‘We Are All Poor Here’: Economic Difference,Social Divisiveness and Targeting Cash Transfers in Sub-Saharan Africa

While the central thrust of Michael Lipton's work has been the crucial role of productivity gains in small farm agriculture for rural poverty reduction, in many sub-Saharan African countries this desirable outcome has stubbornly refused to materialise, and growing numbers of rural poor people are found persistently to fail to secure even minimal acceptable levels of food consumption. A social protection policy response is to target social cash transfers to the chronic extreme poor. This article focuses on the level of cash transfers relative to income differences between households in the bottom half of the income distribution, and the social tensions that arise from beneficiary selection and exclusion. It is found that cash transfers to target groups such as ‘the poorest 10 per cent’ or the ‘ultra-poor labour constrained’ must be set low, even below the welfare levels they seek to achieve, if they are to avoid socially invidious reshuffling of the income distribution. The article identifies critical trade-offs between the cost and coverage of different types of social transfer, their social acceptability and their political traction, helping to explain the reluctance of governments to adopt scaled-up poverty-targeted transfers as the preferred form of social cash transfer to those most in need in their societies.     

The centrality of Central Asia

Abstract

This paper poses some questions about how Central Asia fits into world history. The questions arise from my attempt to study world history as a world system. From this perspective, as one nonspecialist addressing other nonspecialists, Central Asia appears as a sort of black hole in the middle of the world. Little is known or said about it by those who focus on the geographically outlying civilizations of China, India, Persia, Islam, and Europe—including Russia. Even world historians see only some migrants or invaders who periodically emerge from Central Asia to impinge on these civilizations and the world history they make. Historians of art and religion view Central Asia as a sort of dark space through which cultural achievements moved from one civilization to another. At best, they see Central Asia itself as a dark tabula rasa on which itinerant monks, mullahs, and artists from these allegedly civilized areas left their marks. Now their remains can be admired in a thousand Buddha caves and mosques spread through Central Asia. Or they have been deposited in museums spread through the cultural capitals of the West and Japan after their “discoverers” unearthed them, crated them up, and carted them away.     

Books in Brief

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, HEGEMONY & SOCIALIST STRATEGY—TOWARDS A RADICAL DEMOCRATIC POLITICS (London: Verso, 1985), trans. by Winston Moore and Paul Cammack.

Chris Rojek, capitalism and leisure theory (London and New York: Methuen, 1985)

Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux, education under siege—THE CONSERVATIVE, LIBERAL AND RADICAL DEBATE OVER SCHOOLING (South Hadley: Bergin and Garvey Publishers, 1985).

Bertell Ollman and Edward Vernoff. THE LEFT ACADEMY: MARXIST SCHOLARSHIP ON AMERICAN CAMPUSES, VOLUME 1.

—THE LEFT ACADEMY: MARXIST SCHOLARSHIP ON AMERICAN CAMPUSES, VOLUME 2, (New York: Praeger, 1984).

Alam Blum and Peter McHugh. SELF REFLECTION IN THE ARTS AND SCIENCES, (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1984).

Bottomore, Tom, with Laurence Harris, V. G. Kiernan, and Ralph Miliband. A DICTIONARY OF MARXIST THOUGHT. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983)

Resnick, Stephen, and Richard Wolff, eds. rethinking marxism: Essays for Harry Magdoff & Paul Sweezy. (Brooklyn, New York: Au‐tonomedia, 1985).

Adam Przeworski, capitalism and social democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985)

Gosta Esping‐Andersen, politics against markets: the social democratic road TO power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985)

CUBA: twenty‐five years of revolution—1959–1984 (New York: Praeger, 1985), edited by Sandor Halabsky and John M. Kirk.

Barry Barnes, about science (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985)     

Determinants and directions for Chinese weapons imports

This article assesses and presents the determinants and directions of Chinese acquisitions of weapons and weapons technology from abroad, focusing on major conventional weapons and their relevant technologies. Following a brief development of historical themes which continue to affect Chinese military‐related imports today, the study considers the principal contemporary domestic and international determinants which contribute to shaping Chinese arms import policies, and the type of foreign arms acquisitions likely to result from those policies. In analysing past and current security policies, weapons development policies, foreign weapons procurement policies, the study reaches four main conclusions. First, a wide range of problems — including prohibitive cost, political and bureaucratic infighting, absorptive capacities, managerial and administrative roadblocks, and supplier controls — stand in the way of a Chinese military modernization strategy based on foreign procurement. Second, with the exception of Sino‐Soviet cooperation in the 1950s, Chinese arms and arms technology acquisitions from abroad have consistently been relatively modest, sporadic, and problematic. Even in the case of current transfers from such suppliers as Israel and Russia, it is unclear the extent to which these countries are willing to part with significant amounts of top‐of‐the‐line systems and technologies. Third, the impact upon international security of the improvement of Chinese military capability through the acquisition of foreign weapons and technology is not likely to manifest itself in violent military disruptiveness, but rather in the nuanced and steady expansion of Chinese power and influence in parts of East Asia around China's periphery. Fourth, the military capabilities of China's arms clients will probably not be significantly improved through the acquisition of foreign weapons and weapons technologies by China. In sum, Chinese military modernization through arms and technology imports will continue to be a slow and painful process.     

Participation, Performance, and Advancement of Women in Academic Science and Engineering: What is at Issue and Why

Using multi-staged methods developed in this research for coding/analysis of interview data, this article portrays women’s reported experiences of participation, performance, and advancement in academic science and engineering in a major technological institution. The methods and findings have implications for understanding the complexity underlying women’s participation and performance, and for practices and policies to support advancement of women faculty, particularly those in research universities.     

Constitutional Legitimation for Political Acts

The question of legal legitimacy, liberally understood, is that of whether anyone has a morally justified complaint about impressment into compliance with a particular law or set of laws. A good constitution may possibly contribute towards a liberally legitimate practice of national politics. This essay is concerned with one way in which a constitution, no matter how excellent, cannot thus contribute. We cannot use judgments regarding constitutionality to bridge the gap that must always exist between judgments regarding the validity of controversial laws and judgments regarding their legitimacy. We cannot hope to solve in that 'contractual' or 'procedural' way the riddle of government by consent in modern social conditions of deep ethical plurality and conflict, because we cannot successfully combine a proceduralist idea of constitutional legitimacy with a content-based conception of the binding virtue for constitutions.[O]ur exercise of political power is proper and hence justifiable only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to them as reasonable and rational. This is the liberal principle of legitimacy. ¹     

Organized crime and ethnic reputation manipulation

Criminologists often use culture andethnicity to explain crime. In thistradition, organized crime is presentedwith an exotic flavor and the list oftransnational criminal organizations readslike an inventory of ethnic minorities andforeign groups. But the relation betweenethnicity and organized crime isproblematic to say the least. In the courseof our research on several groups active inthe Netherlands (Turkish and Kurdish heroindealers, Yugoslav and Russian-speaking mafiosi, Colombian cocaine dealers andNigerian prostitutes), we have learned toreverse the assumed causal relationship.Ethnic reputation manipulation is essentialto committing crime. This article arguesthat criminal groups and individualsexploit and construct ethnicity in variousways as they engage in criminal activities.Either concealing or emphasizing specificethnic reputations, they are able toaddress any number of audiences (insiders,outsiders, the law).