The FARC's Best Friend: U.S. Antidrug Policies and the Deepening of Colombia's Civil War in the 1990s

The strengthening of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) during the 1990s was an unintended consequence of a series of tactical successes in U.S. antidrug policies. These included dismantling the Medellín and Cali drug cartels, interdicting coca coming into Colombian processing facilities, and using drug certification requirements to pressure the Colombian government to attack drug cartels and allow aerial fumigation of coca crops. These successes, however, merely pushed coca cultivation increasingly to FARC-dominated areas while weakening many of the FARC's political-military opponents. This provided the FARC with unprecedented opportunities to extract resources from the cocaine industry to deepen its long insurgency against the Colombian state. The Colombian experience demonstrates the importance of creating a more sophisticated understanding of how lootable wealth can exacerbate civil wars.     

Logics of action and models of capitalism: Explaining bottom‐up non‐liberal change

Recent institutionalist scholarship has theorized the liberalization or “disorganization” of capitalism as the result of shifts in economic actors' “logic of action” towards opportunism. Little attention has been given to the reverse possibility that shifts in economic actors' “logic of action” away from opportunism might contribute to “embedding” or “organizing” capitalism. This paper builds on recent scholarship to theorize this scenario and then demonstrate its empirical validity with an historical institutionalist study of the emergence of such a “non‐liberal” institution in Switzerland in 1961. The theoretical framework links three “logics of action” – opportunism, enlightened self‐interest and strong solidarity – to Höpner's typology of capitalist institutions – organized, coordinated, and liberal. It theorizes the interactions between these logics and the social mechanism – goal signaling – that can explain a shift from one logic of action to another, potentially leading to change from one type of institution to another.     

The U.S. military and sexual violence against women

Abstract

The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (BCAS) created the “Notes from the Field” section in 1992 in an attempt to bring BCAS closer to its activist origins and goals by publishing brief reports on events and issues of particular concern in the world today. Not intended to duplicate BCAS's usual in-depth and well-documented analysis and research, these reports are meant to be a less formal equivalent of “field notes” describing what is happening or being debated or studied out there in the world of action. Although analysis is usually a valuable part of these presentations, the “Notes” are more akin to urgent notices or offerings for discussion. The name “Notes from the Field” is not meant to imply the colonialist concept of people reporting back from the so-called Third World, and even though the name can be seen to loosely apply to the field of Asian studies, it does not refer to reporting on the more strictly academic aspects of fields of study within academia. The hope is that the information and opinions presented in these “Notes from the Field” will inspire readers to concern themselves with issues that matter, either through further study and analysis or by speaking out or taking action more directly.

It has been reported that on 4 September 1995 two U.S. Marines and one U.S. Navy man stationed at Camp Hansen Marine Base in Kin, Okinawa, raped a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl. This situation caught the Okinawan, Japanese, and international media's attention, brought out an Okinawan demonstration of 90,000 people in the latest of “U.S. Bases Out Of Okinawa” demonstrations that go back at least to 1972 with the reversion of Okinawa to Japan, made apologies by U.S. president Clinton mandatory, and resulted in the turning over of the three servicemen to the justice of Japanese courts, itself an act reflecting the need of the U.S. military and civilian authorities to try to defuse the situation.     

从外交到移民——美国对中国“滞留”学生政策的转变分析(1948~1957)

“滞留”美国的中国留学生是冷战初期中美关系中的重要议题之一。两国在围绕其去留的反复较量中,美国的政策变化不仅是对现实利益的追求,更重要的是为满足其冷战意识形态斗争的需要。中国留学生与中共的跨国政治联系直接影响了中国政府在争取滞留人士过程中的方针策略。此外,部分滞留的中国留学生转化为永久定居美国的移民,在美国移民政策中创造了诸多“先例”并产生了多米诺骨牌效应,对此后旅美外籍留学生申请永久移民产生了深远影响。     

IMPERIAL DESIGNS

For a very short period after the attacks on 9/11, as the United States bombarded Taliban positions and the alleged training camps of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida organization, Afghanistan was center stage. Then, as the mundane mopping up, the political haggling, and the international community's efforts to manage the postwar mess took over, the spotlight turned to Iraq. Yet even while Afghan landscapes, politics, and economic and social practices were the focus of the world's attention, the country's history and its place in Central Asia and in the wider realm of Asian and global geopolitics were little covered by the media. This essay outlines how Afghanistan has figured in the imperial designs of regional and international powers for more than two thousand years. From the Mongol invasions of the “civilized” world in the thirteenth century to the U.S. intervention just after the turn of the second millennium CE., the “deep” political history of Afghanistan is described with a view to “locating” the country in a wider political-economic context. Afghanistan's relationship to the great regional empires of Persia, India, and China in the late medieval and early modern periods is discussed, as is its role in “the Great Game” of imperial politics between Russia and British India during the nineteenth century. The regional impact of the Russian Revolution and of efforts to consolidate the USSR are described, as is the rising nationalism and Islamism of the peoples of the region during the final years of the Soviet Union. The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the longer term implications of U.S. support for the mujahiddin – support that ironically contributed to the movement that gave rise to al-Qaida -- are analyzed as the final episodes before 9/11 and the recent dramatic U.S. military and political intervention.     

日本“国家正常化”与美国的东亚地缘战略

战后,由于美军单独占领日本,美国占领当局直接主导了日本的非法西斯化改革,日本的对外政策也被纳入美国的东亚地缘战略框架内。正因如此,战后日本的"国家正常化"进程与美国的亚洲地缘战略密切联系在一起。冷战时期,日本充当美国在亚洲的"冷战"哨兵,日本在"旧金山体制"下获得"独立"和国际空间。冷战结束后,美国推行全球霸权战略,日本乘机加强与美国的军事同盟关系,扩展自主权。尤其进入21世纪,日本通过参与美国的"反恐"战争,实现了海外派兵。近年来美国实施战略东移和"亚太再平衡",日本借机加快修宪活动和军事"解禁",加速日本"国家正常化"的步伐。     

New letters from Hiroshima

Abstract

Wartime censors, as Phillip Knightley's The First Casualty reminds us, perform a twofold mission: (l) deny vital data to the enemy and (2) conceal from the citizenry potentially perturbing news as to how their leaders are conducting the mayhem at the front. This protective zeal tends to be habit forming and can outlast formal hostilities. Take the case of two historians who tried to pry past the “received wisdom and the received ignorance” about Western military activities in a gory conflict fought on Third World terrain: A tyrant launched a lightning invasion into a neighboring southern country over which he claimed historical sovereignty. A U.S. diplomat earlier had “signaled” the avaricious dictator that the target state lay outside the perimeter of vital U.S. interests. Nonetheless, seventeen U.N. countries—though primarily the United States—charged in to repel the invaders with a ferocious aerial campaign and a massive ground assault. The tyrant, alas, survived this onslaught because several hundred thousand—and eventually several million—highly motivated Chinese troops came to the rescue.     

Peter Gowan's “American grand strategy”

While this article broadly agrees with Peter Gowan's concern about the new militarism of the United States and the appalling consequences that have emerged as a result of U.S. preemption in Iraq, it questions the extent to which his portrait of U.S. hegemony addresses all the relevant issues as they affect the Asian region. Given the numerical dominance of Asia in world population and the rising power of China and India, how Gowan's “American Grand Strategy” applies to this part of the world is of fundamental importance to the relevance and sustainability of his argument. Part 1 on U.S. economic hegemony argues that U.S. capital has not been an unmitigated evil for India and where U.S. interests have been damaging they are not uniquely so: the European Union's economic policies have also been deeply damaging even though Europe is not a hegemon. Part 2 on U.S. political hegemony argues that bringing Pakistan and India into the U.S. alliance system has been beneficial for regional security and domestic political-ethnic stability. Part 3 considers responses to U.S. hegemony, arguing that this supremacy is more fragile than Gowan assumes because new powers, such as China and India, have long-term strategies to reduce their dependency. The conclusion suggests that despite widespread criticism and dissatisfaction with the nature of U.S. engagement in Asia, the dominant view in the region is one that sees the United States as a useful wedge between the emerging interests of China, India, and Japan. In short, the “American Grand Strategy” is not as negative, overwhelming, or as unpopular as Gowan suggests.     

Changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union: The effects on China

The rapidly changing political, economic, and security policies in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in late 1989 and 1990 have added to the complications faced by Chinese leaders since they decided to suppress the unprecedented large-scale pro-democracy demonstrations in Chinese cities in spring 1989. These changes had an obvious “ripple effect” in China, encouraging prodemocracy forces and alarming Chinese leaders. They attracted strong positive attention from the developed countries of the West and Japan, and international financial institutions and businesses. This came at the indirect expense of China. And they accelerated changes in world politics (especially in U.S.-Soviet relations) and in the politics of government decision making in the West that promised to reduce China’s relative influence in world affairs in the 1990s. The prospect of reduced influence abroad and curbed economic contacts did not appear to be sufficient cause for Beijing leaders to markedly change existing policies. Chinese leaders in mid-1990 appeared focused on issues of internal political power at a time of leadership transition. Significant changes in policy appeared most likely to await leadership changes as Deng Xiaoping and other aged leaders die or are incapacitated.     

Die Wiederherstellung des Marktsubjekts

The UK is generally considered a laboratory for styles of governance influenced by New Public Management: outsourcing, internal markets, targets, auditing. The shifts in governance style, and the new instruments that have accompanied them, were once synonymous with “Thatcherism” but have since been adopted and refined by New Labour. Early critical social scientific analyses deployed the Gramscian notion of hegemony to analyse this shift. This was followed by Foucault inspired analyses of “governmentality”. The latter focused more explicitly on the micro-level of conduct. This article follows that lead, but seeks to address the central puzzles thrown up by this experiment through Max Weber’s conception of a “bureaucratic revolution” and Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the constitution of a “market subject” via a “double movement”: a simultaneous loosening and tightening of control. The Weber-Polanyi approach allows us, we argue, to make the link more explicit between micro-level changes in the “conduct of life” (Lebensführung) and the meso-level instruments designed to bring about such a re-orientation of conduct. The article makes the case with reference to empirical material from a number of public services, notably education and health. Overall, the decisive factor is not a weakening of the state, but a change in its capacities and instruments.     

After neoliberal globalization

This article traces the “securitization” of U.S. foreign economic policy in the administration of George W. Bush. It does so with reference to U.S. economic policy in East and Southeast Asia. It argues that in the context of U.S. economic and military preponderance in the world order, the United States has been unable to resist the temptation to link foreign economic and security policy. While there was evidence of the securitization of economic globalization in U.S. policy from day one of the Bush administration, it was 9/11 that firmed up this trend. For the key members of the Bush foreign policy team, globalization is now seen not simply in neoliberal economic terms, but also through the lenses of the national security agenda of the United States. Economic globalization is now not only a benefit but also a “security problem.” The attacks on 9/11 offered the opportunity for what we might call the “unilateralist-idealists” in the Bush administration, to set in train their project for a post-sovereign approach to U.S. foreign policy.     

THE REISCHAUER MEMO: Mr. Moto,Hirohito, and Japanese American Soldiers

This article offers a critical reading of a recently discovered memorandum authored by Edwin O. Reischauer in September 1942. Already at this early date in the war, Reischauer proposed retention of the Japanese emperor as head of a postwar “puppet regime” that would serve U.S. interests in East Asia. He also argued that Japanese Americans had until then been a “sheer liability” and that the United States could turn them into an “asset” by enlisting them in the U.S. military. He reasoned that Japanese American soldiers would be useful for propaganda purposes – that is, to demonstrate to the world and particularly the “yellow and brown peoples” that the United States was not a racist nation. The article interrogates the racial thinking behind such utilitarian proposals for the Japanese emperor and Japanese Americans and considers the memorandum within the broader context of the wartime foundations of the postwar U.S.-Japan relationship, the characteristics of postwar Japanese studies, the decision to mobilize Japanese Americans as soldiers, and the shifting place of Japanese Americans in the management of U.S. race relations during and after the war.     

The political economy of the dollar and the yen in East Asia

From the early 1980s until 1997 large amounts of Japan's current account dollar surplus were invested in U.S. Treasury securities. This economic relationship developed into an “alliance” sustained by the economic policies of U.S. and Japanese authorities. The U.S.-Japanese alliance indirectly promoted East Asian export-led growth during 1985–95. However, policies associated with the U.S.-Japanese alliance also contributed significantly to the 1997 Asian financial crisis. During the past years Japan has launched a number of initiatives for aid and regional monetary co-operation with the aim of internationalising the yen and redirecting regional current account surplus flows to go within the region, rather than being invested in the United States. The article assesses the viability of this regional challenge to U.S. monetary hegemony.     

Occurrence at Nog Ŭn-ri Bridge: An Inquiry into the History and Memory of a Civil War

This inquiry begins with the American Civil War and then moves into an investigation of history and memory in the context of the Korean War, using the alleged massacre of Korean civilians in the vicinity of Nog?n village (Y?ngdong country) as a focal point. The article describes the progressive political background of Y?ngdong county and argues that revelations about the Nog?n-ri massacre must be seen against the backdrop of leftist activity and guerrilla warfare in an area that was long known as the “red county.” Finding themselves facing “essentially a guerrilla war [fought] over rugged territory,” the American military forces responded by creating a free-fire zone. The author links these free-fire operations with U.S. actions during the war in Vietnam and then explores how and why the U.S. government (with the complicity of the mainstream media) has buried stories about the murder of civilians and he weighs U.S. responsibility for these atrocities.     

Waging Peace on Okinawa

“Waging Peace on Okinawa” examines peace discourses as enacted in tours of battle sites and war (peace) memorials on the main island of Okinawa. Pointing out linkages with and divergences from mainland Japanese peace practices, the essay focuses on “peace guides” that have emerged as the backbone of educational tours that cater to Okinawan and, especially, mainland Japanese schoolchildren. Staffed by volunteers in conjunction with private and public organizations, peace guide tours and their supporting materials endeavor to promote peace by conveying a historical knowledge of the Battle of Okinawa that is more richly contextualized – “complete” – than that which is typically found in official textbooks, commercial tours, and patriotic pilgrimages. “Complete” in this context implies open discussion – even highlighting – of the violence and discrimination Okinawan civilians suffered at the hands of Japanese during the battle, but it also signals discriminatory treatment toward Okinawans before and beyond the battle (the most concrete example of the latter being the maintenance of U.S. military bases under the U.S.-Japan security arrangement). Peace guides and their supporters thus find themselves in a battle over historical representation that arguably has more to do with immediate political and economic issues than with setting the historical record straight.     

Reviews

The expansion of the global economy and the governance deficit it has generated raise questions about the possibilities for regulating the practices of participants in global production networks. This paper focuses on the regulation of industrial relations in Cambodia's textile and garment industry – a unique ensemble of state, trade union, private sector and international institutions that is promoted as a “fair model of globalisation.” We track the trajectory of Cambodia's industrialisation and insertion into the global economy over three interrelated phases: first, the beginnings of export-orientated garment production in the mid- to late 1990s; secondly, the promotion of Cambodia as an “ethical producer” from 1999; and, thirdly, privileging “competitiveness” in global production networks over labour compliance for its advantage. In doing so we centre our analysis on the complex intertwining of global production, the genesis of the unique ensemble of actors in Cambodia and the anomaly of Cambodia's labour movement.     

China’s Oil Venture in Africa

Oil has long been viewed as a strategic resource for nations. China is now the world’s second largest oil-consuming country after the U.S.. Its global efforts to secure oil imports to meet increasing domestic demand have profound implications for international relations in the Asia-Pacific region. China’s rising oil demand and its external quest for oil have thus generated much attention. As China’s overseas oil quest intensifies, will China clash with the U.S. and other western countries’ interests in Africa, and how dose it look at this rivalry? Will China disrupt the U.S. and its allies’ foreign policy and the world order? This article tries to provide an overview of China’s initiatives in developing oil in Africa. It examines factors for Chinese oil companies going to Africa and China’s oil strategy there. Finally, it argues that even though China’s practices of energy diplomacy in Africa seem to undermine U.S. goals of isolating or punishing “rogue states”, contrary to those pessimistic views, China has largely accommodated the U.S. and is willing to forge joint efforts with the U.S. in energy exploration in Africa.     

American policy toward Beijing, 1989–1990: The role of president Bush and the White House staff

The Tiananmen massacre of June 1989 created a major crisis in U.S. policy toward China. President Bush and his aides on the National Security Council staff took the lead in formulating the U.S. response to the crisis. The president took charge personally in dealing with various issues during the next two years. He strove hard to maintain a balanced policy that would allow for continued U.S. involvement with the people and leaders of China. In the crisis atmosphere of 1989–1990, the president appeared to judge that it was important to narrow sharply the circle of officials who would manage U.S. policy toward China. In part, this was because the president was attempting to strike a difficult balance in U.S. policy. On the one hand, he was attempting to elicit positive gestures from Beijing's beleaguered leaders in the wake of Tiananmen. On the other hand, he was attempting to avoid what he judged were overly punitive and counterproductive U.S. measures against China, which were being pressed on the administration by U.S. leaders in the Congress, media and elsewhere. The president and his close advisors took steps to ensure that State Department and other U.S. officials avoided comment on the most sensitive policy issue of 1990—the extension of most-favored-nation tariff treatment to China. By the end of 1990, however, the president's policy efforts had not stilled congressional debate or restored a consensus in U.S. China policy. President Bush still labored under the misperception in many quarters that he was less interested than others in human rights in China, was overly attentive to the interests of Chinese leaders, and stressed excessively China's alleged strategic importance for the United States. In fact, the Chinese government's relatively constructive role in world affairs, especially over such vital issues as the 1990–1991 Persian Gulf crisis, appeared to do more to win U.S. support for the president's carefully balanced approach to China than the efforts by administrative leaders to explain the policy.     

Review essay: Agrarian transformation,agrarian struggles,and Marxist analyses of the peasantry

Abstract

After some years of living in an Indian village, on family land that by the standards of most Marxist scholars puts us in the category of “capitalist farmers” or “kulaks,” I find myself taking scholarly discussion of “agrarian transformation” and “agrarian class structure” quite personally. There is something that jars against the reality of a daily life that includes hauling water for household use in the morning, enduring frequent blackouts or “load sheddings,” trying to decide whether to purchase first a TV or a refrigerator or a washing machine and not really being able to afford any of them, to be told that in moving from a salaried position in a U.S. university to an Indian village one has made a class jump upwards, from a section of the “expanded working class” or at worst “petty bourgeoisie” to membership among the capitalists and even (according to some scholars) participation in India's “ruling bloc.”     

Changing Lenses: Conflict Analysis and Mexico's “Drug War”

U.S. policy toward Mexico has been influenced by a “drug war” frame that has left little rhetorical and operational room for creative multisectoral strategies to stem the violence and address its causes. This article proposes conflict analysis, a lens for viewing conflict that brings into focus a multilevel, integrative diagnosis of the violence in Mexico and supports recent evolutions in Plan Mérida toward a more holistic peacebuilding approach.