‘Stepping back and moving in’: the role of the state in the contemporary food regime

In recent years, a number of middle-income countries and influential multilateral institutions have instigated actions that frame food system governance around social protection and rights. These state-centered mobilizations raise fundamental questions about how to portray the global politics of food. Since the late 1980s, analysts have largely concurred that US hegemony in the global politics of food has given way to diverse and volatile neo-liberalist and corporate-led food system governance. However, what should we make of a situation where state and supra-state actors are flexing their powers to reshape food systems in line with rights-based models? Should this be understood as reflexes which aim to preserve national order, at a time of intensified food and nutrition insecurities? Or, does it lay the foundations of a re-governed system which curbs and molds a corporate-led politics of food within frameworks of justice? This contribution responds to these questions by tracing the evolution of social protection and rights-based approaches to the politics of food at the multilateral level and in two influential jurisdictions (India and South Africa). We argue that these initiatives underline a robust and continuing role of state power in global food politics, albeit in a novel fashion compared to previous entanglements.     

全球化背景下国际法律制度的互动分析

随着全球化的迅猛发展,国际法律制度与国际组织的数量剧增,不同领域的议题交叉重叠,改善"全球治理"的呼吁日盛。在这种背景下,有关"制度互动"的研究命题开始进入国际关系与国际法学者的视野。考察不同的联结点,国际法律制度的互动可以分为"水平互动"与"垂直互动";"功能互动"与"政治性互动";"功利互动"、"规范互动"以及"观念互动"等。同时,国际法律制度互动的构建与维持模式分析也成为必要工作。     

从出土文献看六朝时期西北地方法的特点——以鄯善、河西、高昌诸政权与中原的比较为重点

本文将出土文献与传世文献相结合,探讨了六朝时期西北地区鄯善、河西、高昌诸政权法制建设的特点及户籍法、奴隶身份法的几个问题。指出六朝时期西北诸政权大多以六朝等中央政府为正朔所在,在国家行政体制、社会基层组织、文化教育传统等方面,既形成了自己的地方特色,又保持了与汉晋文化的高度一致性,成为除江南以外保存汉文化最多的地区,因此才能成为陈寅恪先生所讲隋唐制度渊源的"河西因子",深深影响到北魏的各项改革,成为隋唐帝国典章制度的重要来源之一。     

From Hybridity to Standardization: Rethinking State-Making in Contexts of Fragility

Having been top of the agenda for the past two decades, debates on state fragility have recently witnessed the emergence of pluralist concepts. While the concept of ‘hybrid political orders’ has invigorated our thinking about fragile states, it yields to the fallacy that pluralism constitutes the birth certificate of statehood. This article introduces an alternative concept to better grasp state trajectories, proposing an understanding of state developments in terms of institutional and identity standardization. Rooted in existing accounts of state-making, the analytical prism of ‘rule standardization’ is original in that it conceptually bridges the gap between statebuilding and nation-building as well as between state-making and state-breaking. Substantiating the theoretical discussion with three case studies from the Somali territories, the paper fundamentally proposes that what is required to sustain states should not be confused with what is required to initiate them.     

Mapping deviant democracy

A number of countries have emerged as stable, electoral democracies despite low levels of modernization, lack of democratic neighbouring countries and other factors consistently related to democratic stability in the literature. The study of these deviant democracies is a promising new research field but it is afflicted by the lack of a consensus as to which democracies are actually deviant. The present article attempts to solve this problem by carrying out a comprehensive mapping of deviant democracies. It reviews the literature to provide an overview of the cases most often identified as deviant democracies and uses a large-N analysis of 159 countries covering the time period 1993–2008 to systematically map deviant democracies. The analysis points to 12 cases that merit further attention. These are the Central African Republic, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Mongolia, Niger, Senegal, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turkey.     

Internationalized regimes: a second dimension of regime hybridity

Traditional approaches have conceptualized political regimes almost exclusively with reference to domestic-level political factors. However, many current and historical political regimes have entailed a major role for international actors, and in some cases the external influence has been so great that regimes have become internationalized. This article explores the concept of ‘internationalized regimes’ and argues that they should be seen as a distinct form of hybrid regime type that demonstrates a distinct dimension of hybridity. Until now, regime hybridity has been conceived along a single dimension of domestic politics: the level of competitiveness. Yet, some regimes are characterized by a different type of hybridity, in which domestic and international authority are found together within a single political system. The article explores the dynamics of internationalized regimes within three settings, those of international occupation, international administration and informal empire.     

Contested or established? A comparison of legislative powers across regimes

In research on authoritarian institutions, legislatures are portrayed as capable of resolving dilemmas between the leader and opposition members. Nevertheless, repeated interactions between a leader and their ruling coalition can lead to both contested dictatorships, in which institutions constrain the leader, and established dictatorships, in which the leader exercises near-complete control. To date, however, no one has examined the patterns by which powers vary across legislatures in different settings and over time. Using data from the Varieties of Democracy Project on legislative powers between 1900 and 2017, we conceptualize changes in the powers afforded to the national congress to characterize the development of regimes in either direction. The study expounds on the content of legislatures across regimes and the ways in which they change, encouraging scholars to further consider the relationship between regime dynamics and legislative institutionalization.     

Forward to democracy or back to authoritarianism? The attitudinal bases of mass support for the Russian election protests of 2011–2012

Two UK-based political scientists present the results of an original survey they conducted in Russia soon after the presidential elections of 2012. The survey examines the interaction between mass attitudes toward the causal triggers of protest during the 2011–2012 electoral cycle and underlying political attitudes regarding the preferred alternatives to a hybrid regime (both more democratic and more authoritarian). They find that supporters of the protests were not stronger advocates of a democratic transition; on the contrary, they were more likely to support authoritarian leadership and ethno-nationalism. This finding leads to a discussion of whether one of the major constraints on elite-mass mobilization in Russia is the authoritarian direction such mobilization might entail.     

In the Spotlight: Analyzing Sequential Attention Effects in Protest Reporting

During waves of contention, international media attention can be of crucial importance for activists and protest participants. However, media attention is a scarce resource and the competition over news coverage is high. While some emphasize the agenda-setting power of news outlets and argue that receiving coverage is determined by factors outside the protest movement, others suggest a dynamic relationship between media attention and activism where social movement organizations are assumed to have some agency to make it to the news. In this article, we contribute to the latter and analyze how protest can endogenously trigger more coverage. Building on insights from communication science, we argue that widely covered protests attract media attention and temporarily lower the selection threshold for subsequent incidents. Using fine-grained data on anti-regime protest in all authoritarian countries between 2003 and 2012, we find robust empirical evidence for this hypothesis. We also show that this effect becomes weaker and eventually disappears with increasing spatial and temporal distance from a highly salient event. These findings are important for research in contentious politics, since they allow us to gauge the extent to which protest activity on the ground may under certain circumstances be overreported in the media.     

Norm subsidiarity and institutional cooperation: explaining the straits of Malacca anti-piracy regime

Abstract

Given competing interests among the three littoral states of Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, what explains the nature and timing of their cooperative arrangement in combating maritime piracy in the Straits of Malacca in the post-2004 period? This observation is especially puzzling because the material and strategic interests of these actors generally did not change during the time period that witnessed increased cooperation. We argue that key developments of the anti-piracy regime in the Straits of Malacca cannot be fully explained by rationalist approaches, which traditionally stresses material and national interests of states. By critically engaging constructivist approaches, this paper posits that Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia engaged in a process of norm subsidiarity. Through norm subsidiarity, relatively weak states get together to develop their own rules to prevent their exclusion or marginalization from institutions of global governance by more powerful actors. The littoral states engaged norm subsidiarity to resist extra-regional attempts to manage piracy in the Straits of Malacca. These extra-regional security proposals triggered a powerful regional cognitive prior, providing the impetus for an indigenous response, leading consequently to a collective cooperative effort to deal with the threat of piracy.