Border cosmopolitanism in critical peace education

This paper intends to contribute to recent developments in the theory of critical peace education. The role of cosmopolitanism in critical peace education is examined, particularly in relation to universal moral inclusion, secularism and universalism. It is then recommended that critical peace education draw from post-universalist and dialogical approaches to cosmopolitanism. Walter Mignolo’s border cosmopolitanism is suggested as a decolonising framework for critical peace education. This would entail the theory of critical peace education orienting itself towards the aim of reconsidering cosmopolitanism from the perspective of coloniality. Connections are drawn between border cosmopolitanism and Paulo Freire’s problem-posing education. The result is a vision for critical peace education to empower participants through centring personal and lived experience in critical deconstructions of cosmopolitan discourses.     

Framing a fiscal/cultural micro-encounter: value added tax meets calypso in Dominica

This article focuses on the performance of the calypso song ‘VAT on You’, as a response to the introduction into Dominica of the value added tax (VAT). The article applies a set of concepts to frame and so enhance our understanding of the event in terms of global history. Both calypso and VAT have extended histories and this performance represents an unusual meeting of earlier and current forces of globalisation. The conclusion assesses the helpfulness of the framing concepts ‘longue durée,’ continuities, centring, class divisions and micro-resistance, and assesses the song’s contribution to such resistance     

Authority in rebel groups: identity,recognition and the struggle over legitimacy

This article asks how rebel leaders capture and lose legitimacy within their own movement. Analysing these complex and often uneasy relations between elites and grassroots of insurgency is important for understanding the success or failure of peace processes. This is because internal contestation over authority between rival rebel leaders can drive a movement’s external strategy. Based on ethnographic research on the Karen and Kachin rebellions in Myanmar and insights from Political Sociology, the article suggests that leadership authority is linked to social identification and the claim to recognition among insurgent grassroots. If rebel leaders manage to satisfy their grassroots’ claim to recognition, their insurgent orders are stable. Failing this, their authority erodes and is likely to be challenged. These findings contribute to understanding insurgency and peace negotiations in Myanmar and civil wars more generally by showing how struggles over legitimacy within rebel groups drive wider dynamics of war and peace.     

“The Higher You Fly,the Further You Fall”: White-Collar Criminals, “Special Sensitivity” and the Impact of Conviction in the United Kingdom

The resilience of some high-profile white-collar criminals in the media gaze after prison may lead some to conclude, particularly as some research also supports this notion, that this group of offenders generally manages well after conviction. Research in this area is, however, small and largely American. The authors seek to add to this small body of research by offering findings on the impact of conviction on 17 UK convicted white-collar criminals after completion of their sentence. It provides a unique insight into the consequences of conviction, showing that although there were some offenders who did experience limited impact and coped well, there was also a significant group who suffered a decline in status, financial losses, negative media coverage, and relationship and mental health problems, to name some. The authors argue more research is needed on this group and their needs as they are often neglected by the criminal justice system.     

Extreme idealism and equilibrium in the Hotelling–Downs model of political competition

In the classic Hotelling–Downs model of political competition, no pure strategy equilibrium with three or more strategic candidates exists when the distribution of voters’ preferred policies is unimodal. I study the effect of introducing two idealist candidates to the model who are non-strategic (i.e., fixed to their policy platforms), while allowing for an unlimited number of strategic candidates. Doing so, I show that equilibrium is restored for a non-degenerate set of unimodal distributions. In addition, the equilibria have the following features: (1) the left-most and right-most candidates (i.e., extremists) are idealists; (2) strategic candidates never share their policy platforms, which instead are spread out across the policy space; and (3) if more than one strategic candidate enters, the distribution of voter preferences must be asymmetric. I also show that equilibria can accommodate idealist fringes of candidates toward the extremes of the political spectrum.     

Complex Contracting: Management Challenges and Solutions

Governments at all levels buy mission‐critical goods and services whose attributes and performance requirements are hard to define and produce. Many governments—and the public managers who lead them—lack experience and knowledge about how to contract for complex products. The contract management counsel provided to public managers is thin. Missing is a conceptual managerial framework to guide purchasing the complex products that are often so critical to public organizations' core missions. Drawing on perspectives from across the social sciences, the framework presented in this article provides guidance on how managers can harness the upsides of complex contracting while avoiding its pitfalls. The framework helps identify conditions that increase the likelihood of positive outcomes for the purchasing government and the vendor—the win‐win. To illustrate the framework, the article provides examples of successful and failed acquisitions for complex products such as transportation projects, social service systems, and information technology systems.     

All Paths Lead to Rain: Explaining why Watershed Development in India Does Not Alleviate the Experience of Water Scarcity

Abstract

Watershed development (WSD) projects in India are key to meeting a range of human development goals in rain-fed agrarian landscapes. However, outcomes are often observed to be partial and short-lived. We offer a novel perspective on the reasons. Our analysis shows that the dominant ‘water narratives’ of WSD policy and practice and the lived experience of local people contribute to a naturalisation of water scarcity, resulting in widespread views that WSD is primarily a means for increasing irrigation water supply. We show how this over-simplifies the complex problem of agricultural water use and perversely contributes to a continuing experience of water scarcity rather than its resolution.     

Trust and Reciprocity in the Aftermath of Natural Disasters

Abstract

Beyond all the material and economic losses that natural disasters produce, post-disaster environments can alter the social capital of a community by affecting social norms, attitudes, and people’s behaviour. To analyse this issue, we empirically investigate the effect that the aftermath of a disaster can have on trust and reciprocity of people within communities. We do this by comparing outcomes of trust games conducted in earthquake-affected and non-affected rural villages one year after the 2010 Chilean earthquake. Our findings show that while trust levels do not differ across cases, reciprocity is lower in earthquake-affected areas.     

Is Russia a militocracy? Conceptual issues and extant findings regarding elite militarization

The dominant paradigm for understanding contemporary Russia holds that Vladimir Putin's tenure in office has been accompanied by a massive influx of former KGB and military personnel – so-called “siloviki” – into positions of power and authority throughout the polity and economy. Claims of extensive elite militarization, however, are largely based on the analyses of only one research program and, moreover, the validity of the estimates produced by that research program is open to question on numerous grounds. In this article, we review existing research on elite militarization in Russia; discuss a series of conceptual and empirical issues that need to be resolved if valid and meaningful estimation of military–security representation is to be achieved; introduce new findings; and evaluate the totality of existing evidence regarding whether the Russian state under Putin deserves to be labeled a militocracy. We find that the most straightforward reading of existing data indicates that the percentage of siloviki in the political elite during Putin's first two terms as president was approximately half of that which has been widely reported in both scholarship and the media, and also declined during the Medvedev presidency. In addition, our analysis of a broader cross section of the elite estimates military–security representation during the Putin presidency to have been lower still. Overall, existing data paint a less alarming picture of the depths to which siloviki have penetrated the corridors of power since 2000 than has been commonly portrayed and thereby cast doubt on Russia's status as an “FSB state.” On the other hand, past trends also provide some basis for expecting that the numbers of siloviki will once again rise during Putin's current presidential term.