Recreating the Third World Project: possibilities through the Fourth World

Abstract

In this paper, we make a theoretical argument that the Third World be returned to its political origins to inspire an updated Third World Project (TWP), revived as a global movement for progressive, anti-imperialist forces, through the Fourth World movement, which highlights internal colonialism. Both the TWP and the United Nations recognise only nation states as full members. We examine how a Third World strategy that brings in the Fourth World, or indigenous, minority and/or stateless groups, can help oppressed groups gain more autonomy and rights through a transnational solidarity rooted in empathy. We trace the intellectual roots and history of the TWP and consider obstacles in bringing together the TWP and the Fourth World movement. A Fourth World strategy corrects the TWP’s implicit approval of an underlying imperialism, and the TWP provides the Fourth World movement a model to accomplish its goal of resisting uncritical modernity.     

Who governs? Religion and order in postcolonial Africa

Abstract

This article explores how mutually productive intersections between religion and governance constitute international political order in sub-Saharan settings. Asking ‘who governs’, I propose religion–governance entanglement as a means of analysing these intersections and rethinking governance, order and religion in Africa. Existing literatures typically characterise the public reliance on religious actors and institutions as being part of a uniquely ‘post-secular’ moment in contemporary world politics or a wider ‘post-Westphalian’ shift in modern governance. Enduring dynamics between postcolonial states and the Global North problematise these framings. In sub-Saharan Africa, religion has a protracted history in postcolonial hybrid governance, overlapping the regional presence of international non-govermental organisations following decolonisation. Using the example of South Sudan, I build on recent analyses of religious-political activities that leave their collective implications under-theorised.     

International Criminal Law and Russia: From ‘Nuremberg’ Passion to ‘The Hague’ Prejudice

Abstract

This essay outlines the history of international criminal law scholarship in Russia. I use a politically based explanation of the changing positive and negative attitudes regarding international criminal law, and show that the discourse on these issues in contemporary Russia is subject to serious political pressure. Changing such a situation is a difficult but essential task, mainly because of the over-riding need to free current scholarship from political control.     

Public administrators in interactive democracy: a multi-paradigmatic approach

ABSTRACT

Currently, interactive forms of democracy that bring local politicians into dialogue and collaboration with relevant and affected citizens are mushrooming. While some research has investigated how interactive democracy affects citizens and politicians, we know little about what interactive democracy means for public administrators. This article presents the results of a case study of role perceptions and coping strategies among public administrators assisting a new type of interactive political committee in two Nordic municipalities. Guided by a multi-paradigmatic conceptual framework featuring public administrators’ roles and coping strategies in interactive governance, the study shows that individual public administrators identify with different administrative roles, and that political and administrative leadership sentiments condition their choice of coping strategies. Moreover, the coping strategy that public administrators select to handle intra- and inter-paradigmatic role dilemmas can have dire consequences for the interplay between interactive democracy and local representative government.     

Plural strategies of accessing land among peri-urban squatters

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses strategies utilized by migrants/squatters in accessing land for settlement and livelihoods in places where the state and the indigenes are not sympathetic to their needs. Although of significant policy and theoretical significance, this area has not received attention from scholarship, its dominant focus being on understanding the diverse origins, destinations, drivers and processes of migration. In addressing this issue, the study uses the case of Malawian migrants located in Zimbabwe’s peri-urban area of Norton. The finding of the paper is that there are as many strategies for acquiring land as they are migrants. The identified strategies (inheritance, seizures, and purchase) are contingent based – varying according to the access of the parties involved in the transactions.     

Turkey’s Public Administration Today: An Overview and Appraisal

ABSTRACT

This study overviews and appraises Turkey’s contemporary public administration system. Its prominent characterizing features are discussed, with an emphasis on both the achievements and problem areas. Turkey has a long history of strong traditional bureaucratic practices and culture, from which its contemporary public administration system has emerged since the Republic was established almost a century ago. Despite its many achievements, public administration has its problems, generally the product of conflicts between tradition and modernity. Due emphasis should, however, be given to addressing the challenges of its over-politicization, strengthening governance practices, enhancing the human factor, and instituting further modern administrative reforms.     

Informal Countermessaging: The Potential and Perils of Informal Online Countermessaging

Abstract

Online countermessaging—communication that seeks to disrupt the online content disseminated by extremist groups and individuals—is a core component of contemporary counterterrorism strategies. Countermessaging has been heavily criticized, not least on the grounds of effectiveness. Whereas current debates are focused on the role of government and large organizations in developing and disseminating countermessages, this article argues that such approaches overlook the informal production of countermessages. Recognizing the appetite for “natural world” content among those engaged in countermessaging, this article highlights some of the potential benefits of informal approaches to countermessaging. At the same time, the article also acknowledges the risks that may result from closer working between countermessaging organizations and informal actors.     

Drugs of choice,drugs of change: Egyptian consumption habits since the 1920s

Abstract

Much has been written and published about the 25 January 2011 Egyptian revolution from the perspective of contemporary history and political science. Much less attention has focused on social policy. I am unaware of any scholarly material that has dealt with illicit drugs during the critical 2011–2016 period, yet increasing drugs consumption provided a social backdrop to the events of that period. This paper identifies historical trends in illicit drugs consumption over the course of the last century to the beginning of the Arab Spring. During much of this period hashish was the drug of choice. This paper argues that drug consumption was on the rise in Egypt well before the downfall of President Husni Mubarak in February 2011, but that it has grown markedly since the ousting of the former president. It will ask which have been and are the drugs of choice in contemporary Egypt. It will further ask how this composition has changed and why, giving special focus to the relatively new mass, opioid drug, Tramadol.     

Trafficking in pain: genealogies of witnessing slavery in Francesco Bartolozzi and concluding with Lalla Essaydi

Abstract

This paper examines the ways that slave bodies have been rendered visible in visual representation. I argue that African diasporic slave bodies are firmly located in a history of viewing imbued with a sentimental erotics of pain. Through a careful examination of the engravings by Francesco Bartolozi that accompany John Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, I argue that even abolitionist images of slaves traffic in pain, exploiting the wounded captive body through a sexualized identification that reinscribes black subjugation. I suggest that contemporary African diasporic artists such as Lalla Essaydi can navigate this genealogy of viewing by strategically moving through hurtful images in order to resituate and recite them. Such a re-citation as Essaydi accomplishes in her painting Duty Free allows for an ethical viewership that does not simply ignore or repress a painful legacy of visual representation but that rethinks it in the name of redress.     

Reconceptualizing Early Ghana

At the time of his death, Nehemia Levtzion had initiated a project to revise Ancient Ghana and Mali in the light of new scholarship since its original publication in 1973. He proposed that the question of origins and early development of Sudanic polities such as Ghana should be thoroughly reconsidered with regard to findings from research in archaeology and related disciplines. In this article, I discuss four topics (climate variability, sedentary-mobile interactions; external / internal dynamics; and organizational variability) central to Levtzion’s 1973 account of Ghana’s origins and the implications of research results to date for our understanding of early political consolidation in the Sahel.     

Education and Freedom of Choice: Evidence from Arranged Marriages in Vietnam

Abstract

Using household data from Vietnam, we provide evidence on the effects of education on freedom of spouse choice. We use war disruptions and spatial indicators of schooling supply as instruments. The point estimates indicate that a year of additional schooling reduces the probability of an arranged marriage by about 14 percentage points for an individual with eight years of schooling. We also estimate bounds on the effect of education on arranged marriage when exclusion restrictions are violated locally (the lower bound is six to seven percentage points). The impact of education is strong for women, but significantly weaker for men.     

Public Administration in Libya: Continuity and Change

ABSTRACT

Libyan public administration has been shaped by Libya’s history, ideology, and economy. It has been negatively affected by the political changes occurring since independence in 1951, particularly Gaddaf’s distinctive initiatives, and by upheavals in the post-Gaddafi transition. Libya’s rentier economy has had its impact on public administration, particularly through its promotion of widespread public corruption. This article analyzes the history of Libya’s politico-administration system before describing the current administrative arrangement, identifying the essential factors that have given rise to those arrangements, and analyzing the contemporary characteristics of public administration that constitute the key future challenges Libya faces.     

Manicheism delirium: desire and disavowal in the libidinal economy of an emerging economy

This paper explores the motivations behind the outward foreign direct investment (ofdi) decisions in the past decade of an East Asian government-linked corporation (glc), the largest company of its kind in the world in terms of sectoral specialisation. This glc has travelled far from its origins as an agent of European imperialism to its current controversial role spearheading postcolonial extra-territorialisation strategies. I argue that financial predation is the synechdoche for territorialisation in the new imperialism. Consequently emerging economies pre-empt the financial siege by embarking on ofdi strategies themselves to create economic buffer territory. I construct a psychoanalytical framework for examining how anxiety is acted out in the global economy. I apply concepts of the traumatic moment, anxiety and the defence mechanisms of disavowal, splitting, introjection and projection to analyse the glc’s investments as territorial displacements of the libidinal economy.     

Feature review Corruption eruption: Development and the international community

Abstract

‘Tied’ or ‘in-kind’ international food aid has been criticised as an implicit form of export subsidy that governments use to circumvent export subsidy restrictions. In addition to displacing agricultural exports, food aid is less efficient than untied aid and depresses local agricultural production in recipient countries. I argue that tied food aid is not protected by the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture and could consequently be challenged under the World Trade Organization's dispute settlement mechanism as a prohibited or actionable subsidy contrary to the Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (scm) Agreement. As the USA is both the largest donor of international food aid and most consistently ties its food aid to domestic agricultural producers, this paper focuses on US policy to describe the challenge that might be advanced under the scm Agreement.     

Decolonising drug studies in an era of predatory accumulation

Abstract

The cultural and political-economic valences of psychoactive drugs in the Global South offer critical insights on local and international fault lines of social inequality and profiteering. Historically, in a classic primitive accumulation process the trafficking of industrially produced euphoric substances across the globe have wreaked havoc among vulnerable populations while extracting profit for the powerful. The complex flows of capital generated both by illegal addiction markets and also by the mobilisation of licit public funds to manage their mayhem, however, suggest the contemporary utility of the concept of ‘predatory accumulation’. The Enlightenment-era concept of ‘primitive accumulation’ usefully highlighted state violence and forcible dispossession in the consolidation of European capitalism. A contemporary reframing of these processes as predatory accumulation, however, highlights contradictory, nonlinear relationships between the artificially high profits of illegal drug sales, repressive governmentality and corporate greed. It sets these patterns of destructive profiteering in the context of our moment in history.     

Working with Korean Immigrant Alcohol Abusing Clients

Abstract

As cultural and ethnic diversity increases in American society, it becomes crucial for professionals working with alcohol abusing clients to gain cultural sensitivity. This article seeks to aid the clinician in culturally sensitive treatment with Korean immigrant alcohol abusers. As an aid to providing effective treatment for this population, the following areas are discussed: the pattern of Korean immigration to the United States; the prevalence of alcohol abuse among Korean Americans; the influence of sociocultural, psychological, and physiological factors on Korean American alcohol use; and intervention strategies for working with this population.     

Strategy of tension: The Belgian terrorist crisis 1982–1986

Abstract

Between 1982 and 1986, Belgium suffered a series of terrorist attacks that claimed more than 30 lives, making this campaign one of the most destructive in the recent history of western Europe. Two major groups were involved: one was purportedly a leftist radical sect, the other an anonymous cell popularly known as the “mad killers,” whom subsequent investigation has shown to be connected to neo‐Nazi organizations. Both groups were apparently seeking to destabilize the Belgian state at a time of intense political conflict, and it was widely suggested that the apparently opposed political extremes were actually allied in a common cause. In addition, official enquiries established connections between the terrorist groups and agents of Belgian state security. This paper discusses the use of terrorism in a political “strategy of tension” modeled on that developed in Italy in the late 1960s. It also suggests that the contemporary structure of European terrorist groups readily lends itself to manipulation in the cause of provocateur activity.     

‘The new Europeans’: the image of the African refugee in European literature

Abstract

This essay examines the representation of African refugees and asylum seekers in European literature in general, as well recent life writings and literature for young adults in particular. Examples will be drawn from writers as diverse as Benjamin Zephaniah and Senait G. Mehari. It is argued that the selected refugee stories invest in narrating an imagined community of ‘the new Europeans’ and thus invite readers to a plural reading of history. Following this train of thought, I am particularly interested in the interplay between images and motifs that evoke and shape various nation-states while illuminating an imagined European community. I therefore seek to excavate a transcultural imagery that characterizes refugee and asylum seekers as the ‘new Europeans’ by utilizing narrative strategies which reflect Paul Ricoeur's ideas about a new ethos for Europe.     

ISIL's Execution Videos: Audience Segmentation and Terrorist Communication in the Digital Age

ABSTRACT

This article offers a bottom-up understanding of the media strategy employed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) as it relates to the production and dissemination of its hostage execution videos. Through an empirical analysis of sixty-two videos of executions produced by ISIL in the year following its establishment as the “Islamic State” in 2014, this study examines the videos as a major component of ISIL's media strategy. Through these media products, ISIL seeks to spread a political message aimed at both local and global, ingroup and outgroup consumption through audience segmentation, while striving to influence both local and global audiences through the use and production of graphic violence. This article also discusses the strategy governing the production and release of ISIL's execution videos; how it relies on the global media to transmit its intertwined political and religious agenda in the digital media age.