Power,politics and perception: the impact of foreign policy on civilian–peacekeeper relations

This article responds to a recent call for increased empirical evidence on the ‘local turn’ in the peacebuilding literature and discusses the impact of the international on local consent for peace operations. Using fresh empirical material this article examines the case of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). It shows how local perceptions of the foreign policies of peacekeeping contingents matter, and how this affects the functionality of the mission. This article highlights the heterogeneity of both United Nations peacekeeping missions and local populations, an issue that is insufficiently discussed in the literature on local engagement in peacebuilding/peacekeeping.     

Indonesia’s maritime connectivity development: domestic and international challenges

This study considers the political aspects of the Joko Widodo government’s megaproject to build an integrated marine logistic system known as the tol laut. Expanding the existing literature which gives details about the contextual obstacles faced by and the prospects for the Indonesian government to pursue its infrastructure ambitions, the study argues that notwithstanding the relevance of the tol laut for advancing the Indonesian economy, it is inevitably entangled with dynamic internal and external environments which can unfavourably distort the construction processes. This is the way of understanding the political economy of Indonesia’s development issues which allows for the juxtaposition of domestic political and international relations factors as its framework of analysis. The discussion is divided into four sections. Section one explains the conceptual and methodological foundation of the study. Section two outlines the importance of the tol laut to Indonesian national economic development. Section three looks at how the current domestic political settings pose structural hurdles to Widodo’s tol laut, and section four observes the effect of international relations of powerful regional actors and Jakarta’s diplomatic capacity to the on-going tol laut. The concluding section summarizes the findings of the study.     

Reconceptualising the migration – development nexus: diasporas,globalisation and the politics of exclusion

The presence of a sizeable expatriate African population constitutes a potentially exploitable, if undeveloped, resource that represents a significant developmental challenge for the continent. Problematically the global division of labour and power, as well as differences of region, class, generation, ethnicity and race, are not properly recognised within the existing scholarship or development policy. What is clear is that diasporas do have a substantial role to play in development on the African continent. Further theoretical and empirical investigation is necessary to investigate the practical significance, nature and content of diasporic identifications and activities. By setting these against the structural backdrop of the global economy and the closely associated ideology of globalisation, this paper seeks to provide a new basis for understanding the role of the diaspora in development. This has considerable policy implications as to which diasporic populations should be targeted for developmental purposes.     

Marketing Development: celebrity politics and the ‘new’ development advocacy

Politics and culture, once considered separate, are now fusing in new and interesting ways. Political activism is becoming popular, particularly through the expansion of a new kind of development advocacy made highly visible through celebrity involvement. Theorists of globalisation celebrate the democratisation of civil society made possible by new information and communications technology; critical theorists will note the various ways in which ict ambivalently makes the contradictions in global capitalism more obvious and has become the means by which globalisation is contested. Some metropolitan governments have sought to capitalise on this new knowledge economy by making knowledge for development part of their strategies to produce ‘global citizens’ necessary for the global economy. This paper examines the linkages between celebrity and government-funded development advocacy in Australia, which comprise the introduction of free market principles to form a marketing campaign for neoliberal globalisation.     

“Success” in policy piloting: Process,programs, and politics

Research has demonstrated that pilots contain multiple shifting purposes, not all of which relate to simple policy testing or refinement. Judging the success of policy pilots is therefore complex, requiring more than a simple judgment against declared goals. Marsh and McConnell provide a framework against which policy success can be judged, distinguishing program success from process and political success. We adapt Boven's modification of this framework and apply it to policy pilots, arguing that pilot process, outcomes and longer-term effects can all be judged in both program and political terms. We test this new framework in a pilot program in the English National Health Service, the Vanguard program, showing how consideration of these different aspects of success sheds light on the program and its aftermath. We consider the implications of the framework for the comprehensive and multifaceted evaluation of policy pilots.     

Electoral discourse analysis of state foreign policy development: exploring the party politicization of the Commonwealth in UK Westminster elections 1945–2010

This paper focuses on the policy discourse of the Commonwealth in Wales, UK general election manifestos 1945–2010. It reveals party politicization in the immediate post-war period underpinned by contrasts in policy framing and a Left–Right cleavage spanning a range of issues including immigration and development. A significant post-1970 decline in salience is shown to be accompanied by a shift from substantive to symbolic policy-making and cross-party convergence around residual policy frames whereby the Commonwealth is used to evoke past influence and a normative vision of international governance. This has wider significance for the present electoral discourse approach provides a transferable methodology to inform understanding of party dynamics and policy framing in the formative stage of international relations policy-making.     

Ethnic politics and Third World development: Some lessons from Sri Lanka’s experience

Sri Lanka has been in the forefront among LDCs, always implementing development strategies that are fashionable for a given period of time. Beginning with a capitalist structure in the 1950s, it embraced features of a planned economy in the 1960s. By the mid-1970s it had taken up market-orientated growth policies. Yet its record of achievement is a disappointing one. The primary reasons for this are to be found in the ethnic politics Sri Lanka has been engaged in ever since the end of colonial rule. The political economy of ethnicity is traced through four stages where the common element has been a lack of compatibility between economic policies and political strategy.     

Social policy and conflict: the Gezi Park–Taksim demonstrations and uses of social policy for reimagining Turkey

This article argues that conflicts are productive forces within which new ideas are developed and new social relations are articulated. The critical issue here is the way in which such conflicts are managed and mediated. The paper analyses the Gezi Events of May–June 2013 in Istanbul and considers the way in which people’s reactions in these events are linked with the intersection of everyday lives and the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi – AKP) government’s social policy initiatives, which are increasingly framing these everyday lives. Social policy is considered to be the domain of this intersection, as the government uses policies to inform a particular way of orienting individuals’ everyday context.     

Aspects of local government and politics in china: 1955–58

This study, based on work in six villages, seeks insights into the likely effect of the introduction of prospective land‐, water‐, and crop‐management technologies, being researched at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi‐Arid Tropics, on the existing village labour‐use patterns in one major relevant region: peninsular India. Explicit attention is given to the similarities and differences between small and large farms and their relevance to the adoption of the prospective new technologies.

Regional variation in labour utilisation reveals a tremendous employment‐creating potential in the existing tank and well irrigation systems in the Alfisols of peninsular India. The prospective technologies should increase employment, compared with existing technologies, by at least 100 per cent in the Alfisols and by over 300per cent in the deep Vertisols— but with some increase in the seasonal variability of labour demand. Given the existing availability of labour, there will be, with the improved watershed technologies, major farm labour bottlenecks. These should eventually generate increased wage rates and employment potentials. However, even temporary adverse effects on the timelessness of operations could be critical to the success of a double‐cropping and/or intercropping technology aiming at greatly increased yields. This would create demands for selective mechanisation, for example, of threshing.     

This time it’s different: lithium extraction,cultural politics and development in Bolivia

As governments throughout Latin America have increased their dependence on resource extraction, the debate around extraction-based development has been reinvigorated. This article argues that, despite historical failures and recurrent conflicts associated with extraction-based development, the way in which development is experienced and conceptualised at the subnational level demonstrates why extraction continues to be perceived as a legitimate means for development. These findings show that, as resource extraction continues to play a critical role in the overall development transition of Latin America, the process must be understood and theorised in relation to the experiences and expectations of actors at multiple scales.     

‘LADIES A YOUR TIME NOW!’ Erotic politics,lovers' rock and resistance in the UK

‘Lovers’ rock' is a largely overlooked genre of ‘Black British’ reggae music that emerged in London during the 1970s through Caribbean nightclubs and ‘pirate radio’ stations. Lovers’ rock was an integral part of the reggae music scene of that period. However, lovers rock became gendered as genre that appealed particularly to the romantic aspirations of black teenaged girls growing up in ‘Thatcher's Britain’. Within the political context of the dancehall scene, both lovers rock and roots reggae are seen as binary opposites of each other – lovers being ‘soft’ feminised reggae concerned with romantic love, and roots as masculinised ‘serious’ reggae concerned with black oppositional politics. Using black feminist theories on love and the erotic, this paper challenges the gendering of lovers' rock by suggesting that the genre was part of a much broader and complex political expression of love and rebellion amongst Caribbean communities in Britain. Indeed, while the gendering process is highly problematic, this paper also argues that Caribbean communities had also used the erotic and political intersection of both genres to reconfigure racist and sexist representations of their identities. As such Caribbean males and females had created their own ethic of ‘loving blackness’ as a way of restoring and validating their experiences within Britain's often hostile urban centres.     

Escape from politics: hong kong's predicament of political development?

Political development in Hong Kong is analyzed in terms of its existential rationale, non-sovereign autonomy, capability, and democratization. Changes in these aspects have two implications. First, the conditions for social escape from politics before the conclusion of the Sino-British Agreement on the future of Hong Kong in 1984 no longer exist. Secondly, a political society has emerged to mediate between society and the polity. This represents a fundamental structural transformation in state-society relationship away from the “minimally integrated system” whereby the polity was secluded from the society. Can this political society in Hong Kong be eradicated, arrested, or tamed after the transfer of sovereignty to China in 1997? An educated guess is that it can at best be tamed, provided that democracy remains the ultimate objective of the Basic Law and elections continue to be held.     

Bandits and blanket thieves,communists and terrorists: the politics of naming Sandinistas in Nicaragua, 1927 – 36 and 1979 – 90

This article examines the politics of naming Sandinistas in Nicaragua during two periods of intense political and military struggle: the era of the Sandinista Revolution and Contra War (1979?–?90) and the era of the Sandino rebellion against the US Marines and Nicaraguan National Guard (1927?–?36). Focusing principally on the rhetorical and narrative strategies used by the USA and its Nicaraguan allies, the article explores the delegitimising master narratives concocted by these dominant groups and the efforts of two generations of Sandinistas and their allies to challenge these narratives. It argues that the politics of naming was embedded within a larger politics of storytelling, and that effective challenges to dominant groups' epithets must be grounded in historically informed challenges to the larger narratives from which they spring.     

South–South cooperation and the future of development assistance: mapping actors and options

International development cooperation is undergoing fundamental changes. New – or often re-emerging – actors have gained importance during the past two decades, and are increasingly challenging the traditional approach to development cooperation associated with the members of the Development Assistance Committee of the oecd. Their supposedly alternative paradigm, ‘South–South cooperation’ (ssc), has been recognised as an important cooperation modality, but faces contradictions that are not too different from those of its North–South counterpart. ssc providers are highly heterogeneous in terms of policies, institutional arrangements, and engagement with international forums and initiatives. This article contributes to current debates on ssc by mapping the diversity of its actors – based on illustrative case studies from the first and second ‘wave’ of providers – and by presenting and discussing some possible scenarios for the future of ssc within the international aid system.