Colonial governmentality and the ‘economy’

Using Foucault's notion of governmentality, this paper argues that colonial governmentality in India sought to effect a new relationship between resources, population, and discipline. Drawing theoretical insights from the 'critical accounting literature' to bear on the regulation of economic activity in colonial India, the paper shows how the discursive practices of colonial governance, in particular the modalities of measurement, accounting, and classification, enabled the constitution of the 'economy'. Such statistical data generated as part of colonial administration opened up the possibility of a nationalist accounting of the exploitation of India by the colonial power.     

Santam and Nando's: An advertising narrative of local humour,local conflict,local co-branding

ABSTRACT

In 2011 South African short term insurer Santam (Santam Ltd.) put in place an advertising initiative that illustrates the power of a humorous brand narrative effected in conjunction with another brand. In this case, it is the South African arm of Nando's (Nando's Chickenland Ltd.), a fast food restaurant chain specialising in Portuguese-themed chicken dishes that rely heavily on peri-peri spices. The two well-known brands aired a series of five commercials on television and the Internet, trading good-humoured jibes centred around the value proposition of each company's offering. The resultant rise in social media viewership and consumer engagement was notable and illustrates the efficacy of a cobranded narrative run over numerous media platforms; in this case radio, television, social media, print and the Internet.     

Mapping ‘Hybrid Regimes’: Regime Types and Concepts in Comparative Politics

This article addresses the conceptual challenges involved in mapping political regimes. The first section offers a critique of regime typologies that adopt a uni-dimensional approach to differentiating between political regimes. The second section shows why a two-dimensional typology is better grounded in liberal democratic theory as well as for analytically grasping the empirical variation between political regimes and regime change. The penultimate section proposes a classificatory scheme on the basis of a clear set of defining attributes of the two constitutive dimensions of liberal democracy – electoralism and constitutionalism. Equipped with this two-dimensional classificatory device the article proceeds in the last section to propose a regime typology with four main types of regime: democratic, constitutional-oligarchic, electoral-autocratic, and authoritarian. This provides a conceptual map in which the categories and subcategories developed by the literature on hybrid regimes can be located and analytically related to each other. The last section further divides the category of democratic regimes into four subtypes: liberal, constitutional, electoral, and limited.     

Democracy and ‘punitive populism’: exploring the Supreme Court's role in El Salvador

El Salvador is characterized by the sad record of having one of the highest degrees of violence and crime in Latin America. Recent governments have tried to fight it with programmes called ‘mano dura’ or ‘super-mano dura’ with measures and practices that have often violated human rights and judicial guarantees. This paper aims to explore the Supreme Court's role in the application of these policies by the Salvadoran government. We discovered that the highest court in this country supports this kind of policies termed by some analysts ‘policies of punitive populism’. In this sense, the Constitutional Chamber acted in contrast to what is required by democratic theory. The paper proceeds as follows: in the first part we analyse the theoretical framework of public safety policies and frame the Salvadoran case. In the second part, we explore the Supreme Court cases that support (or not) these policies, examining the performance of the court in relation to these cases. The last part is a summary of our evidence.     

The US discourse on political Islam: is Obama's a truly post-‘war on terror’ administration?

In this article, I examine the legacy of the discourse on political Islam in the context of George W. Bush's ‘war on terror’, reflecting on the role this discourse has performed in constructing and affirming the United States' self-identity as a beacon of ‘democracy’, ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’, in contradistinction to an Islamist ‘other’. It will evaluate the three most prominent manifestations of the modern rationalist paradigm in relation to the ‘war on terror’ discourse: the tendency to ‘ideologise terror’; the tendency to conflate Islamist movements and view them solely within a security/counterterrorism framework; and the tendency to employ double standards when distinguishing between what is regarded as legitimate and illegitimate uses of political violence. This article will then consider to what extent it is appropriate to label the period since the Obama election as a truly ‘post-war on terror’ politics.     

Political party and party system institutionalization in Southeast Asia: lessons for democratic consolidation in Indonesia,the Philippines and Thailand

Abstract

This article analyses the Kim Dae-jung government's industrial realignment (‘Big Deals’) policy in post-crisis Korea, which offers a valuable insight into the state's role in managing the transition from a developmental state to a free-market economy and into the changing nature of government–business relations. Although Kim was committed to creating a free-market economy in Korea, as the ‘Big Deals’ got under way critics accused him of violating market principles and employing tactics of intervention and coercion used by previous authoritarian regimes. The ‘Big Deals’ experience suggests a further stage in the evolution of the Korean developmental state; the dismantling of state powers and the implementation of neoliberal reforms in the 1990s had led to the emergence of a ‘transformative state’ in which the state acted as ‘senior partner’ rather than ‘commander-in-chief’. The transitional state charged with the task of rebuilding the economy after 1997 regained some of its lost powers and used some familiar methods of achieving its ends. However, it also demonstrated by the nature and scope of its interventions that it was gradually evolving and adapting to meet the changing economic environment. Although Kim's actions prompted allegations from the chaebol and their conservative allies of a return to autocratic economic management by the government, it was clear that the developmental state had not been resurrected. Rather, these criticisms serve to highlight the continuing antagonism in the state–business relationship; neither side had developed new strategies for dealing with each other and their relations were still characterized by mutual mistrust and staunch chaebol resistance to key reforms demanded by the government. Although suspicions of a permanent return to extensive state intervention were unfounded, they nevertheless diminished the prospects for the creation of a cooperative relationship between the state and big business that would be a crucial factor in revitalizing the Korean economy.     

Embedding the 'new economy' in Europe: a study in the institutional specificities of knowledge-based growth

Aspirations for a 'new economy' currently feature prominently in the economic policy debate within the EU. So pronounced is elite interest in the 'new economy' that the issue of knowledge-based growth dominated the Special European Council organized for Lisbon in May 2000. However, the Presidential Conclusions to that Council failed to address the question of whether the European economy is institutionally compatible with knowledge-based growth. The 'new economy' is currently most developed within the United States, and the institutional specificities of the American high-tech sector suggest that it may be impossible simply to import the 'new economy' into Europe. The EU may lack both the labour market and the capital market conditions necessary for successfully embedding the 'new economy' in Europe.     

Mending the Divide: Lessons from LGBTQ+ Movements for Latin American Studies

Latin American has made remarkable progress in the last twenty years regarding LGBTQ+ rights. More recently, LGBTQ-related issues have had major impacts on national and regional politics. However, most of the literature about Latin American social movements still largely ignores LGBTQ+ movements. This article argues that including LGBTQ+ movements in social movements research is essential to further our understanding of LGBTQ+ politics in the region and of Latin American politics and social movements more broadly, as well as to address the enduring lack of academic engagement with gender and sexuality as political topics.     

Denaturalisation and conceptions of citizenship in the ‘war on terror’

The threat of American and British nationals returning home after fighting with ISIS sparked calls in 2014 for legislation to allow the revocation of terror suspects’ citizenship. Using content analysis, this paper compares how citizenship was renegotiated during the debates that followed in both countries. For proponents of the new powers, acts considered prejudicial to national security did not simply constitute a ‘bad’ or dissenting citizen, but were incompatible with the status of citizenship itself. I find that republican discourses of citizenship conceived as loyalty to the state were used not as an alternative to liberal discourses that espouse individual rights and a more limited political arena, but precisely as means of discursively limiting of that arena, by selectively excluding particular undesirable or less desirable groups – terror suspects, naturalised citizens – from political life as we know it.