东南亚的中国文化消费

文化产品和文化服务已经成为现代国际文化交流的主要表现形式。东南亚地区曾受到中国文化的深刻影响,形成了中国文化消费的传统和群体。本文以2000年至今中国文化产品和文化服务输入东南亚的情况为基础,分析利用文化消费的形式扩大中国文化影响的可能性。笔者认为,中国文化产品在强调传统文化特点的同时,应该充分考虑东南亚民众文化消费的取向,兼顾文化宣传和娱乐受众的目的,从而达到扩大中国文化影响力的目标。     

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.     

Antiforeigner Resentment as a Manifestation of Xhosa Hegemonic Masculinity

Abstract

During a xenophobia and social cohesion research project conducted by the Safety and Violence Initiative (SaVI) of the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Freedom House USA, researchers found an overwhelming perception that foreign nationals were taking things that belong to South Africans. This perception was most prevalent in the male population, and antiforeigner resentment was mainly aimed toward male foreign nationals. This paper uses ethnographic research in the form of qualitative interviews from Motherwell and Makhanda in the Eastern Cape province to find out how constructions of hegemonic masculinities at the local level contribute to antiforeigner resentment.     

新时代中国参与中东安全治理的理念与实践

进入新时代以来,中国始终坚持共同、综合、合作、可持续的安全观,倡导构建中东安全新架构。在参与中东传统安全治理、化解地区冲突方面,中国始终推动对话协商,致力于公正合理解决中东热点问题,构筑兼顾各方合理关切的集体安全架构。在改善地区安全环境方面,中国抓住中东地区主要安全矛盾,顺应地区国家寻求缓和与发展的时代潮流,取得了促成沙特与伊朗复交的重大成果。在参与非传统安全治理方面,中国与中东国家共同提高应对非传统安全威胁的能力,共同维护发展中国家的权益。在参与中东安全治理的过程中,中国形成了以共同安全破解独享安全、以综合安全破解分割安全、以合作安全破解竞争安全等理念和经验,在中东安全事务中发挥了重要的建设性作用。