Situating Property in Transformation: Beyond the Private and the Collective

In most parts of the post-socialist world high expectations regarding privatisation were quickly disappointed when it became obvious that property practices did not follow the ideal type predicted by market models. The article addresses this divergence and emphasises the necessity of overcoming the dualism of an ideal type of property rights on the one hand and the way property is handled in everyday life on the other. It argues that concrete situations as well as the necessary justifications of practices have hitherto both been widely neglected as empirical foci in studies on property relations. Five brief episodes from the privatisation of collective farms in rural Russia serve as examples to illustrate how situations and justifications are reflexively linked by drawing on and negotiating about differing ‘orders of worth’.     

Ethics and public policy: an analysis of a research tradition ∗

This article focuses on the relevent scholarly literature devoted to ethics and public policy. A literature search revealed an extensive body of research which lacked a coherent ordering. This article provides a model to understand a field of academic inquiry which has a rich tradition.     

Marxist scholarship on Thailand the work of E. Thadeus flood (1932–1977)

Abstract

Thadeus Flood died of cancer on December 11, 1977. The last ten years of his life were devoted to promoting revolutionary change and resisting American imperialism in Thailand. His life and work reveal the contradictions of American education and imperialist policy. This is not only because of what he wrote about, but because his life and scholarship transcended his conservative and “apolitical” education, moving him from academic scholarship to political commitment, forcing him beyond the functions within the university for which he had been intended. American imperialism in Southeast Asia gave him a political awareness which his education had consistently denied him. In this brief article I would like to indicate the important lessons which Asian scholars and others can learn from his transformation, and to attempt to assess his seminal contribution to the study of Thailand. I seek to draw, from his life and work, political lessons which can further our common struggles.     

America,capitalism, and the interstate system

Peter Gowan responds to published criticisms of his article “Triumphing toward International Disaster: The Impasse in American Grand Strategy” (Critical Asian Studies 36, no. 1 [March 2004]: 3-36) by Kristen Nordhaug, Ravi Arvind Palat, Vijay Prashad, Marika Vicziany, Mark T. Berger, and Heloise Weber (see Critical Asian Studies 37, no. 1 [March 2005]: 75-140).