Sixty years of Sino-Afghan relations

Afghanistan and the People's Republic of China (PRC) established diplomatic relations in 1955. Since that time, the changing relationship of China with Afghanistan has mirrored those of the PRC with other nation states. What began as an attempt by the PRC to establish international legitimacy for its new government and to offer third-world nations a socialist-communist path other than following the Soviet Union turned into a quest for natural resources. Using a variety of primary sources, including recently declassified intelligence files, secondary sources and open source material, this article traces the development of this changing relationship, demonstrating how it has complemented or complicated the United States' relationship with Afghanistan. It also shows how changing world events have affected the Chinese perception of the role Afghanistan can play in its foreign policy. The article concludes with a presentation of what role China is playing and can play in Afghanistan today, ending with a discussion of the dangers that the PRC faces in its current relations with Afghanistan, especially with regard to its ever-changing relationship with the United States.     

Electronic Resources and the Study of Political Elites in Russia

Developments in the information society in Russia have led to the creation of an abundance of online primary texts by political actors and institutions. This article surveys a large selection of official electronic texts with the aim of encouraging more extensive use of online sources and easing researchers' navigation of Russian politicians' use of the internet. While the authors do not claim that online data can replace the insights gained from elite interviews, the article suggests that online texts could be used more extensively as a valuable addition to existing methods applied to the study of Russian political elites.     

Gangsters or Gandhians? The Political Sociology of the Maoist Insurgency in India

This article combines concepts from political sociology with evidence from newspaper reports, insurgent and state documents, and ethnographic studies in order to understand the nature of the Maoist insurgency in India. The first section argues that the insurgency should be conceptualized as a state building enterprise rather than organized crime. It demonstrates that both insurgent violence and fundraising serve, on the whole, the collective interests of the state building enterprise – i.e., to consolidate insurgent control in their base areas – rather than the private interests of individual insurgents. The second section seeks to understand how Maoist state builders undermine and fragment the Indian state’s monopoly of the means of violence and administration in areas where they operate. In some areas the state is totally absent, while in others the state forms alliances with the insurgents at the local level in order to maintain the semblance of a sovereign and democratic ruler.     

Contradictions between economic liberalization and democratization: The case of South Korea

This article examines the relationships between economic liberalization and democratization in South Korea. The two processes are often correlated, but in Korea liberalization has been problematic for democratization. Domestic liberalization initially expanded space for labour organizations, but after they appeared to become too active, the process was so managed as to block political activity. This also resulted from pressures brought on by international liberalization, which made competitive wage costs increasingly important and raised the prospect of disinvestment by Korean and foreign firms. Liberalization has not reduced the power of business (the chaebol). Deregulation and privatization have encouraged a transfer of public economic power to the private sector. The increased political role of business is not necessarily beneficial, and the chaebol's economic power represents a threat to democratization in a variety of ways. In previous decades state power rested on economic controls; and the main impetus for democratization has come from the expansion of civil society through economic development, rather than from economic liberalization. State intervention in the economy may continue to be required to protect the position of certain civil society groups and to control business power, but domestic and international liberalization have challenged both of these functions and may increasingly curtail them in the future. Thus, close examination of the specifics of liberalization in South Korea show no automatic positive correlation can be made between economic and political reform without risking either reductionism or reification.     

Coordination Risk and Cost Impacts on Economic Development in Poor Rural Areas

This paper addresses issues relevant to a critical problem in economic development: how to get rapid pro-poor economic growth in poor rural areas in Africa and South Asia where most of the world's dollar a day poor live. It examines constraints to the development of coordinated exchange systems in poor rural areas, focusing on the core problem of thin markets and low density of economic activity in these areas. Transaction cost and risk analysis is integrated into a conventional neoclassical production economics framework to describe the existence of low level equilibrium traps in transactions and supply chains and to generate important insights for development policy.     

Municipal Socialism Then and Now: some lessons for the Global South

Given the large and growing literature opposed to the privatisation of services such as water and electricity, it is peculiar that so little has been written about the experience of ‘municipal socialism’—a set of roughly analogous historical movements that used local governments to challenge private service delivery and advance ‘socialist’ agendas from the late 1800s to the 1940s. Although primarily a European and American phenomenon, and emerging from different contexts than those prevailing today, municipal socialism found widespread support and transformed many public services. Results were mixed, with some experiments being little more than (pre)Keynesian attempts to revitalise capital accumulation in the face of ‘irrational’ private sector services, but the lessons are important as these experiments provided the first intellectually and politically sustained resistance to privatisation and other prototypical forms of what we now call neoliberalism, and demonstrated the possibility of effective service delivery by the public sector. This paper reviews these experiments, focusing on the experience of the United Kingdom and drawing lessons for contemporary efforts to build alternatives to privatisation in cities in the South, where local-level, socialist-oriented reforms have been relatively strong.     

Book reviews

Poverty, Progress and Exclusion: an Economic History of Latin America in the Twentieth Century. By Rosemary Thorp. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press for the Inter‐American Development Bank and the European Union, 1998. Pp.xiv + 369. £20.50. ISBN 1 886938 35 0

Economic Dynamism in the Asia‐Pacific: The Growth of Integration and Competitiveness. Edited by Graham Thompson. London: Routledge, 1998. Pp.402. £50 and £14.99. ISBN 0 415 17273 X and 17274 8

India and Pakistan: The First Fifty Years. Edited by Selig S. Harrison, Paul H. Kreisberg, and Dennis Kux. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp.xii + 217. £32.50 and £10.95. ISBN 0 521 64185 3 and 64585 9

Agencies in Foreign Aid: Comparing China, Sweden and the United States in Tanzania. Edited by Goran Hyden and Rwekaza Mukandala. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Pp.ix + 246. $69.95. ISBN 0 312 22098 7

Market Integration, Regionalism and the Global Economy. Edited by Richard E. Baldwin, Daniel Cohen, Andre Sapir and Anthony Venables. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xix + 344. £45 and £16.95. ISBN 0 521 64589 1 and 0 521 64181 0

Instruments of Change: Motivating and Financing Sustainable Development. By Theodore Panayotou. Earthscan in association with the United Nations Environment Programme, 1998. Pp.240. £19.95. ISBN 1 85383 467 X

Famine in Africa: Causes, Responses and Prevention. By Joachim von Braun, Tesfaye Teklu and Patrick Webb. Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Pp.xvii + 218. £32.50. ISBN 0 8018 6121 7

The East Asian Welfare Model: Welfare Orientalism and the State. Edited by Roger Goodman, Gordon White and Huck‐ju Kwon. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Pp.206. £17.99. ISBN 0 415 17211 X

Critical Development Theory: Contributions to a New Paradigm. Edited by Ronaldo Munck and Denis O'Hearn. London and New York: Zed Books, 1999. Pp.xx + 217. £39.95 and £22.50. ISBN 1 85649 637 6 and 638 4

Streetlife China: Transforming Culture, Rights and Markets. By Michael Dutton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp.xvi + 304. £13.95 (US$19.95) and £37.50 (US$54.95). ISBN 0 521 63719 8 and 63141 6     

Finanzplatz deutschland: National or European response to internationalisation?

Germany's has long been held up as a competitive, bank‐based financial system, providing long‐term and secure finance for industrial and service companies. The emphasis here is on the international market and regulatory conditions which have helped to transform the the financial system. In the 1980s, the government remained averse to any ‘Big Bang’ experiment, adapting national securities markets to policy initiatives in the US, and in London and Paris. This aversion was rooted in Bundesbank opposition to the development of money markets, and to the practice of corporate‐bank‐insurance cross‐shareholding among Germany's big publicly listed corporations. The politics of ‘Finanzplatz Deutschland’ achieved a balance between maintaining national institutions and adapting them carefully to international markets and regulation. Implementing monetary union and the European financial area in the 1990s and beyond amounts in effect to a ‘Big Bang ‘ policy which is already under way. The prospect of a liquid ‘Euro'‐market for securities, and increasingly competitive banking and insurance markets, spells a shift in German corporate policies towards Anglo‐American practices. National cross‐shareholding corporate structures will not long survive a single currency.     

Making space for restorative justice in criminal justice and criminology curricula and courses

Restorative justice, rooted in the practices of indigenous people across the globe, has grown exponentially in both theory and practice since its beginnings in Canada in the 1970s. Restorative justice has influenced the interactions between offenders and victims, helped community members address crime and develop self-efficacy, and changed the way some countries rebuild after a history of oppression. Despite these restorative justice influenced changes, many criminology and criminal justice programs pay scant attention to restorative justice in curricula. This paper will examine ways to include restorative justice in criminal justice and criminology curriculum and the challenges involved in the process. The paper will then examine how the Law and Justice Department at Central Washington University has incrementally added restorative justice components to its curriculum, culminating most recently with the addition of a Community and Social Justice course. The paper will conclude with several examples of classroom activities and assignments that have helped connect students with the theory and practice of restorative justice.     

Studying the Past: the Nature and Development of Legal History as an Academic Discipline

This article pursues two themes. First, it argues that there is a commonality between the general interest in the past, the interest of historians, and the interest of legal historians. Second, it shows that several ideas about the past commonly appear in all three contexts. In pursuing these themes, the article begins by reviewing the initial study of the past and the emergence of history and legal history in academia. It explores the various reasons why the early historians and later academic historians and legal historians studied the past and the different ways in which they used it. The article then pursues in more detail the development of Anglo-American legal history as a scholarly tradition. It identifies three types of academic legal history: classical, liberal, and critical, and discusses their natures and different uses of the past. Finally, the article explores the substantial legal history scholarship and its relevance to scholars who are not legal historians. The article concludes by stressing the importance of studying the legal past.