States versus Corporations: Rethinking the Power of Business in International Politics

Over 25 years ago, Susan Strange urged IR scholars to include multinational corporations in their analysis. Within IR and IPE discussions, this was either mostly ignored or reflected in an empirically and methodologically unsatisfactory way. We reiterate Strange’s call by sketching a fine-grained theoretical and empirical approach that includes both states and corporations as juxtaposed actors that interact in transnational networks inherent to the contemporary international political economy. This realistic, juxtaposed, actor- and relations-centred perspective on state and corporate power in the global system is empirically illustrated by the example of the transnationalisation of state ownership.     

春秋战国土地制度变革动力再探讨

生产力对春秋战国土地制度变革的决定性作用,是为实现变革提供基本条件,而不是直接动力.土地制度变革是一种制度创新,是人的创造性活动,只有通过具有意识能动作用的人的实践活动才能实现.春秋战国土地制度变革的直接动力是人们的实践活动.从井田制到授田制的变革,是家族公社公有制到个体家庭所有制变革的漫长私有化过程的结果.     

The measurement of electoral competition,with application to Indian states

We investigate the measurement of three distinct, but related dimensions of electoral competition in a majoritarian electoral system: contestability in the struggle for governing power; competition among candidates at the constituency level; and competition among existing parties at the level of the legislature. At each step, the analysis is made concrete by calculating our preferred indexes of these dimensions of competitiveness for 14 major Indian states from 1972 to 2009 (and from 1952 in some cases), while comparing them to others that have been widely used, though not always calculated for Indian states. We also use our preferred indexes to study the importance of the level of development for an understanding of how competition has evolved across the states. The paper concludes by posing questions about the measurement of competitiveness, in general and in the Indian case, that arise in the course of our investigation.     

Fluctuating Saudi and Emirati Alignment Behaviours in the Horn of Africa

ABSTRACT

The overthrow of Omar al-Bashir after three decades of rule has brought to light a dynamic that has been present for years: an interweaving of political, economic and security issues between the states of the Horn of Africa and the Gulf monarchies. Since 2011, the most active powers are the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which seek political support to counter both Iran’s influence and the growing Turkish presence. The two Gulf monarchies’ search for alignments with African counterparts has favoured the continuous reshuffling of alliances with direct effects on the local actors’ strategic choices. These dynamics need to be considered to understand the determinants behind the currently increasing instability in the Red Sea area.     

International Science and Local Conditions on the Ground: The Agricultural Sciences and Baltic German Identity, 1845–1905

Questions of how agricultural science would be defined, who would conduct the research, where investigations and teaching would take place, and whose interests it would serve became significant issues in the Baltic provinces in the nineteenth century. The Baltic German elite made repeated efforts to bring scientific agricultural practices into the region and to build institutions that would disseminate them in ways that suited local interests. While previous studies have defined Baltic German endeavors in the agricultural sciences as successes, this study focuses on the frustrations, cultural complexities, ideological controversies, and even violence that came with efforts at agricultural modernization.     

Iurii Samarin's Baltic Escapade

Iurii Samarin, a leading Russian Slavophile, was early in his life assigned to Riga to help reform the Russian administration there. He was shocked and outraged by what he regarded as Russia's abdication of authority in the Baltic region to the German minority. He urged St. Petersburg to reduce the powers of that minority in favor of Russians and the native population. His views were rejected by tsars Nicholas I and Alexander II, who regarded their German subjects as loyal citizens, but they influenced Alexander III.     

Garros-Evdokimov and Commodification of the Baltics

Recent groundbreaking analyses of the Baltics have focused on decolonization and national and postcolonial subjectivity. A related but somewhat divergent approach to postcolonial, ethnic and global studies in the Baltic context is to explore the response of contemporary Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian cultures to the introduction of consumer capitalism, intra-European community and global pop-culture. A long-awaited independence brought by the Soviet departure has also presented the Baltics with multiple novel challenges, especially the issue of establishing a new identity, on both a national and a personal level. These challenges become the focus of Headcrusher (2003), the debut novel of Latvian-Russian journalists Alexander Garros and Alexei Evdokimov. This essay investigates Headcrusher's fictionalization of Latvian entry into global commodified space and contextualizes the novel's censure of the new consumer-driven realm within a broader Western comparative literary and theoretical perspective.     

Marks on the city: the impacts of coastline emergence and bombing on Tallinn’s anachronistic pockets

ABSTRACT

With its complex history, Tallinn is a puzzling patchwork of contrasts – old and new, historic and revisionist. Tallinn’s abrupt contrasts in urban form originate largely from two types of historic disturbance: shoreline emergence and bombing. Through an analysis of archival maps and planning documents, this paper examines how natural shifts in the city’s shoreline combined with bombing during World War II to create anachronistic pockets within Tallinn and divergent densities and access to green space within Tallinn’s districts. Little is written in English about the history of Tallinn’s urban development. This paper analyzes Tallinn’s history of disturbance and poses challenges and opportunities to consider in the city’s future development.     

Backsliding and Reversal: The J Curve Revisited

In this article we argue that democratic transitions can reverse, oscillate, or simply stall. These transitions are exemplified in the different types of states we categorize. We construct a model of stability vs openness using three dimensions of stateness, namely authority, legitimacy, and capacity. With the additional application of a six-fold typology of states, we offer a robust analytical framework with which to identify and explain changes in state status. Our construct of stability and openness leads to a novel development of a global conflict damage index, which is built upon conflict risk, but considers a state’s capacity to deal with conflict. The paper concludes with implications for policy and the application of the model to conflict prediction when states under go transition.     

First calculations of the total output of Latvia and Lithuania in the 1920s: a comparison

The contemporary system of national accounts (SNA) framework is used to compare the methodologies and to adjust the findings to allow for cross-country comparisons of the very first calculations of the total economic output of Lithuania in 1924 by Albinas Rimka (1886–1944) and of Latvia in 1925 by Alfrēds Ceihners (1899–1987). Ceihners’ notion of national income corresponds to the SNA concept of gross national income (GNI), while Rimka measured net national income (NNI). Rimka’s estimate has a downward bias, because he applied a fixed capital depreciation rate that was too high and did not include the value of noncommercial public sector services.