Resource powers? Minerals,energy and the rise of the BRICS

The rise of new economic powers has seen increasing attention focused on the international role of the BRICS countries. Importantly, a common feature uniting the BRICS is that they are all resource-rich, and many analysts (and some BRICS governments) have argued that natural resources are one of the key factors propelling the rise of the group. This article explores the BRICS’ emerging status as ‘resource powers’, examining how resource wealth underpins their economic development and foreign policy strategies, and thus contributes to their growing influence in international affairs. It is argued that through the use of nationalistic mining and energy policies, the BRICS governments have exploited natural resources for both domestic economic and international diplomatic objectives. However, there are several challenges and emerging risks facing the BRICS’ resource strategies, which mean that resource wealth is making a positive – though inherently limited – contribution to the growing international status of the group.     

Imperial Families: women writing home in Georgian Britain

This article critically engages with the concept of home to question what home meant and how it was constructed in eighteenth-century Britain. It particularly focuses on elite imperial families for whom ideas of home were significant, yet fragile as family members became dispersed across ever-greater distances. It uses letters as its source base to examine how families managed to construct a sense of home and belonging despite different locations and underlines the important role that women played in organizing and completing the work of home building. In doing so this article challenges understandings of homes as stable entities and highlights how elite imperial families worked to constantly negotiate and construct them.     

Individual Autonomy and Local-Level Solidarity in Africa

Come election time, many localities in Africa seem to speak with one voice. Vote totals often suggest near-unanimity within villages and neighborhoods, even when national-level results demonstrate greater competitiveness. However, there is substantial variation in the electoral solidarity of local communities, with some demonstrating significantly less cohesion than others. Few if any scholars have tried to explain this variation. I theorize that solidarity levels are largely a function of community members' abilities to act autonomously. Namely, communities will be more likely to vote en bloc when residents are less able to resist pressures from local elites, who often act as brokers for national politicians, due to elite-empowering land-tenure regimes, poverty, and information scarcity. I test this theory with data from Uganda, which displays significant variation in local-level electoral solidarity. I find that electoral solidarity is lower in communities where freehold land arrangements are more common, living standards are higher, and mass media (i.e., radio signals) are more accessible.     

Does a commodity economy enrich the few while ruining the masses? Differentiation among petty commodity producers in guatemala

In this paper I discuss the way in which rural artisans in one municipio of Guatemala organize production and how this organization impedes the differentiation of the artisanal population into owners and workers. I show that categories of owners and workers exist in the municipio, but that these categories do not reproduce themselves as classes; instead, they reproduce each other through the life cycle. In order to explain this phenomenon, I look at internal relations of production, the external environment of large‐scale capital, and the role of migration and the stale in the creation of a permanent Guatemalan proletariat and in the creation of an undifferentiated artisanal economy.