Who's socializing whom? Complex engagement in Sino-ASEAN relations

Abstract

This article draws on constructivist approaches to explore processes of socialization in the context of evolving relations between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Constructivist discussions have challenged traditional accounts of socialization; however, left under-examined are the processes by which social learning and social change take place. This article contributes to the theoretical discussion with its examination of ASEAN's regional engagement processes. It treats ASEAN states' ‘complex engagement’ of China as an exercise in argumentative persuasion, which seeks common agreement via a deliberative, non-coercive process. In contrasting ASEAN's particular style of engagement with other models that emphasize more coercive and utilitarian strategies of persuasion, the article draws attention to how particular kinds of interaction may facilitate social learning, as well as the conditions that may make social learning more likely. Particular attention is paid to the roles played by power asymmetries, uncertainty, and different kinds of engagement (mutual and interactive versus closed and unidirectional) in social learning, as well as the importance of viewing socialization as a process that involves different stages.     

Between Resistance and Compliance: Non-participation and the Liberal Peace

Abstract

This work is interested in the concept of non-participation in relation to international peace–support interventions. While the concept of participation has received significant attention, non-participation is under-conceptualized. A typology of non-participation is advanced, differentiating between voluntary and involuntary types of non-participation. It is argued that there is an overhasty tendency by many observers to subjectify inhabitants in post-war settings into the categories of resistance and compliance. This article rejects such a binary as too crude, and argues that non-participation needs to be examined in its own right, not automatically in relation to wider projects of liberal peacemaking or of resistance to that form of peacemaking.     

The “Phantom Local” and the Everyday Distinction Practices of Humanitarian Actors in War: A Socio-Legal Perspective

ABSTRACT

This article is concerned the everyday practices of international humanitarian actors who deliver assistance in armed conflict zones. Drawing on original fieldwork conducted in South Sudan, it elucidates how humanitarian actors engage with the principle of distinction in international humanitarian law (IHL). The article considers how the desire to enforce distinction impacts humanitarian actors’ relationships with others, and introduces the concept of everyday distinction practices. These practices have an important performance component, designed to appease the “phantom local.” It is proposed that such practices may have adverse implications for the humanitarian–beneficiary encounter. By positioning war-affected populations as an audience for distinction, everyday distinction practices reconfigure the victims of war from being receivers of aid to perceivers of aid. By lumping beneficiaries together with armed actors as part of the “phantom local,” distinction practices also paint the victims of war as an object of mistrust, fear, and potential danger.     

Michael Leifer and the balance of power

Abstract

In the work of the late Professor Michael Leifer few concepts are invoked more often than the balance of power. It was due to his reliance on this concept that Michael Leifer came to be widely regarded as an exponent of realism and an advocate of countervailing balance of power practices. By reviewing Leifer's own writings, this article not only re-examines the now almost standard interpretation of his work, but also investigates the significance of the balance of power in his scholarship in new ways. The first section identifies the two key meanings Leifer explicitly imputed to the balance of power. It also examines Leifer's arguments relative to what he perceived as changes in the balance of power. This will be done with reference to his analyses of the international politics of Southeast and East Asia in the Cold War and post-Cold War period. The second section extends the discussion on the particularities of Leifer's writings on the balance of power, but relates it specifically to the question of what Leifer's writings suggest about his theoretical home. His ability to demonstrate the significance of the balance of power as a political factor in the foreign policies of individual Southeast Asian states is the focus of the third section. Finally, the article builds on Leifer's empirical writings on the importance of psychological factors in relation to the balance of power as policy to take up theoretically important questions that he himself did not pursue, particularly about the extent to which the balance of power is the product of struggles for security and recognition. The article draws three conclusions. First, Leifer should be thought of not as a diehard advocate of conventional balance of power practices, but rather as a scholar broadly working within English School parameters who was deeply wedded to the idea that the balance of power is necessary to uphold regional order in international society in the context of the rise of a potentially hegemonic power. Second, one of the finest aspects of Leifer's scholarly legacy is to be found in his discussion of the balance of power factor in the foreign policies of Southeast Asian states. Third, Leifer should also be an inspiration to those interested in empirical work underlining the importance of struggles for recognition in the formation and practice of the balance of power.     

An Invidious Position? The Public Dance of the Promiscuous Partisan

Public service mandarins were once largely anonymous, diligently wielding their great power behind the scenes while their political masters performed on the front stage. Things have changed. Today, civil service leaders are appearing publicly more often, in more places and to a wider range of audiences than ever before. This article examines the extent to which this decline in anonymity impacts on traditions of civil service impartiality within the Westminster system. It draws on the late Peter Aucoin's concept of ‘promiscuous partisanship’ to examine how contemporary mandarins in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia face accusations of having compromised their impartiality by advocating for the policy agenda of the government of the day. The article argues that what has changed is not that civil service leaders have suddenly become partisan, but rather that they have become more ‘public’, allowing for perceptions of partisanship to emerge.     

Studying civil society across the world: Exploring the Thorny issues of conceptualization and measurement

Abstract

The debate about the usefulness of the civil society concept for social analysis has reached a critical stage and calls for its abandonment are mounting. To prove its relevance for policy, practice and research, better operational concepts and more rigorous empirical research on civil society are required. This article examines the possibilities and pitfalls of cross-national civil society research as a crucial area of empirical civil society studies. It explores the definition, conceptualization, operationalization and measurement of civil society through a critical examination of existing international efforts at comparative civil society analysis. A functional approach to defining civil society and a two-dimensional operational concept of civil society, according to its (1) structural and (2) cultural features, are proposed as suitable tools to study the phenomenon cross-nationally. The article also reviews the Civicus Civil Society Index as an innovative tool to assess the state of civil society and discusses the insights and challenges emerging from its current application in more than 50 countries. The paper concludes that international comparative civil society studies are both possible and necessary, but cautions that more attention needs to be paid to the development of appropriate operational concepts and measurement models.     

NGO Interventions in the Post-conflict Memoryscape. The Effect of Competing ‘Mnemonic Role Attributions’ on Reconciliation in Cambodia

ABSTRACT

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are a constituent part of post-conflict Transitional Justice interventions and as such their projects shape but are also constrained by various narratives about the past. This article introduces the concept of mnemonic role attributions defined as the sum of how actors, their roles, their responsibility and their suffering are categorised as they are remembered regarding a certain period of time. The article analyses how different mnemonic role attributions that are propagated during interventions by Transitional Justice experts in civil society influence the potential for reconciliation in post-conflict Cambodia.     

ASEAN and human rights: resisting Western pressure or emulating the West?

Abstract

Observers of Southeast Asian affairs commonly assume that the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are reluctant to pursue liberal agendas, and that their main concern is to resist pressure from Western powers to improve their human rights practice. This article, however, argues that such a conventional view is too simplistic. The Southeast Asian countries have voluntarily been pursuing liberal agendas, and their main concern here is to be identified as ‘Western’ countries – advanced countries with legitimate international status. They have ‘mimetically’ been adopting the norm of human rights which is championed by the advanced industrialized democracies, with the intention of securing ASEAN's identity as a legitimate institution in the community of modern states. Ultimately, they have been pursuing liberal agendas, for the same reason as cash-strapped developing countries have luxurious national airlines and newly-independent countries institute national flags. Yet it should be noted that the progress of ASEAN's liberal reform has been modest. A conventional strategy for facilitating this reform would be to put more pressure on the members of ASEAN; however, the usefulness of such a strategy is diminishing. The development of an East Asian community, the core component of which is the ASEAN–China concord, makes it difficult for the Western powers to exercise influence over the Southeast Asian countries. Hence, as an alternative strategy, this article proposes that ASEAN's external partners should ‘globalize’ the issue of its liberal reform, by openly assessing its human rights record in global settings, with the aim of boosting the concern of its members for ASEAN's international standing.     

The citizen of empire

In this paper, the authors imagine a Citizen of Empire. This is a conceptualization of global citizenship as it might appear in Hardt and Negri's global social order of Empire. The article draws on Hardt and Negri's Empire as the model of global society to imagine what citizenship might look like on a global scale. Hardt and Negri's conceptualization of Empire offers a palette of new and emerging social relationships from which a vibrant conceptualization of citizen and citizenship can be imagined and new democratic politics practiced. First, the authors examine the concept of Empire to unearth foundational concepts upon which a notion of Citizen of Empire can be built. Second, the authors imagine a citizen who ‘calls Empire into being' rather than participating in the ready-made political, cultural, and economic institutions of the nation-state. Without institutional support, citizenship in Empire must be highly generative and creative, and it will operate on a virtual and poetic terrain by enacting mechanisms of deterritorialization, networking, and communication.     

The critique of language and its economy

Abstract

This paper draws upon and develops Paul Rabinow's concept of biosociality to analyse how the field of gambling research, the facts about gambling addiction and the politics of gambling regulation are in the process of transforming one another as the US gambling industry has begun to provide large amounts of funding for scientists and clinicians working on gambling problems. In particular, the paper focuses on the political economy of research that suggests that the negative consequences associated with gambling are not just social problems, but neurobiological ones. The paper introduces the notion of ‘biopolitical capital’ in order to describe how the gambling industry invests in particular kinds of research which are more likely to yield results that can be mobilized to support particular kinds of approaches to dealing with the social and personal problems associated with gambling.     

Public Sector Organizations and Reputation Management: Five Problems

ABSTRACT

This article discusses five problems that most public organizations will face when adopting a popular, yet largely unexplored management concept: reputation management. The inherently political nature of public organizations constrains their reputation management strategies. Furthermore, they have trouble connecting with their stakeholders on an emotional level, standing out as unique and differentiated organizations, communicating as coherent bodies, and maintaining excellent reputations. In this article, we examine in depth the nature of these problems and seek to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the possibilities and limitations of reputation management in a public sector context.     

Edgeless cities: Examining the Noncentered metropolis

Abstract

Edgeless Cities, a form of sprawling office development that never reaches the scale, density, or cohesiveness of Edge Cities, now account for the bulk of office space found outside of downtowns. The term draws on Garreau's Edge City, yet it is a new, albeit elusive, category. It captures the fact that most suburban office areas lack a physical edge. In contrast to Edge Cities, which combine large‐scale office development with major retail, Edgeless Cities feature mostly isolated office buildings spread across vast swaths of urban space.

This article looks at the evolving geography of office space in 13 of the nation's largest office markets, which together contain more than 2.6 billion square feet of office space and 26,000 buildings. The data provide an empirical framework for examining competing theories of metropolitan form. The article concludes with a discussion of the policy implications resulting from the emergence of Edgeless Cities.     

Governing disorder: the Australian Federal Police and Australia's new regional frontier

Abstract

The Australian Federal Police has in recent years become an important actor in both the implementation and design of Australian-led state building interventions in Australia's near region of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. The article focuses on the recent expansion of the Australian Federal Police as a way of understanding the emergence of a new partly (and strategically) deterritorialized, ‘regional’ frontier of the Australian state. Within this new frontier, whose fluctuating outlines the Australian Federal Police not only polices but also to a considerable extent shapes and reshapes, as one of the primary expert agencies on identifying and managing transnational security risks, Australian security is portrayed as contingent on the quality of the domestic governance of neighbouring states, thereby creating linkages between the hitherto domestic governing apparatus of the Australian state and those of other countries. This allows for the rearticulation of the problems affecting intervened states and societies – indeed, their very social and political structures – in the depoliticized terms of the breakdown of ‘law and order’ and the absence of ‘good governance’, which not only rationalizes emergency interventions to stabilize volatile situations, but also delegitimizes and potentially criminalizes oppositional politics. The Australian Federal Police, however, does more than merely provide justification for intrusive state transformation projects. Its transnational policing activities open up a field of governance within the apparatus of intervened states that exists in separation from international and domestic law. The constitution of such interventions ‘within’ the state leaves intact the legal distinction between the domestic and international spheres and therefore circumvents the difficult issue of sovereignty. As a result, police and other executive-administrative actors obtain discretionary ordering powers, without dislodging the sovereign governments of intervened countries.     

China's dual strategy of coercion and inducement towards ASEAN

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to the discussion about China's divisive influence on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). It argues that recent China–ASEAN relations are based on Beijing's successful implementation of a dual strategy of coercion and inducement. The effectiveness of this strategy is tested against the South China Sea disputes – the issue that lies in the core of regional security and a key platform of power display. The article outlines Beijing's recent interaction with individual ASEAN member-states and its implications for the regional multilateral diplomacy. While by no means identical, Beijing's dual strategy of coercion and inducement with individual ASEAN states have resulted in an effective abuse of the ASEAN consensus principle – a tactic often referred to as ‘divide and rule’. Consequently, the group's internal discord has further eroded and affected the institutional confidence of ASEAN. This article draws attention to the psychological effect of coercion as a perception of punishment, and inducement as a perception of reward.     

Transit supportive home loans: Theory,application, and prospects for smart growth

Abstract

This article discusses mortgage lending programs aimed at lower‐income buyers looking to purchase homes in compact, transit‐accessible neighborhoods. Unlike traditional lending formulas, the transit supportive home loans consider the transportation cost savings from living in transit‐friendly neighborhoods and applies these savings to a larger mortgage calculation. However, little has been published positioning the concept against the broader goals of smart growth, describing the application of the product, or commenting on its prospects.

The first part of this article therefore draws heavily from the literature on smart growth to present the theoretical foundations of the transit supportive home loans and how they address growth management program goals. The second part describes the application of the concept, and the third examines the prospects for this tool and briefly comments on circumstances likely to bedevil its widespread adoption or overall impact.     

Emerging donors and new contests over aid policy in Pacific Asia

Abstract

The rise of emerging donors has unleashed new political contests over aid policy, some of which have occurred at the domestic level. This article locates the special edition's analysis of these contests within the existing literature on emerging donors, draws out the key findings of included papers, and considers their implications for policy. It argues that domestic contests have had significant influence over aid policy in both emerging and established donors, the agendas at work have varied from case to case reflecting countries' different political economies, and aid policies represent a ‘work-in-progress’ rather than an expression of immutable models.     

Korea's technological development

Abstract

Indigenous peoples’ rights, including the right to self-determination, are increasingly codified in international law and policy and disseminated globally by international organizations. These norms mark a profound change in the ideals of citizenship promoted by the international community, away from linguistically and institutionally homogenous citizenship in centralized states to group-differentiated citizenship in decentralized, multi-level and multi-lingual states that use local and regional autonomy for the accommodation of indigenous peoples. Essential to realizing these norms is the devolution of some degree of autonomy to sub-central state units substantially controlled by indigenous communities. Because the transfer of powers to indigenous peoples is crucial to their accommodation, protection and participation in modern states, and because decentralization programs are an important component of reform agendas in most developing countries, it is important to understand how these emerging norms are integrated into real-world decentralization processes.

This article analyzes the application of the World Bank's safeguards policy for indigenous peoples within the institution's support to decentralization reform in Cambodia. The analysis demonstrates that under certain circumstances, the policy not only fails to translate into effective protection but leads to outcomes diametrically opposed to its objectives. In its current design, Bank support to decentralization contributes to the marginalization of indigenous peoples in Cambodia and undermines the institutional, cultural and natural resources upon which their empowerment and participation depends. In environments in which full compliance might be unrealistic to accomplish by individual projects, safeguard obligations lead to a strategy on the part of Bank projects of avoiding geographical and policy areas that are likely to trigger the safeguards policy, in order to reduce projects’ vulnerability to non-compliance claims. The article discusses how more effective application of the safeguards policy might be achieved and how strategies for the empowerment of indigenous peoples can more effectively draw on decentralization frameworks.     

Explaining the depth and breadth of international intelligence cooperation: towards a comprehensive understanding

ABSTRACT

Despite neorealism's predominance in the academic debate, it is too narrow a basis for the comprehensive understanding of present-day international intelligence cooperation. This approach is perfectly capable of explaining what is currently not happening in international intelligence cooperation and why this is the case. However, it is inadequate to understand what does happen in international intelligence cooperation. To explain international intelligence cooperation, especially in long-standing multilateral arrangements such as the EU and NATO, additional approaches are needed. This article advocates stepping beyond a state-centric approach of international intelligence cooperation, viewing it as a process and using a sociological perspective.     

Everyday Legitimacy in Post-Conflict Spaces: The Creation of Social Legitimacy in Bosnia-Herzegovina's Cultural Arenas

Abstract

The international community has long been criticized for its lack of social legitimacy in Bosnia-Herzegovina and its creation of a dysfunctional public space in the light of people's everyday experiences of peace. This article contends that, as a result, legitimacy has been moved from such public spaces to semi-public spaces, wherein the public and the private are interrelated. One example is local cultural arenas, where hopes emerging in people's everyday lives are projected onto alternative visions of peace and a corresponding social contract. In that sense, cultural agencies have served as alternative social locations of legitimacy due to their closer connection to people's lives and needs.     

Strategic postures of political marketing: an exploratory operationalization

• In contrast to most political marketing theories which imply that such concepts as ‘voter‐orientation’ or ‘voter‐centric political management’ are trivial and uni‐dimensional, this article will take its starting point from an alternative perspective.
• It draws on the concept of political marketing ‘postures’, i.e. a multi‐faceted conceptual entity, based on varied dimensions of political marketing orientations. The main duality consists of the constructs of ‘leading’ and ‘following’, with an auxiliary (and complementary) dimension of ‘relationship building’.
• This article provides an exploratory methodology to operationalize this concept, which will also be initially tested empiricially, using expert judgements as well as electorate's perceptions.
• Changing postures will be exemplified within a longitudinal application of the concept to perceptions of Tony Blair as Prime Minister.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.