Brazil and the league council crisis of 1926

In 1926, the League of Nations faced a serious crisis over the proposed entry of Germany. On this decision appeared to depend the success of the Locarno treaties and the future peace of Europe. To everyone's surprise German entry was blocked, not by a vengeful European power, but by Brazil. Although it was assumed that Brazil was being manipulated, in fact it had been following its own agenda at Geneva for years, and its veto was more of an unfortunate coincidence than deliberate malice. This article unravels the crisis, and looks more deeply at the failure of statesmen to make the League a truly international organization.     

Realigning Religion and Power in Central Asia: Islam,Nation-State and (Post)Socialism

This article investigates the changing intersections between religion and politics in Muslim Central Asia. Adopting a long-term historical perspective, it shows how successive regimes meshed and clashed with Islam in their efforts to assert worldly power. Religion was uniformly marginalised in the era of Marxist–Leninist–Maoist socialism, but the cases of Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Xinjiang show that religion has been playing somewhat different roles across the region since 1991. For the secular authorities, Islam may be valued as a source of nation building or it may be feared as a potentially destabilising force. The resulting attempts to co-opt, channel and control religious expression provide insights into the nature of secular power and raise questions concerning the applicability to this region of influential theories in the sociology of religion.     

Successful or not? Evidence,emergence, and development management

This article offers a critique of the dominant ways of conceiving of, managing, and evaluating development. It argues that these management methods constrain the exploration of novelty and difference. By drawing on insights from the complexity sciences, particularly the theory of emergence, the article calls for a broadening of our understanding of how social change comes about. Arguing that the domain of development is not a narrow technical discipline, but an intensely social and political practice of mutual recognition, this article calls for a greater focus on power and processes of relating as they affect local interaction between people.     

Information Symmetry in U.S. Financial Market Regulation: A Community of Practice

ABSTRACT

In the last decade, regulation of the financial markets in the United States has received significant attention. In particular, the formal structures responsible for regulating the financial markets have come under heavy criticism. While we may emphasize the role that formal structures play in controlling behavior, informal structures play an important role too. This study examines an informal structure in financial market regulation. Using social network and interview data, this study defines and investigates the role of a community of practice among leaders involved in regulating the financial markets. The analysis empirically defines the characteristics of this community of practice and reveals that this informal structure serves as an information symmetricizer in this regulatory setting. Implications of information symmetry include both positive and negative consequences.