Bridging the academic–practitioner divide

One of the poorest countries in the world, the people of Afghanistan gained a chance for peace with the collapse of the Taliban. Whether the country can find its way forward from a precarious position to a democratic and peaceful future will depend on how it responds to the challenge of globalization and constructs a viable economic system. The rate of economic growth and integration into the world capitalist economy for developing countries depends primarily upon any given country's political capacities. Afghanistan ranks low on all three indicators of political capacity: extractive capability, institutional credibility, and transparency. Globalization is a multifaceted process. In its ability to compete in the global economy, Afghanistan is beginning the contest in arrears with little political capacity and experience in capitalist, market-based economics. Often buffeted historically by external forces and actors, two global wars are intersecting in the country today: those of narcotics and terrorism.     

Exploring Strategies and Implications of an Opportunistic Alliance: A Case Study of Pakistan and China

This article seeks to test the validity of ‘balance of threat’ theory as propounded by Stephen Walt that states react to imbalances of threat. It takes into account the factors enumerated by Walt to explore threat perceptions of Pakistan and the strategy they developed to cope with security threats. It attempts to take an overview of Pakistan's security dilemma its responses in twin time frames: the Cold War period (1980–1989) and the post-Cold War period (1990–2000) with relevance to the contemporary period. Pakistan's arms acquisition, upgradation in sophistication of arsenals, increase in fund allocation in defence have all been its tangible tactics to neutralize India's military superiority. Pakistan explored Pan-Islamism to bring the support of the Islamic states. Pakistan also resorted to an active alliance with China, to increase its competency. From a theoretical angle, this article adopts a realist viewpoint, focuses on security concerns of state actors.     

The Taliban: a new proxy for Iran in Afghanistan?

Abstract

Iran has pursued a highly contradictory policy towards Afghanistan. On the one hand, it became a significant beneficiary of the overthrow of the Taliban regime by the US-led military intervention in 2001 in Afghanistan. The new Afghan government established cordial ties with Iran, allowing it to expand its political, economic and cultural influence in the country. Yet Iran has also provided significant support to the Taliban in its campaign to violently upend the political, social and economic processes in the country. This article examines the underlying domestic and regional security dynamics that contribute to this contradictory behaviour. It offers an assessment of how tensions between the United States and the Islamic Republic, as well as Tehran’s growing threat perception following the rise of the Islamic State – Khorasan in 2014, impact on Iran’s policy towards the Taliban. The paper argues that Tehran views the Taliban as an instrument to disrupt the influence of other actors in Afghanistan. The instrumentalisation of the Taliban, however, is likely to be counterproductive for Iranian security in the long run as it contributes to Afghanistan’s instability and insecurity and undermines Iran’s own long-term interests.     

From ‘Constructing Socialism’ to a ‘Socialist-oriented Market Economy’ in Contemporary Vietnam: A Critique of Ideologies

Abstract

In power, the Vietnamese Communist Party has experienced three ‘moments’ of growth, each with some differences of detail and of meanings: ‘traditional communism’; the transition from a planned to a market economy in the 1980s; and, since 1992, a ‘socialist-oriented market economy’. For each, the article discusses the ideologically defined nature of change; intentionality—‘how growth was to happen’; and the quantitative data used. It suggests that critiques throughout the period have engaged with the intentionality issue: in the first moment, by isolating the socialist relations of production within socialist construction as the cause of difficulties; more recently, by engaging with the lack of effective policy despite contemporary ideology's unreliable belief in policy as key to growth.     

Breaking new ground: Afghanistan's response to landmines and unexploded ordnance

Operating since the late 1980s, in an environment of shifting wars, the Humanitarian Mine Action ( HMA ) programme in Afghanistan has nonetheless been highly successful in reducing the impact of landmines. This article discusses three factors that have contributed to its success: the building of national capacity; the systematic application of surveys; and the ability to act flexibly and innovatively. Having operated under the auspices of the UN, but in the absence of a functioning government, the programme faces new challenges with the potential transition to peace in Afghanistan. Ultimately, however, the programme is a world leader in its field, and as one of the best functioning sectors in economic and humanitarian assistance to the country, it represents a key resource for a new internationally recognised Afghan government.     

The Blue (White and Red) Orchestra: a soundtrack for the country that never was

The aim of the paper is to go beyond the commonly accepted view of Sarajevo’s Plavi orkestar (The Blue Orchestra) as the 1980s “teen pop-rock sensation” and illuminate the less conspicuous, but nevertheless crucial, political dimension of the band’s music and visual aesthetics. This will be done by discussing several “pieces of the puzzle” essential to understanding the background to and motivations behind Plavi orkestar’s political engagement in the second half of the 1980s: (1) the “Sarajevo factor;” (2) the Sarajevo Pop-rock School and the New Primitives “poetics of the local;” (3) the generational Yugoslavism; (4) the New Partisans “poetics of the patriotic;” and (5) the post-New Partisans “hippie ethos.” The concluding section of the paper will reflect on Plavi orkestar’s resurgence in 1998 and explore the question of the band’s continuing resonance within the post-Yugoslav and post-socialist contexts. An argument underlying the discussion of all of these elements is that Plavi orkestar’s Yugoslavism of the 1980s is best understood as a soundtrack for the country that never was (i.e. a popular-cultural expression of what, from the viewpoint of a particular generational cohort and its location in the “Yugoslav socialist universe,” the community they thought of as their own ought to have been but never really was), and that the current value of this soundtrack lies in offering not only a particular window into the pre-post-socialist past but also in being a symbolic referent for a certain kind of retrospective utopia that gauges the realities of the post-socialist – that is, neo-liberal capitalist – present and, in so doing, figures as a “normative compass” for the life of dignified existence.     

America’s Missing Leverage in Afghanistan and Pakistan: a structural analysis

Abstract

Despite strong shared interests and their dependence on US assistance, Kabul and Islamabad frequently fail to cooperate with the USA’s post-9/11 security agenda. Why doesn’t the USA have more leverage in these alliances and what can it change to be more influential? This article identifies four structural factors in Washington’s alliances in Afghanistan and Pakistan (‘Af-Pak’) contributing to Washington’s lack of coercive power: 1) the USA’s interest makes coercion difficult; 2) Kabul and Islamabad have more invested and will bargain to protect their interests; 3) the form of US commitment (an intense but explicitly temporary military commitment) produces incentives for Kabul and Islamabad to adopt short-term solutions, frequently running against US interests; and 4) the tenets of counterinsurgency policy cause Washington to be politically dependent on Kabul and Islamabad, effectively reducing its influence.     

台湾地区金融业促进制造业转型升级的经验

在中国经济新常态背景下,通过金融业改革促进产业转型是当今学术界研究的热门话题。本文以我国台湾地区为样本,以金融结构和产业结构的视角,回顾1960-1980年间的金融抑制时期、1980-2000年间的金融自由化时期、2000年后金融改革和国际化时期,在面临国际和岛内社会经济环境不断变化的情况下,台湾当局通过金融业促进制造业转型升级方面做的积极探索。并探讨了在台湾制造业升级过程中金融发展的作用。这些经验对中国大陆通过金融业促进制造业转型升级具有启示意义,值得借鉴。     

‘East’ and ‘West’ in contemporary Turkey: threads of a new universalism

The tired old civilisational categories of ‘East’ and ‘West’, loosely identified with ‘Islam’ and ‘modernity’, are alive and well, nowhere more so than in contemporary Turkey. The Justice Development Party (AKP) currently in government employs them assiduously to political advantage but they have a long history, having defined the parameters of societal identity and political discourse throughout the history of the Turkish Republic. The paper takes the strength of the categories as its starting point but moves beyond them by asking if discourses, narratives and identities, individual and collective, exist in Turkey which question, overcome and ultimately undermine the categories of ‘East’ and ‘West’. The paper starts by investigating the evolution of ideas about East and West since the late Ottoman period and accepts that they are still dominant. However, since the 1980s in particular, they are being undermined in a de facto way by cultural developments in literature and music, new trends in historiography and novel ways of relating to the past. In some ways in contemporary Turkey, the paper concludes, culture trumps the inherently essentialist idea of ‘civilisation’ and Turkish society is ahead of its political and intellectual elites.     

Employment,restructuring, and gender: The case of San José, Costa Rica

San José has been the territorial fulcrum of Costa Rica’s post-World War II socioeconomic exceptionalism relative not only to Central America but to the periphery of the world economy at large. Research on the contemporary reorganization of the world economy underscores the gendered aspects of widening socioeconomic inequalities on an international scale. From these standpoints, this paper analyzes change in San José’s labor market in terms of two basic questions. First, to what extent has the recent experience of very small countries on the periphery reflected the baseline features of restructured inequalities of employment and gender as portrayed in the literature on global transformation during the late twentieth century? And second, given that the aggregate prosperity of Costa Rica since its economic crisis of the early 1980s has been premised on neoliberal reforms, to what extent have shifts in the gender contours of San José’s labor market amounted to recovery or loss compared with its socioeconomic exceptionalism of the pre-crisis era?     

Foreign Fighters and the Case of Chechnya: A Critical Assessment

The aim of this article is to explore and analyze the role of foreign fighters in the recent episodes of Russo–Chechen violence in the North Caucasus. The article begins by offering a preliminary theoretical consideration of foreign fighters, indicating how the events in Afghanistan combined with the development of a Salafi-Jihadist movement that would shape subsequent conflicts in the North Caucasus throughout the 1990s. The article will then move on to identify the role of Arab foreign fighters in Chechnya, demonstrating how a complex local and global social networks enable and motivate volunteers.     

Sacred or Secular? ‘Memorial’, the Russian Orthodox Church,and the Contested Commemoration of Soviet Repressions

The reconstruction of the history from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s of Soviet repressions critically influenced the social formation of Gulag memory in Russia. Amongst those re-narrating the past, the ‘Memorial’ Society and the Russian Orthodox Church most actively shaped the collective memory of Soviet repressions, trying to establish multi-layered explanatory constructs of the Gulag. Their interpretations were crystallised through contemporary memorialisation acts in significant landscapes of the past. Focusing on Solovki, Ekaterinburg, Butovo and Magadan, and analysing tensions in their memorialisation processes, we discuss secular and Orthodox interpretations of the Gulag, and their impact on the memory of the Soviet repressions in contemporary Russia.     

Localism and Accountability in a Post-Collaborative Era: Where Does It Leave the Community Right to Challenge?

Since the establishment of subsidiarity in the early 1990s, the European-wide move to devolve governance has been interpreted by previous and present UK governments adopting differing ideological positions within a ‘localism agenda’. Interpretations have changed the dynamics of the community right to challenge, as well as the structure and mechanisms for community accountability. This article adopts the typology of forms of local governance developed by Lowndes and Sullivan (2008, How low can you go? Rationales and challenges for neighbourhood governance. Public Administration, 86 (1), 1–22) to explore the hypothesis that the localism agenda realigns the synergy between neighbourhood rationales; citizen engagement in service delivery and the opportunity for public scrutiny and accountability. It concludes that opportunities for communities to challenge service delivery and ensure increased accountability to the local level will be tempered by increased complexity and demands on local authorities to develop new relationships with both service users and providers.     

Repression and endurance: anathematized Hindu and Sikh women of Afghanistan

Hindus and Sikhs, longtime minority religious communities in Afghanistan, have played a major role in the social, cultural, and economic development of the country. Their history in Afghanistan has not been faithfully documented nor relayed beyond the country's borders by their resident educated strata or religious leaders, rendering them virtually invisible and voiceless within and outside of their country borders. The situation of Hindu and Sikh women in Afghanistan is significantly more marginalized socially and politically. Gender equality and women's rights were central to the teachings of Guru Nanak, but gradually became irrelevant to the daily lives of his followers in Afghanistan. Hindu and Sikh women have sustained their hope for change and seized any opportunity presented to play a role in the process. Active participants in the social, cultural, and religious life of their respective communities as well as in Afghanistan's government, their contributions to social changes and the political process have gone mostly unnoticed and undocumented as their rights, equality, and standing in the domestic and public arena in Afghanistan continue to erode in the face of continuous discrimination and harassment.     

‘Sometimes fear gets in all your bones’: towards understanding the complexities of risk in development work

ABSTRACT

In the context of increasing risk for aid workers, a growing body of scholarship is focused on risk management in contexts of humanitarian assistance and development work. Much less attention, however, has been given to how staff and volunteers experience such risks. This paper adopts a feminist geographical approach to explore how development workers make meaning of risk in specific contexts. Adopting a qualitative approach, it draws upon 14 semi-structured in-depth interviews with international (7) and local (7) staff of an international educational and sporting non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Afghanistan. After exploring differences between local and foreign staff perceptions of risk, it also offers a gendered analysis of risk for women development workers in Afghanistan. In so doing, this paper contributes to the growing body of literature in ‘Aidland’ studies by revealing the complex understandings of risk and fear by both foreign and local staff in the same geographical and organisational context. For NGOs seeking to make life-saving decisions based on the calculation of risk, this paper evidences the need to also create space for the voices of local and foreign staff whose experiences of risk will be highly relational, embodied, gendered and context specific.     

External debt of post-communist countries

On the background of continuous global economic instability and debt problems in the Eurozone, the significance of post-communist external debt goes without saying. The article will explore the scope and dynamics of external indebtedness in the post-communist world in a comparative and historical framework. Particular attention will be paid to a likelihood of a debt crisis in the region similar to the one in the developing world in the early 1980s. The debt crisis will be an ultimate price for reform mistakes and may have serious political economy implications by hampering or even reversing the process of the post-communist transformation.     

Globalisation before the crash: the City of London and UK economic strategy

The global financial crisis provides an opportune moment to analyse the rise of the City of London financial markets, their role in the globalisation process and an attempt by the Labour Party Left in the 1970s to challenge emerging transnational forces. The USA became the world's ‘hegemon’ after the Second World War, but London retained its power in finance; well placed to challenge the post-war Keynesian regulatory consensus in favour of globalising interests, theoretically and politically served by the rise of neo-liberal ideology. In response the Labour Party Left devised its radical ‘Programme 1973’ and subsequently the Alternative Economic Strategy, which in seeking to defend social democracy, understood the necessity to prevent the erosion of national financial controls. The 1976 International Monetary Fund crisis was a defining moment in this battle. This article includes interviews with key contemporary actors and is based in the discipline of International Political Economy.     

Pashtun Jirga and prospects of peace and conflict resolution in Pakistan’s ‘tribal’ frontier

ABSTRACT

There is growing recognition and appreciation of traditional approaches towards peace and conflict resolution across the world. This article aims to highlight the crucial role and consequential importance of traditional mechanisms of peace and conflict resolution in Pakistan’s terror-hit Pashtun ‘tribal’ areas, formerly known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). These ‘peripheral’ areas of Pashtun tribes stand in relative isolation from the ‘centre’ of the Pakistani ruling establishment. Moreover, with the onset of militancy since 2001 in the Afghanistan–Pakistan region, the situation has turned worse for the local Pashtun tribes. The article discusses the changing role of traditional mechanisms and local structures of peace and conflict resolution, arguing that colonial legacies have failed to prevent, manage, resolve or transform conflicts in post-colonial states such as Pakistan. Furthermore, the Pashtun cultural code of Pashtunwali, along with its various tenets and structures, especially Jirga (Pashtun tribal council) and Lashkar (tribal militia), is also discussed in the article. The article concludes that the changing socio-political situation, along with the rise of the secular Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), is presenting a challenge to ‘tribal’ Pashtun patriarchal values as well as traditional structures like Jirga in the region.     

Formal and informal disability resources for Afghan reconstruction

After 23 years of turbulence the number of disabled Afghans is unknown and formal services are minimal. The great majority live with whatever resources they find in themselves and their families, the normal pattern throughout history. Informal help and some cultural resources of Afghan history and Muslim teaching are noted in this paper, together with some common negative views. UN agencies and NGOs have made efforts to promote an adapted Community Based Rehabilitation in Afghanistan from the 1980s to the present and to transfer rehabilitation knowledge and skills to families with disabled members. Some local resource centres and community disability organisations have developed and can be a useful basis for disability planning in the anticipated national reconstruction. Emphasis should be given to the participation of disabled people as beneficiaries and employees in all reconstruction programmes, which should proceed in consultation with families and disabled individuals.     

NOT SO ‘ARM'S LENGTH’: REINTERPRETING AGENCIES IN UK CENTRAL GOVERNMENT

Administrative decentralization to government agencies (so‐called ‘agencification’) has attracted much attention in recent years, increasingly for its longevity or evolution after the ‘high’ managerialism of the 1980s, and largely through a neo‐positivist epistemology. Drawing on techniques of narrative and discourse analysis, and a model of incremental ideational change, this article identifies the necessity of supplementing those existing large‐N analyses of agencification's expansion and decline with qualitative attention to the endurance of policy meaning. It demonstrates how the original foundations of managerialism, civil service empowerment and decentralization from the UK's seminal ‘Next Steps’ agency programme are eschewed in contemporary reform discourse, where agencification is instead advocated as centralized, politically proximate and departmentalized governance. This substantial reinterpretation of the arm's‐length concept not only challenges existing claims of continuity in UK administrative policy, but also demonstrates the utility of interpretive methods for exploring longevity in public management more widely.