Mugabe at war: The political economy of conflict in Zimbabwe

This paper employs a 'political economy of conflict' approach to explore the recent deterioration in the governance of Zimbabwe. It argues that this analytical approach, which has been applied by scholars such as William Reno to highly dysfunctional and/or collapsed states like Liberia and Sierra Leone, is appropriate for understanding the current actions of the Zimbabwean government as well, and especially their relation to the military's unpopular intervention in the recent conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While Zimbabwe's current crisis has been aptly described by various scholars as a failure of leadership, this paper argues that such failures of national governments in Africa need to be understood within the broader context of international political economy. Zimbabwe's lapses in governance extend beyond the state and the national border to features that have non-state and informal as well as international and transnational dimensions.     

新形势下如何提高地方外事工作水平之思考

随着经济全球化进程不断加快,世界各国之间的交流与合作日益增多,"科学发展观"的提出和"以人为本"的外交理念的确立,使得各级领导对地方外事工作的要求越来越高,各行各业对外事部门的期望值越来越大,外事工作的任务也越来越繁重.因此,迫切需要用全新的观念、全新的角度去观察、审视和思考地方外事工作.要在继承优良传统的基础上,着眼新情况、采取新举措、总结新经验、探索新路子.     

Municipal Socialism Then and Now: some lessons for the Global South

Given the large and growing literature opposed to the privatisation of services such as water and electricity, it is peculiar that so little has been written about the experience of ‘municipal socialism’—a set of roughly analogous historical movements that used local governments to challenge private service delivery and advance ‘socialist’ agendas from the late 1800s to the 1940s. Although primarily a European and American phenomenon, and emerging from different contexts than those prevailing today, municipal socialism found widespread support and transformed many public services. Results were mixed, with some experiments being little more than (pre)Keynesian attempts to revitalise capital accumulation in the face of ‘irrational’ private sector services, but the lessons are important as these experiments provided the first intellectually and politically sustained resistance to privatisation and other prototypical forms of what we now call neoliberalism, and demonstrated the possibility of effective service delivery by the public sector. This paper reviews these experiments, focusing on the experience of the United Kingdom and drawing lessons for contemporary efforts to build alternatives to privatisation in cities in the South, where local-level, socialist-oriented reforms have been relatively strong.     

Zimbabwe and Canada: Historical Struggle Meets Historical Vacuum

This article argues that a poverty of historical understanding of Canada’s relations with Zimbabwe has had a debilitating effect on Canadian government policy in southern Africa in recent years. More particularly, this vacuum of Canadian historical understanding has encouraged a profound scepticism on the part of African governments about the Canadian government’s motives for intervening in Zimbabwean affairs, and has helped to create an atmosphere of mutual incomprehension. The Canadian government’s approach generally fails to put rights-based criticisms in any sort of historical context, and leaves Mugabe’s historically-based propaganda largely unanswered. The article argues that there are structural reasons why Canadian government policy is pursued in an historical vacuum. These relate to the organisation of government and the academy in Canada; as well as to Canadian nationalist and ideological preconceptions, which impede a more clear-sighted understanding of the broader historical and British imperial context of Canada’s engagement with southern Africa.     

Career moves: Reflections on the Irish gunman

Abstract

The article, based on a generation of contacts with the militant Irish republican movement in general and the Provisional IRA in particular, focuses on: who becomes a gunman and why; who is chosen as a gunman by the leadership and why; what are the characteristics of an active service volunteer; what and who make a good gunman and why—the virtues, characteristics, and craft of the contemporary Irish gunmen; and the result of a gunman's career for the movement, the opposition, and the individual.     

Portfolio models and planning for export diversification: Malawi,Tanzania and Zimbabwe

Evidence is presented regarding strengths and limitations of portfolio approaches as applied to diversifying export earnings. An empirical application using data from Malawi, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe is used to demonstrate these strengths and limitations. Modifications of the typical portfolio approach to export diversification are presented; these modifications help make the approach more plausible for use in developing countries. The modified approach is shown to provide guidance to policymakers who seek simultaneously to increase export earnings and reduce their instability.