The Rise of the “Resistance Axis”: Hezbollah and the Legacy of the Taif Agreement

Abstract

Hezbollah’s direct military presence in Syria and Iraq confirms that their actions transcend Lebanon as a political stage. But why can Hezbollah still not be contained within the boundaries of Lebanon? Exploring how the Taif Agreements both tamed Hezbollah’s rhetoric while simultaneously laying the conditions for transnational activities, this article argues that the conditions of the Taif Agreement have assisted in the rise of Hezbollah’s self-coined Resistance Axis. Post-Taif, Hezbollah has tended relationships with the external forces that helped broker the peace while unlocking the potential in the exceptional decision to allow Hezbollah to retain arms in the name of “resistance.”     

Democratization in East Asia in the late 1980s: Taiwan breakthrough,Hong Kong frustration

Political history took an unexpected turn in East Asia in the late 1980s. The booming movement in Hong Kong had gone downhill and suffered defeat, while the authoritarian Taiwan state actively sponsored genuine democratic reforms. What then explains the Taiwan democratic breakthrough and the Hong Kong democratic frustration? This article argues that conventional explanations offered in the modernization, the dependency, and the class literature—such as culture, liberal colonialism, wealth, new middle class, bureaucratic-authoritarian state, crises, and absence of conservative class coalition—are unable to account for the divergent paths of democratic development in Taiwan and Hong Kong. As an alternative, this article presents a model that highlights the importance of conjuncture factors. It is argued that since Taiwan and Hong Kong have shared similar structural conditions, researchers have to bring in conjuncture factors such as the historical event of Chinese unification, the capacity of the political agency to promote democratic reforms, and the strategy of protest in order to explain the Taiwan breakthrough and the Hong Kong frustration.     

Minority women and the experiences of migration

This article addresses the theme of minority relations and the intensification of gender oppression. We adopt a comparative perspective to examine women’s experiences of migration in two diverse locations. The recent focus on difference in feminist writing renders problematic such comparative enterprises through the contemporary concern with questioning the universality of the category “woman.” However, we suggest that the concept has been deconstructed to the point that it raises the possibility that feminism becomes an inadequate theory and methodology for explaining the status of women. Through a comparative analysis of minority women in different social and cultural contexts, we explore this dilemma for feminism. We examine how gender relations reconfigure in reconstituted relations of class, race, and ethnicity and emphasize the necessity of recognizing both the dynamics of migrating feminisms and the centrality of gender in structuring power relations in diverse contexts.     

Horses for courses: China's accommodative approach to food standard‐setting in response to the internationalization of regulation

This paper examines the evolution of China's food standard‐setting procedures from both domestic and international perspectives, particularly in the context of the internationalization of regulation. After the reform and opening‐up in 1978, state actors and leading enterprises monopolized the process of national food standard setting. With further participation in the global economy in the 21st century, China has become familiar with the international standard‐setting procedures and has modeled its domestic policymaking on these practices. This has resulted in a more transparent, inclusive, scientific, pluralized, and consensus‐based form of decisionmaking. By contrast, the standards of the strategic industries have been harmonized to the standards of international counterparts through a top‐down and authoritarian approach. This paper argues that China uses an accommodative approach, trichotomizing suitable standards and decisionmaking procedures in terms of inclusiveness and transparency, which suits the developmental needs of the domestic market, food export markets, and strategic industries.     

Political economy,poverty, and polycentrism in the Global Environment Facility’s Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF) for Climate Change Adaptation

Climate change adaptation refers to altering infrastructure, institutions or ecosystems to respond to the impacts of climate change. Least developed countries often lack the requisite capacity to implement adaptation projects. The Global Environment Facility’s Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF) is a scheme where industrialised countries have disbursed $934.5 million in voluntary contributions to support 213 adaptation projects across 51 least developed countries. But how effective are its efforts—and what sort of challenges have arisen as it implements projects? To provide some answers, this article documents the presence of four “political economy” attributes of adaptation projects—processes we have termed enclosure, exclusion, encroachment and entrenchment—cutting across economic, political, ecological and social dimensions. Based on extensive field research, we find the four processes at work simultaneously in our case studies of five LDCF projects being implemented in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, the Maldives and Vanuatu. The article concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of the political economy of adaptation for analysts, program managers and climate researchers at large. In sum, the politics of adaptation must be taken into account so that projects can maximise their efficacy and avoid marginalising those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.     

The Public Service Mutual: Theories of Motivational Advantage

Public service mutuals are a form of employee‐led organization in which service workers spin out of the public sector to form “mutuals” that contract back with government to provide a service. This article draws on economic and psychological theory to demonstrate that mutuals can align both self‐interested and altruistic or public service motivations so as to serve the social good; moreover, by offering greater autonomy to public service professionals, mutuals are predicted to encourage energetic and persistent behaviors. In both cases, there is an advantage over alternative forms of organization such as the public sector bureaucracy, the shareholder‐owned private firm, or the nonprofit organization. The employee‐led mutual form, however, may not appeal to risk‐averse workers, its collective decision‐making systems may be inefficient, and external mechanisms may be required to ensure that organizational outcomes are always directed toward the social good.