ultimately, the HIV/AIDS threat to China's women is an issue that can only be resolved through political reform leading to discursive democracy and social justice.     

The new market socialism: A critical review

This article focuses on the new market socialist literature published in 1991–1995. Comparisons are made between the new and older models of market socialism. Contributions to the new literature are critically examined. It is argued that the new market socialism does not present a viable alternative to modern democratic capitalism. The article also discusses what some had believed to be the dilemma post-communist societies would face: market socialism or the restoration of capitalism. In this connection, some of the transformation options are examined.     

Public administration and policymaking: The political/career executive environment

Federal government policymaking is improved by the partici-pation of career executives. As a minimum, contributions based on their professional expertise and institutional experience can serve as an early warning system for helping political executives to avoid mistakes in new policy ventures. However, a number of political, structural, and attitudinal factors cause the political/career executive relationship environment to be characteristically stressful, tense, and frequently not conducive to joint involvement in policymaking. Historic factors producing this environment include basic constitutional and democratic values regarding the exercise of unitary power, the ambiguous roles of political and career executives, the controversial executive workforce structure, and the differing orientations of career and non-career executives. More recent obstacles to developing a cooperative state of political/career relations consist of the rise of the administrative presidency accompanied by bureaucrat-bashing, an increased politicization of management, and the trend toward ideological administration. What has been termed the “quiet crisis” in public service has led to calls for change in presidential rhetoric, development of orientation and communication opportunities in the political/career relationship, and proposals of structural alternatives to the present executive workforce system established in 1978. The Bush administration has implemented several measures leading to a renewed recognition of the benefits to policymaking output of career executive involvement.     

The European Union and Post-9/11 Counterterrorism: A Reappraisal

In spite of the hectic activity subsequent to the so-called month of transformation in the wake of 9/11, it is not to be taken for granted that the European Union is the right vehicle in Europe for the combating of terrorism. The lack of the EU's executive powers with respect to regulating the behavior of member states relative to a common threat such as terrorism, raises the fundamental question of whether the Union itself, as opposed to its constituent members, or an alternative multilateral forum, is an appropriate body for effectively confronting terrorism in Europe.     

Commentary: The Logistics of Actionable Intelligence Leading to 9/11

Uncertainty is a hallmark of conflict behavior, and other forms of violence that accompany civil and international war—such as low-intensity warfare, guerrilla, insurgency, and asymmetric conflict—are no exception. This study applied the theory of political uncertainty and complexity theory to the analysis of conflict events during the first three years of the second Iraq war, 2003–2006, limited to the Diyala province. Findings show that neither the time between attacks T or the severity of attacks S (fatalities) have the “normal” (bell-shaped) or lognormal distribution that is characteristic of equilibrium systems. Instead, both variables showed heavy tails, symptomatic of non-equilibrium dynamics, in some cases approximating a power law with critical or near critical exponent value of 2. The empirical hazard force analysis in both cases showed that the intensity was high for the first epoch in both variables (March 2003 to June 2004) but even higher in the latter period from July 2004 to March 2006. Selected policy implications are discussed, including the possibility that real-time or near real-time analysis of the data analyzed through the uncertainty-complexity computational methods would have revealed the gathering momentum of adversarial attacks perhaps in time to have prevented the insurgency.     

Misjudging Islamic Terrorism: The Academic Community's Failure to Predict 9/11

Most academic experts within the International Relations (IR) community and other, more specialized disciplines, failed to predict or warn government policymakers and the public of the possibility that events of 9/11 magnitude could take place on the U.S. homeland. Given that long-term investigation of trends in world affairs is one of the sources that has always informed policy analysis, this represents an interesting question to examine. The analysis contained in this assessment suggests that the ontological, methodological, and conceptual problems within and between the disciplines, combined with a skewed absorption with the prospect of developments in Asia, created a gap in the knowledge about Islamic terrorism and groups like Al Qaeda, which in turn caught most of the academic community unaware on 9/11. This article performs a quantitative study to determine the nature and scope of this apparent analytical failure on the part of academics in IR and other specialized disciplines to predict 9/11 and aims to address why this failure took place.     

The oakland hiv/aids planning council: Its organizational form and environment

An observational study of the Oakland Eligible Metropolitan Area and its Ryan White CARE Act Title I HIV health services planning council, officially known as the Alameda/Contra Costa HIV Planning Council, has been in progress since October 1992. Until June 1994, the Oakland planning council had a bifurcated organizational structure, with a component council for Alameda County and a component council for Contra Costa County. This case study focuses primary on the Alameda Component Planning Council (ACPC) and reveals that since its inception, the ACPC has struggled with numerous difficult issues, including volunteer membership, part-time staff support, membership selection and composition, conflict of interest, tensions among competing interest groups, conflicting demands from patientsJconsumers, and tensions among competing service delivery organizations. In spite of the substantial effort required to address these issues, the ACPC managed to fulfill its basic responsibilities of prioritizing the service needs of HIV-infected persons in the community and allocating funds to service providers to meet those needs. Over time, however, dealing with these issues took its toll on the planning council, resulting in a near complete turnover of members within 18 months. One reason that the planning council survived may be due to its unusual organizational form, which fits closely the definition of a minimalist organization. This form of organization is flexible and very efficient at adapting to changes in its environment. Previous studies of such minimalist organizations, however, have examined organizations functioning in stable, non-competitive environments. Whether HIV planning councils with this particular organizational form will be able to survive over a long period of time in turbulent environments is an important question for future research.     

A classic debate revisited: The policy/administration dichotomy in tax polittcs

One of the oldest debates in political science is over the separation of policymaking from administration. The primary purpose of this paper is to resurrect the distinction as both a guide to empirical theory describing the political process and as an element in the normative debate over how that political process should ideally work. I first discuss the classic dichotomy and arguments for and against it. I then argue that tax politics can best be described as a trichotomy, in which there resides a “middle” set of actors, labelled professional policy managers, who have very important policymaking roles, but who also have many characteristics of administrators. In making these distinctions, I also outline a distinctive form of accountability that resides with each set of actors. Based on these forms of accountability, I reiterate the importance of separating and distancing “pure” administration from policymaking and political pressures. I also argue that effective policy is best insured by balancing the roles of policymakers, policy managers and administrators.     

Health,Need and Politics: The Determinants of Bilateral HIV/AIDS Assistance

Over the last 10 years foreign aid for HIV/AIDS control has grown from ‘millions to billions’. This study investigates donor motivations in the targeting of bilateral HIV/AIDS assistance. Are donors selecting recipients primarily based on level of need or are political and merit-based considerations at play as well? The results of our two-stage statistical analysis of bilateral HIV/AIDS assistance flows over the period 2002–2007 suggests that recipient need is an important determinant of aid flows. We also find limited evidence of dyadic political relationships having an effect on assistance targeting, while the quality of recipient policy environments seems to have a minimal impact on donor allocation decisions.     

The malleable homo sovieticus: transnational entrepreneurs in post-communist East Central Europe

This paper investigates the coping strategies of post-1989 East Central European transnational migrant entrepreneurs. Paradoxically, rather than facilitating transfer into the region of liberal-democratic orientations and practices, the incorporation of East Central Europe into late 20th-century consumer capitalism based on short-cycle flexible production in sectors unregulated by legal-institutional frameworks reproduces some of the features of the accustomed homo sovieticus syndrome: in particular, the reliance on the beat-the-system/bend-the-rules orientation on informal/crony patronage and connections, and immediate consumption rather than deferred gratification/investment-oriented capital accumulation renders effective strategies of economic action in the new situation. The effects of so-informed transnational migrant entrepreneurs' activities on the transformation processes in their home-countries are also discussed.