‘Strangely Easy to Obtain’: Canadian Passport Security, 1933–73

Since December 1999 when an Algerian member of Al Qaeda was arrested at the US border carrying a fraudulently obtained Canadian passport, the issue of Canadian passport security has been widely discussed. However, the controversy is nothing new. This article explores the long history of the misuses of Canadian passports, which began in the early 1930s, and the efforts by the Canadian government to combat these abuses. These efforts involved considerable debate within the Canadian government, specifically between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Department of External Affairs, over what measures were acceptable. Ultimately, the discussions around passport security have relevance to debates in the present over biometric passports and identity cards.     

Coming to terms with neopatrimonialism: Soviet and American nation-building projects in Afghanistan

The author examines how patrimonial forms of domination, as conceived in a Weberian sense, came to pervade the formal bureaucratic apparatuses developed under both Soviet Marxist–Leninist (from the late 1970s) and American-coalition liberal designs (since 2001), creating hybrid states defined by neopatrimonialism. Drawing lessons from the survival and eventual collapse of the Najibullah regime following the 1989 withdrawal of Soviet forces, the article finds that the continued extension of aid and arms, and not the presence of foreign military forces, proved most effectual in sustaining the Afghan leader's patronage-based grip on power. Arguing that the contemporary regime of Hamid Karzai has likewise adopted a neopatrimonial-type rule, these findings have clear implications for current American policy in Afghanistan. America, Afghanistan's ultimate patron, can better ensure stability in the region by extending aid to Karzai than by continuing a large and costly military occupation of the region.     

Book reviews

Improving the quality of public participation in council decision making continues to be a key goal of local government 'modernisation'. Different rationales for this have been advanced, including consumerist aims of service improvement, participation as an important value in itself, and participation as a survival strategy for local government. Based on surveys of, and interviews with, councillors and senior officers in Scottish local government, this article explores the ways in which concepts of 'consumerism' and 'citizenship' inform councils' approaches to public participation.     

Marketing ideas

There is a pressing need better to understand the relative merits of emerging ideas and their contexts of generation. However, it is important to point out that the enterprise is needlessly disadvantaged if we unthinkingly adopt certain implicit assumptions about the nature of ideas. This short paper aims to clarify the consequences of our reliance upon such assumptions. It sets out to do this by positing three broadly differing perspectives on the nature of ‘ideas’: 1) romantic, 2) modified romanticism and 3) constitutive. The relative merits of these perspectives are then considered through reflections on the practical experience of generating and communicating new ideas in social science research. The paper concludes that social scientists need to embrace a form of constitutive marketing of ideas.     

Reforming the Canadian security state: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police security service and the ‘Key Sectors’ program

Although a significant component of Cold War domestic security, counter-subversion has not received the same attention as counterespionage in recent historical writing. This article examines one aspect of the history of counter-subversion, specifically an internal attempt by the Canadian Security Service to reform itself in the face of the social change of the 1960s. ‘Key Sectors’ attempted to modernize the RCMP's pursuit of subversives by emphasizing qualitative factors and broader criteria for what constituted subversion beyond an association with communism. In the end, however, the program failed because it could not free itself from the anti-communism paradigm that the Canadian security state had been constructed on in the first place.