韩国国会议员社会背景管窥

韩国国会议员的社会背景是其政策决策的社会源流。韩国的内外政策从宏观看存在着左右分野,而从微观看则明显带有个人的影响。韩国社会是一个人情社会,社会标签与网络决定了个人的情绪与政策喜好。在对议员社会背景的分析中,性别与血型、血缘与地域、教育经历、职业生涯、特别经历等因素决定了议员本人的活动与价值观,从而决定了政策的基本走向。这些基本的社会背景因素对国会议员的议政活动和议会政治发展产生了种种影响。     

21世纪中国地方政府在中韩关系中的作用

随着中国改革开放的深入和中韩关系的发展,中国地方政府开始在中韩关系中发挥日益重大的作用。本文以山东省、上海市、广东省、湖北省为案例,分析了21世纪中国地方政府在中韩关系中的作用。这种作用体现为以下三个方面：中国地方政府与韩国的经贸关系为中韩关系发展注入了强大的经济动力;中国地方政府与韩国的外事活动为中韩关系发展奠定了坚实的政治基础;中国地方政府与韩国的文化交流为中韩关系发展营造了友好的民意支撑。展望未来的中韩关系,本文得出的相关政策启示在于：对于中国地方政府而言,要为韩国企业入驻创造良好的投资环境;对于中国中央政府而言。需要给予地方政府在发展中韩关系中适当的授权和分权;对于韩国政府而言,需要积极应对中国经济发展方式的重大转变;2012年韩国丽水世博会将是进一步密切中国地方政府与韩国关系的重要契机。     

Text Matters: Some Reflections on the Forging of a New Constitutional Jurisprudence in South Africa

The South African Constitution establishes a constitutional democracy with a strong form of constitutional review. The Constitutional Court is required to declare invalid any legislation or conduct of the President which is inconsistent with the Constitution. The author, a former judge of the Constitutional Court, argues that the text of the Constitution has been an important determinant of the Court's jurisprudence, both in relation to the Court's jurisprudence concerning the institutional structures established by the Constitution and its Bill of Rights jurisprudence.     

Cultivating “success” and “failure” in policy: participatory irrigation management in Nepal

Introduced over a decade ago and considered largely successful by irrigation professionals, Irrigation Management Transfer and Participatory Irrigation Management (IMT/PIM) policies were recently reviewed and seen to have resulted in more cases of “failure” than “success”. Primary research on two IMT/PIM projects in Nepal, which were among the few “successes” in the assessment supporting a “failed” PIM, shows how such policy-driven evaluations, when defining success, overlook incongruities between policies, institutions, and the evolving dynamics around class, caste, ethnicity, and gender. Without exploring the dynamics of practice, the process of “cultivating” success and/or failure in evaluations provides little insight on how irrigation management works on the ground.     

The role of caste in the implementation of herbal gardens in Bangalore

Over the past few decades home garden research has emphasised the promotion of home gardening for nutritional and other welfare benefits for the poor in urban areas. Still, the urban communities who cultivate plants in their home gardens are in general represented as rather uniform groups, and no distinction is made in terms of caste, ethnic groups, or social class. This article asserts that social stratification represents an important aspect that needs to be taken into account while devising educational programmes and community projects for the promotion of home herbal gardens in urban areas.     

Microcredit and power: examining how and why women encounter domination in Bangladesh

Using data from a recent ethnographic research project on microcredit, power, and poverty in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, this article demonstrates that the relationship of women with both NGOs and male relatives is one of dependency and subordination. Gendered power relations, embedded in NGO practices and socio-cultural gender norms, influence the female borrowers to accept the domination of the fieldworkers and their male relatives. This article examines how and why NGOs create power inequalities between fieldworkers and female borrowers, why the fieldworkers dominate a group of women, and why these women continue to participate in microcredit programmes.     

Religion and attitudes towards corruption in India: a collective action problem?

This paper argues that religion influences the ways that people think and speak about corruption, typically leading to condemnation. However, it is also argued that, in a systemically corrupt country, such condemnation is unlikely to influence actual corrupt behaviour. Based on fieldwork in India, the paper finds that existing anti-corruption policies based on a principal-agent understanding of corruption, even if they incorporate religious organisations and leaders, are unlikely to work, partly because people consider “religion” to be a discredited entity. Instead, the paper argues that if corruption were to be seen as a collective action problem, anti-corruption practice would need significant rethinking. Despite its current lack of influence, revised policies and practices may see a role for religion.     

Third time lucky? Establishing diplomatic relations between Russia and South Africa

Diplomatic relations between Russia and South Africa were established in 1992, before South Africa's transition to democracy was completed. This move was perceived as a betrayal by many in both countries and beyond. For many decades the Soviet Union supported the African National Congress in its fight against the apartheid regime. South Africa's National Party government, in its turn, presented the USSR as the main force behind the ‘total onslaught’ – an all-out war purportedly waged against South Africa by international communism. Yet it was with the National Party government that the Russians established diplomatic relations. This article looks into the reasons for this change of heart in Moscow and Pretoria, discusses the political forces behind the decision to establish diplomatic relations, and analyses the process that led to this event and the results of establishing diplomatic relations the way it happened and at the time it happened for both countries.     

The sustained incremental multi-actor multi-action building of South Korean soft power in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Since the end of the East–West divide in the 1990s, the world has slowly lost its US-based unipolarity to globalisation, and a shift towards East Asia. This phenomenon has given more space to middle powers and furthered the embeddedness of the political, economic, and cultural spheres into the dynamics of social structures. It is highly visible when observed from the digital communication standpoint, which has become pervasive. In this context, the study of international power has moved towards the concept of soft power, which remains a fuzzy concept concerning ‘who’ and ‘what’. We define power as a continuum, in which various types of public and private actors carry out different types of coercive to cooptive actions in various but embedded spheres. We propose an empirically tractable conceptual framework that we use as a tool to analyse soft power within a hard-to-soft power spectrum, in which the articulation, dynamics and incremental nature of soft power become observable. We illustrate our point with the case study of South Korean power in Indonesia in the twenty-first century and draw conceptual as well as practical conclusions.     

Branding K-REDD+ and its implications for South Korea's middle power diplomacy

ABSTRACT

The need for new and stronger middle power diplomacy is growing as global challenges are increasingly governed by various horizontal inter- and trans-national networks. Climate change is one of the most complex and urgent global challenges that require collective action, and it is an issue for which more middle power leadership is greatly needed. The Republic of Korea (ROK) has been successful in becoming a primary actor in green growth governance, and its success has been attributed to its strategic middlepowermanship, integrating both material and ideational contents. Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) in tropical developing countries has been lauded as an immediate and effective solution to mitigate climate change. ROK's unique history of forest transition before rapid economic growth highlights the fact that improving forest management is possible even with imperfect governance, rapid population growth, and low economic development. The lessons learned from ROK's forest transition can be developed as a distinct contribution to the international effort to address forest-related impacts on climate change, and offer an important opportunity for ROK to play a constructive role and achieve enhanced stature within the international community.