What might celebrity humanitarianism have to do with empire?

The aim of this paper is to bring into conversation two apparently disparate debates in the fields of politics and International Relations. The first is a debate over celebrity humanitarianism that is divided between optimistic scholars, who see in it an enhancement of democracy, and pessimistic scholars, who link it to capitalist imperialism or a throwback to older colonial tropes. The second is a debate over a (new) American empire which has prompted scholars in IR to redress IR’s historic ‘elision’ of empire and to offer new network theories of empire. The paper argues that these two debates each address the shortcomings in the other and offers speculation on what celebrity humanitarianism might have to do with empire by bridging the connections between structuralist political theories of empire and the cultural accounts offered by postcolonial theory.     

The “Minsk Phenomenon:” demographic development in the Republic of Belarus

This paper returns to a topic the author dealt with in a more basic form some years ago. But it also makes an attempt to conceptualize the development of independent Belarus through its population migration to urban centers and especially its capital city, a development that dates exclusively from the post-1945 period, but that paradoxically has prevented this republic from experiencing the sort of modernization processes evident elsewhere in Europe. It takes as its starting point the pioneering work by the German historian Thomas Bohn titled The Minsk Phenomenon and develops it further by linking it to demographic issues, current health concerns, and problems in industrial development.     

Municipal Mergers in New Zealand: An Empirical Analysis of the Proposed Amalgamation of Hawke’s Bay Councils

Local government policymakers across the developed world have frequently employed municipal amalgamation to improve the operation of local councils, and New Zealand is no exception. This paper empirically examines claims made in Potential Costs and Savings of Local Government Reform in Hawke’s Bay that the merger of the five local authorities in the Hawke’s Bay Region of New Zealand would generate significant cost-savings. We empirically test for the existence of scale economies in a single merged Hawke’s Bay council and find that no cost-savings can be expected. This removes a key argument for a forced Hawke’s Bay amalgamation.