Wildlife policy matters: inclusion and exclusion by means of organisational and discursive boundaries

As a result of shifting wildlife policy, approximately one-sixth of South Africa's total land has been ‘game-fenced’ and converted for wildlife-based production during the last three decades. The wildlife industry has thereby become a multibillion rand industry with an increasingly vocal political arena. Seeing nature and its production as an organised political project, this article sets out to give insight into the shifting power relations between wildlife utilisers, government officials and civil society in South Africa. It does so by examining the production of dominant narratives on wildlife in the emerging organisational field of wildlife policy. This article studies the Wildlife Forum, an important national discursive space in which government engages with non-governmental parties about wildlife policy. The article argues that by means of organisational and discursive restructuring, government and industry actors have promoted a discourse alliance that endorses both government's conservation interests and industry's development interests, while excluding dissenting voices.     

区域治理视域下的东盟环境问题

环境问题是区域治理的重要组成部分.20世纪80年代以来,环境问题已成为影响东盟社会经济可持续发展的重要因素之一,平衡经济增长与环境的可持续性成为东盟必须认真考虑解决的问题.为应对日益恶化的环境问题,东盟建立了不少合作机制,签署了若干宣言、倡议和协定,并积极与域外国家和环境组织开展合作,然而治理成效还是有限.从东盟存在的环境问题、合作机制和面临的挑战来看,制约东盟环境治理成效的因素,既有东盟层面的,也有东盟成员国层面的.东盟的环境治理尚未摆脱以国家为核心的传统治理模式,区域间缺乏有效的协调与合作,导致治理成效不佳.其中,"东盟方式"是最大的障碍,如何突破"不干涉成员国内政"这一原则的限制,将是东盟环境合作能否取得成效的关键.东盟治理能力的缺陷和缺乏有效的危机应急管理机制、区域意识淡薄、区域合作治理意志与决心不强、集体行动迟缓,说明东盟仍只是一个松散的国家集团.因此,如何协调政治—安全、经济、社会一文化三大支柱之间的关系,实现经济与环境的可持续发展,东盟还有很长的路要走.     

A critical understanding of good governance and leadership concepts written in the context of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and the challenges to contextual discourse on Africa's development paradigms1

ABSTRACT

Good governance is a value-laden concept that is characteristically nebulous; it can mean different things to different people, depending on the context in which it is used. The same applies to leadership. Concepts, as Pauw (1999a, 465) puts it, are ‘tools of thinking’ and contexts are ‘the environments or frameworks in which they [concepts] operate’. Lucidity in the meanings of concepts is fundamentally important for shaping debate and enriching discourses. To maintain their power, concepts must be used in their proper contexts. This necessitates an understanding of the art of contextual discourse. Good governance is used in NEPAD as a principle and emphasised as a sine qua non for sustainable development in Africa. On the other hand, NEPAD premises Africa's re-birth or Renaissance on good governance and leadership, with a vision and commitment to repositioning the continent in global power balances. In this article good governance and leadership are considered as concepts. NEPAD is a textual context within which the two key concepts are used and should, consequently, be engaged. The article attempts a critical review of African scholarship engagement with good governance and leadership within the NEPAD context to determine the extent to which contextual discourse is practised. It further grapples with the immediate historical background to scholarship on Africa's development between the 1960s and early 1990s. The exercise reveals that much of the accumulated body of African scholarship and scholarship on Africa's development reviewed does not suffciently contextualise discourse on good governance and leadership within NEPAD, and its key assessment and monitoring device, the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), and offers an alternative framework.     

Putting violent armed conflict in the center of the Salween hydropower debates

Regional economic integration has become the dominant development pathway promoted, endorsed, and followed by many developing country governments in South East Asia and globally. Focusing on hydropower development, this article shows how forces of globalization manifested in the Myanmar government’s strategies to promote economic growth are shaping the Salween River basin’s development trajectory. Contesting the general belief that economic development would help the country’s transition to full democracy and achieve peace, it illustrates how hydropower development plans in the basin are closely interlinked with human rights issues. Well known for its long histories of violent conflict involving the Myanmar military and ethnic armed groups in various states, hydropower development in the Salween River is not only linked to the ongoing peace process in Myanmar but could also have direct implications on the actual significance of the process. Despite the signing of nationwide ceasefire agreements in 2012, hydropower dam projects could contribute to and trigger reoccurrences of violent armed conflict. Recognizing this conflict-prone and politically fragile condition as the main characteristics of Salween water governance is essential if we are to strive for sustainable and just development.     

Negotiating Violence and Creative Agency in Commissioned Mexican Narco Rap

This article explores agency as an ability to act and exert power creatively when failure implies literal death. It draws on interviews with an ex‐narco and rappers who willingly accept narco‐commissions in 2010s Tamaulipas, Mexico, a context where precarity and necropolitical logics prevail. It asserts that many rappers exert power creatively, despite the risks. Rappers shape narco‐aesthetics by determining the lyrical and sonic elements of songs; draw on experiences of narco‐life to contribute to narco‐ethics; and mould narco‐masculinities by encouraging listeners to stay firm. It proposes that prevalent discursive Us–Them dichotomies facilitate Othering and stigmatisation of actors in the narco‐world, and serve to accentuate narco‐power.     

Islam,ethnicity and the state: contested spaces of legitimacy and power in the Kurdish-Turkish public sphere

ABSTRACT

The pro-Kurdish nationalist mobilization in Turkey was mostly built on the right to self-determination aligned with the Marxist-Leninist ideology for the insurgent Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the early 1980s and ethnic minority rights for the secular-leftist pro-Kurdish legal parties in the 1990s. The Turkish state mostly framed the legal and illegal pro-Kurdish mobilization as ‘the enemy of the state’ and ‘the enemy of Islam’ in its counter-insurgency efforts. However, in the 2000s, the PKK and the pro-Kurdish legal parties became more tolerant and inclusive toward Islamic Kurdish identity by mobilizing their sympathizers in events such as ‘Civic Friday Prayers’ and a ‘Democratic Islamic Congress’. This move aimed to function as an antidote to the rising popularity of the ruling conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Kurdish Hizbullah in the early 2000s. In other words, Islam and pious Muslim identity has increasingly become contested among Turkish Islamists, Kurdish Islamists, and the secular Kurdish nationalists. This article seeks to unpack why, how, and under what conditions such competing actors and mechanisms shape the discursive and power relationships in the Kurdish-Turkish public sphere.     

党的意识形态话语权建构的发展脉络与经验启示——基于建党100周年的审视

中国共产党历经百年奋斗实践,意识形态话语权建构已成为一项系统工程伴随其发展的全过程。意识形态话语权作为意识形态建设中的一个子系统,对维护国家政权稳定、有效引导社会发展、正确规范个体行为具有重要的意义。值此建党百年之际,回顾总结中国共产党在成立、发展和建设过程中争夺、探索、提升、升华意识形态话语权的百年历史进程,能够获得宝贵的经验和深刻的启示。新时代,党的意识形态话语权建构要加强和完善党的意识形态话语主体的建设,拓展和丰富党的意识形态话语内容的广度,探索和创新党的意识形态话语载体的运用,以及实现对党的意识形态话语场域的净化。     

Ecologies of relation: post-slavery,post-apartheid,and rethinking race across the Atlantic in Zakes Mda’s Cion

This article will argue that Zakes Mda’s 2007 novel Cion stages a dialog, one where two “Souths” – South Africa and the American South – speak to one another and give a critical voice to an under-acknowledged history of transatlantic discursive exchange on race and racial governance. Mda’s fictional South African critique, of an America still struggling with the cultural and political legacies of slavery, gestures towards a history of exchange between the two countries that in many ways is representative of a more global dialog on racial segregation during the first half of the twentieth century – of which both southern (US) segregation and apartheid are seminal examples. Moreover, this article explores various conceptualizations of race as well as the governance of racial relations as they have been articulated through ecological imaginaries, and especially between South Africa and the Southern United States over the course of the twentieth century. In this article, I argue that not only can apartheid (as well as pre-apartheid segregation) be rethought of as part of a global conversation on race and thus less as a South African anomaly, but also that the United States through its examples of various racialist technologies was highly influential across the colonial and apartheid worlds.     

The controversy over the delimitationof the Turco-Syrian frontier in the period between the two world wars

The main objective of this study is to analyze the effects of discourse in the production of designed landscapes within the urban environment. The study concentrates on the social construction of space within the framework of Lefebvre's spatialization trilogy and Foucault's approach to power in order to investigate a public park as a tool for studying the emergence of order and power relationships in society. In this work, Lefebvre's ‘spatial practice’ concept was considered a ‘discursive practice’ providing a conceptual ground for the discussion of the problem. Additionally, Lefebvre's definition of spatialization is reconceptualised along with Foucault's notions of power, knowledge and discourse. The problem is studied in reference to Atatürk Park in Bal?kesir, a small city and regional capital located in the western part of Turkey. Through the discourse of the modernization process, how Atatürk Park as an urban space been socially constructed has been described and analyzed.     

Sacred Laïcité and the Politics of Religious Resurgence in France: Whither Religious Pluralism?

This article contributes to the current scholarly discussion by inviting us to look at secularism not as a static model of religious governance, but as a formation that shifts with time and that is deeply related to our contemporary understanding of religion. As such, it investigates the recent transformations of French secularism. In 2004 France passed a law banning visible religious symbols in public schools. Since then French secularism has increasingly become a sacred – non-negotiable – element of collective life. Drawing on Kim Knott's concept of the ‘secular sacred’, the article investigates, through an analysis of policy reports, law proposals and laws, how this discursive usage of secularism has been used to set apart particular spaces from others: secular spaces that carry the ‘supreme’ values of secularism. In this process, the role of public servants and citizens has been changing, as they have been invested with the responsibility of policing the boundaries of these spaces. New tools, such as charters of secularism, laws and regulations, and state bodies are being imagined to consolidate these boundaries. The article also explores how ‘religious resurgence’ (and more specifically ‘Islamic resurgence’) has been essential to this ‘sacred-making’ activity: to give substance to values that are non-negotiable and need to be separated from those that are not. Overall, the piece posits, in line with other recent works, that sacred-making is not reserved to the ‘religious’, but can become a central component of how secularism gets articulated and deployed. In so doing, it underscores the importance of documenting how meanings given to secularism shift to grasp the politics that underpin discourses on religious resurgence.     

全球环境治理“领导者”的蜕变:加拿大的案例

加拿大长期以来曾是西方发达国家中积极领导全球环境治理的典范,一度也是全球气候治理的积极参与者,但是近年来却俨然蜕变为气候谈判中的"拖后腿者"。发生这种转变的原因究竟是什么?本文通过国际和国内、政治与经济多个层面的分析发现,除了美国因素以外,加拿大国内的经济形势变化和政治体制是导致其战略变化的主要原因。20世纪90年代以来,油砂大规模开发和原油出口(特别是对美国的市场依赖),导致加拿大在气候变化问题上处于比较劣势;而相关利益集团的游说,正好与加拿大松散的联邦制等制度因素相结合,导致了加拿大气候政策的转向。从这个层面上看,经济利益的变化和政治决策制度特征共同成为决定国家气候或环境战略的主要因素。在某种程度上,这一案例也反驳了发达民主国家因其制度因素必然成为全球环境保护积极支持者的命题。     

The contested terrain of land governance reform in Myanmar

State control of land plays a critical role in producing land dispossession throughout the Global South. In Myanmar, the state’s approach towards territorial expansion has driven the country’s system of land governance, resulting in widespread and systemic land grabbing. This article investigates ongoing land governance reforms as key terrains for contesting such abuses of power. Employing a relational land governance approach, we view reform processes as shaped by changing power-laden social relations among government, civil society, and international donor actors. Legal and regulatory reforms in Myanmar potentially act as sites of meaningful social change but in practice tend to maintain significant limitations in altering governance dynamics. Civil society organizations and their alliances in Myanmar have played an important role in opening up policy processes to a broader group of political actors. Yet, policies and legal frameworks still are often captured by elite actors, becoming trapped in path dependent power relations.     

Die symbolische Inszenierung als „kultureller Anderer“ – Zur Auslegung weltkultureller Skripte im Feld der europäischen Inklusionspolitik

This paper puts forward a sociological perspective on the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) going beyond the usual focus on power and learning in governance studies. It uses a combined approach based on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social fields and John W. Meyer’s neoinstitutionalism. Seen from this angle the OMC transmits and amplifies the abstract ideas of the world polity for EU Member States. The coordination procedure gives rise to a political field in Bourdieu’s sense filled with a variety of actors that claim to be selfless and disinterested “cultural others”. Hence, the OMC can be used by these actors as an opportunity structure for symbolic enrichment. By symbolically enriching their strategies, these actors avoid triggering the automatic recourse to subsidiarity as a means to fend off European influence. Empirically, the article identifies five types of cultural others: conceptual entrepreneurs, knowledge producers, fundamental critics, detached observers and robust actors.     

Paradoxes of electoral authoritarianism: the 2015 Ethiopian elections as hegemonic performance

The 2015 elections in Ethiopia had a predictable outcome, showing an entrenched system of one-party dominance that self-referentially enacts the political order created by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) since 1991. EPRDF spokespersons continued to defend the party’s hegemony as inevitable, grounded in a logic of technocratic authority and with reference to ‘stability’ and ‘development’. This paper describes the electoral process not in the light of democracy theory but of hegemonic governance theory. Elections seem to have lost relevance in Ethiopia as a means of political expression and are only important as a performance of hegemonic governance and as ‘global impression management’ – showing state skills in securing a smooth electoral process as a major organisational feat in itself. Contradictions that the political process creates between the Ethiopian party-state and domestic constituencies, and between the attitudes/policies of certain donor countries, are downplayed or avoided, but problematic in the long run.     

Democracy,development and chieftaincy along South Africa's ‘Platinum Highway’: some emerging issues

South Africa's ‘Platinum Highway’ (Generally referred to as ‘the platinum belt’.) – ‘a 150?km continuation of platinum group metals (PGM)-bearing reefs’ [Havenstein, R. (2004). “The Platinum Highway – Where Does It Lead?” Accessed May 10, 2011. http://web.up.ac.za/sitefiles/file/EBIT-Innovate/The_Platinum_Highway-where_does_it.pdf, 1] – has ushered in a new era of considerable accumulation of mineral revenues by a few traditional authorities on whose communal lands platinum ore is extracted. The Royal Bafokeng community in the North West province stands as an epitome of this phenomenon. However, not much is known about the relationships at local governance level, particularly the interface of mineral wealth and community development. Adopting the Bafokeng community as an empirical case in this article, I argue that, despite some observed benefits, vast mineral wealth is likely to deepen tensions between local power holders within the sphere of rural local governance, thus paradoxically hampering development, particularly in a context where traditional authorities are the architects and champions of resource-engendered community development.     

Dangerous othering in Meg Vandermerwe’s Zebra crossing: Ubuntu – ideals and realities of the 2010 FIFA World Cup

This article explores the process of ‘othering’ in Meg Vandermerwe’s 2013 novel Zebra crossing. Othering is defined as a discursive practice in which one social group defines another in an inferior way. The novel is narrated by Zimbabwean-born albino, Chipo, who crosses the border into South Africa shortly before the start of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Far from finding the better life she had hoped for there, Chipo is instead met with prejudice and disdain from locals. Through her portrayal of Chipo’s life as an illegal immigrant in Cape Town, Vandermerwe shows that while apartheid is over, social division and inter-group conflict are not. All the while juxtaposing this reality against the backdrop of the World Cup and the ubuntu ideals it championed but failed to deliver, Vandermerwe exposes how wide the gap is between theory and practice, ideology and lived reality. Highlighting the power of discursive practices like othering to produce real and violent consequences, Vandermerwe warns that if we do not truly embrace the values of forgiveness, compassion and acceptance, we face a dark future in which a cycle of conflict and injustice is repeated instead of being broken.     

Political steering: how the EU employs power in its neighbourhood policy towards Morocco

Although the European Union’s engagement beyond its borders is ultimately about power, the concept remains under-utilized in empirical analyses of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). This article therefore proposes political steering as an analytical framework to conceptualize and track the empirical use and entanglements of diverse forms of power, highlighting genuine soft mechanisms. These bind actors to discursive practices because formalized sanctions or institutions are absent. This case study of the EU’s human rights and rule-of-law promotion in Morocco reveals how such soft mechanisms are intertwined with indirect steering mechanisms to achieve technicalization of policy reform at the governmental level and parallel politicization at the societal level.     

The First Time as Tragedy,the Second as Farce? Lebanon’s Nascent Petroleum Sector and the Risks of Corruption

This article analyses the risks of corruption in Lebanon’s nascent governance structures established in preparation for a thriving petroleum sector. Engaging with comparative theory on the ‘oil curse’, the article assesses the risks of corruption in the institutional and regulatory measures and policy tools that have thus far been developed down the sector’s value chain and including revenue management and expenditure. Lebanon’s political settlement, or the ways in which its political decision-making process evolved since the Ta’if Accord, consistently caused disappointing outcomes when it comes to sound institution-building and countering corruption; despite signs of awareness of the large stakes involved, this tendency is once again discernible in the country’s preparations for petroleum sector governance.     

Glaubwürdigkeit als religiöses Vermögen

On the basis of quantitative data from household surveys in three Bosnian-Herzegovinian cities, I construct a revised model of the religious field according to Weber’s, Yinger’s and especially Bourdieu’s theories of religion, in order to analyze various religious organizations sociotopologically according to the criteria of credibility (Glaubwürdigkeit) and complexity (Organisiertheit). The purpose of the model is to determine religious power structures within a given regional context—especially in post-conflict situations, transitional states, and under conditions of precarious governance in general—taxonomically, and to provide grounds for in-depth qualitative research.     

Huawei and ZTE in Malaysia: The Localisation of Chinese Transnational Enterprises

ABSTRACT

While much research has been undertaken on firms’ internationalisation, much less has been written on internationalisation’s other side, localisation. Yet with the rise of emerging economies, especially Chinese transnational corporations, localisation has become an increasingly significant. This article examines the localisation experience of two Chinese telecommunications enterprises – Huawei and ZTE – in Malaysia. By holding these factors constant (the ceteris paribus assumption), several dimensions of localisation are revealed. They are product, workforce, technology, organisation and management. Firm-specific factors matter both in accounting for inter-firm similarities and differences in the manner they localised. Enterprise ownership is also important in explaining firm performance and host countries’ perception of these firms. Leadership styles of these enterprises’ founders also matter. Together, these factors affect the differential pace of firms’ internationalisation and localisation.