The oecd’s discourse on fragile states: expertise and the normalisation of knowledge production

The concept of legitimacy has been highly influential in policy recommendations concerning state building in ‘fragile states’. Indeed, depending on how ‘legitimacy’ is conceived, the actions and practices of state builders can differ substantially. This article discusses what is at stake in the conceptualisation of ‘legitimacy’ by comparing the academic literature with the normative production of the oecd. Looking at two approaches to legitimacy – the institutionalist or neo-Weberian approach focusing on institutional reconstruction, and the social legitimacy approach emphasising the importance of social cohesion for successful state building – the article shows that both these conceptions are present in most reports, but also that the neo-Weberian approach tends to prevail over the social legitimacy perspective. Through a series of interviews with oecd officials and scholar-practitioners who have participated in the writing process of oecd reports, we hint, finally, at future research avenues on the social conditions of knowledge production and its normalisation.     

A French perspective on the China-EU comprehensive agreement on investment: the proof of the pudding is in the eating

Asia Europe Journal - The major objective of the China-EU CAI was to facilitate a rebalancing of the bilateral relationship by improving access for European companies to the Chinese market and...     

Das Verhältnis zwischen Verwaltungsgerichtsbarkeit und Verfassungsgerichtshof im Gefolge der Verfassungsreform – kritische Anmerkungen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Opening the black box – The making of India’s foreign policy

ABSTRACT

Most studies looking at India’s external policies continue to “black-box” the actual process of how Indian foreign policy is made. More specifically, most studies generally overlook how India’s complex domestic polity and bureaucratic apparatus shape India’s foreign policy outlook. Unlike works on India’s security policy which have built from and contributed to broader academic debates, studies on India’s foreign policy have failed to directly engage with concepts and theories developed by the sub-discipline of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). Why have these concepts and approaches not been consistently applied to the Indian context? There are various reasons for this, ranging from these disciplines’ excessive reliance on Western case studies, or the lack of interest in mainstream International Relations scholarship by South Asianists (in contrast to disciplines such as economics, political theory, and developmental studies, all of which have benefited from the Indian experience). This special issue is a step towards bridging this gap and to encourage a greater dialogue between FPA and the systematic study of Indian foreign policy. Through the careful analysis of specific case studies, the different papers offer a conceptually grounded and empirically innovative reading of India’s foreign policy across time, space, and themes.     

Personality traits and party identification over time

Why do some people stably identify with a party while others do not? This study tests whether and how the direction, stability and strength of party identification are associated with big five personality traits, using panel data from a representative sample of German citizens. First, the study confirms that personality traits are related to identification with different political parties. Second, it moves beyond previous research by showing that personality traits are related to the strength and variation in party identification over time. The implications of the study for the classical perspectives on party identification, as well as the personality and politics literature, are discussed.     

Knowing about crisis

With this brief piece, we raise some questions and suggest some alternative directions for knowing about crisis. In particular, we point to the role of core beliefs in shaping society, including the way in which those held by academics shape research and how knowledge about crisis is produced, as well as the influence core beliefs have on the everyday lives of the people with whom we work. We draw on the work of Miki Kashtan (2014), who identifies three core beliefs that have become persistent themes in our work with communities: separateness, scarcity, and powerlessness. We offer some examples of and reflections on work we have done in the Govan neighborhood of Glasgow, Scotland by way of gesturing toward how we understand core beliefs to work and how they might be engaged with. Our intention is not to denigrate the value of beliefs, but rather to point out the value in recognizing the beliefs that inform our ways of knowing and actions.     

Patent Production at a European Research University: Exploratory Evidence at the Laboratory Level

Most studies of academic patenting focus on the university as the unit of analysis. In contrast, we examine this phenomenon at the laboratory level. Based on a sample of 83 research laboratories of Louis Pasteur University (ULP, Strasbourg, France) from 1993 to 2000, we constructed a panel data set that allows us to discriminate between patents that are owned by the university and those that are owned by firms and other organizations but invented by faculty members. We use these data to estimate a patent production function and find that university-owned patents are more responsive to specific public funding, while non-university-owned patents are more responsive to industrial funding. Our results also highlight the importance to control for disciplinary and institutional differences, since they significantly affect the production of the different kinds of ULP patents.     

Risk-aversion and prudence in rent-seeking games

This paper considers a common n-agent symmetric rent-seeking game. It derives conditions so that risk-aversion and risk always decrease rent-seeking efforts. These conditions hold for any regular contest success function when risk-averse rent-seekers are also prudent. Under n=2, prudence is a necessary and sufficient condition for risk-aversion to decrease rent-seeking efforts compared to risk-neutrality. An intuition for this result is given based on a self-protection model.