What Does China Want? Discerning the PRC's National Strategy

Abstract

Debates about China's national strategy have surprisingly overlooked an important source: the national strategy as formulated by China's leaders themselves. This article explains how the ruling Communist Party of China formulates its equivalent of a national strategy – defined as the nation's desired end state and guidance on supporting objectives, ways, and means. It explores the current national strategy as published in widely available official documents such as the Communist Party Constitution and Party Congress Work Report, the most recent version of which dates from the 17th Party Congress in 2007. The article considers some implications for observers and policymakers.     

The Arrow--Directional Semiotics: Wayfinding in Transit

Airport language is a spectacle, an interface for social relations between humans and machines. Signage intensifies social relations--reconfiguring territories of geophysical/architectural space into territories of recognition that speak to a productive power of language that is fundamentally non-representational. Airports are walked, the signs don't accompany or reflect upon the airport, they are machined into it. The traveller navigates through a highly textually mediated space where the signs not only enact semioticised territories but also directly intervene into the material machinic processes of travelling. As Guattari (1992: 49) might say, these point-signs 'don't simply secrete significations'. They activate the bringing into being of ontological universes. This paper focuses on 'signage' in a quite expanded yet also limited sense. It focuses on the increasing standardisation of the signifying semiologies of transit wayfinding systems which signal the primacy of pragmatic interactivity in the communicative event of walking the airport. If the controlling semiosis of non-places is, as Auge´ (1995) notes, the dominant space of supermodernity, then a thorough consideration of such signifying technologies would seem in order. This paper focuses on one of the most ubiquitous signs at the airport: the arrow. The airport's arrow is an asemic figure through which perhaps to read the semiotic technologies of the airport itself. The arrow is both a tool and a trope for the imperatives of global transit: it turns place into passage, striates space into controlled flows, and urges the traveller to 'move on'. It is a point sign that leads the way to a consideration of the technologies, both semiotic and a-semiotic, that provide the navigational and behavioural guidance that is increasingly in evidence, not only at the airport but in all public spaces.     

Beyond birds: Biopower and birdwatching in the world of Audubon

ABSTRACT

This paper surveys the nascent experiments in political ecology underway in predominantly Kurdish areas of south-eastern Turkey, known as Bakûr, and Rojava (northern Syria). The Kurdish freedom movement is attempting to consolidate a social revolution with ecology at its heart in a most unpromising context, given its ongoing struggle against Islamic State and regional embargoes. This greening of its ideology can be significantly attributed to the influence of American social ecologist Murray Bookchin, an inspiration for Kurdish attempts to implement democratic confederalism, which comprises principles of direct democracy, gender equality and ecological well-being in a needs-based economy. The Mesopotamian Ecology Movement has emerged from activist campaigns opposing dam construction, climate change and deforestation in the region, to inform ecology councils tasked with formulating policies that reflect this philosophical paradigm shift. The essay considers the prospects for the ecological initiatives in Turkish and Syrian Kurdistan. It argues that, confronted by formidable challenges, expansion of the democratic confederal model beyond the heartlands of Bakûr and Rojava, and international solidarity, are preconditions for their endurance.     

History,regionalism, and CARICOM trade: A gravity model analysis

Abstract

A gravity model is fitted to 17 annual cross sections, 1980–1996, of bilateral trade data (imports and exports) between CARICOM member states and selected trading partners. Specifically, the paper investigates the effects of regional integration, colonial legacies and linguistic ties on CARICOM bilateral trade flows between member states and between member states and North American and European Union countries. The empirical results indicate that history and regionalism have had significant and strong effects on CARICOM trade. Additionally, two traditional explanatory variables in gravity models, income per capita and population, have significant and positive effects on CARICOM trade while the distance between trading partners exerts the expected negative effect.     

Are you sitting comfortably? Estimating incumbency advantage in the UK: 1983–2010 – A research note

This note adapts two models commonly used to estimate the incumbency advantage that US members of Congress enjoy – the ‘slurge’ and the Gelman-King Index – to provide comparable estimates for UK MPs. The results show that Liberal Democrats enjoy extremely large such advantages on a par with those of US Congressmen of between 5% and 15% of the vote. Labour and the Conservatives have incumbency advantages at around 2% and 1% respectively. The note estimates that effects could have changed the outcome in as many as 25 seats in some elections, and that they cost the Conservatives the chance to govern alone after the 2010 election.     

Beyond the Blame Game: Political Strategies for State Funding Reform

There is growing concern that intergovernmental financial relations in the Australian federation are becoming increasingly acrimonious and dysfunctional. This paper argues that it is necessary to analyse State funding as a whole, including the critical relationship between State‐level taxation and its reform and the broader Commonwealth Grants Commission regime, if we are to establish a system of State funding which is financially sustainable, promotes economic efficiency and is broadly congruent with established norms of Australian federalism. Above all, based on international experience, we argue Commonwealth leadership is required to achieve this goal. We conclude with a case study concerning resource taxation which demonstrates how the Commonwealth could provide leadership using a ‘bundled’ approach to policy reform. It is argued that such an approach has the potential to alleviate wider intergovernmental conflicts which currently afflict Australian federalism.     

The afterlife of modernity in the politics of the postmodern∗

Abstract

Though poststructuralist and postmodern critiques provide a powerful tool for deconstructing contemporary power relations, when they are overextended, they lose their subversive edge and actually begin to serve the development of new forms of social domination. Taken as an example, Baudrillard's theory of postmodern society reflects this very tendency. While on the surface Baudrillard has abandoned the hierarchies of modernity upon which order and domination have depended, his critique reintroduces its own countersubversive hierarchy upon which a postmodern order depends. As parts of a postmodern conceptual framework, these hierarchies serve to expand the system of domination manufactured in contemporary communications industries and to undermine resistance through the production of simulated social and political realities.