A Study of Transnational Communication Among Iranian Migrant Women in Australia

Through the analysis of 25 interviews with Iranian migrant women in Australia, this study shows how living in different communicative environments can affect transnational communication practices. The case of these Iranian transnational families indicates that the digital divide, in terms of information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure and communication capacity, may affect the technological quality of ICT-mediated communication. However, the digital divide does not significantly affect the frequency of communication among these families. The findings illustrate that the Iranian migrants in Australia and their family members overseas developed innovative communication practices and went to great lengths to maintain “ordinary” family interactions across national borders.     

The In-securitisation of Youth in the South and East Mediterranean

The securitisation of youth as a social category has been well-documented. For the South and East Mediterranean (SEM) countries, moral panics over demographic youth bulges, Islamist radicalisation and protracted conflicts have placed youth centre-stage as a threat to the security of states and societies. Rejecting such assertions as themselves being what Foucault might have termed ‘technologies of power’ in a neoliberal order, and instead taking a critical approach to security, the spotlight is turned towards youth themselves as the referent object of study. This reveals the multidimensional hyper-precarity and insecuritisation of young peoples’ lives which derive from that same neoliberal economic order and the political structures that sustain it in the SEM countries. The finding resonates with other studies of new, insecure, formats for adulthood in Africa and suggests that we should look at the insecurity of young people today to understand global neoliberal futures in countries beyond the post-industrial ‘core’.     

The EU and the Global Order: Contingent Liberalism

Abstract

Politicians, diplomats and analysts commonly assume that commitment to multilateralism and liberal norms is part of the EU’s very DNA. Increasingly, however, the EU’s commitment to the liberal global order is more selective. We demonstrate the shift to a more contingent liberalism by examining the EU’s recent record in relation to four different challenges: international trade; US leadership; Russian actions in the eastern neighbourhood; and security in the Middle East. We speculate on what this may portend for the EU’s self-identity, European interests and the integrity of the prevailing global order.     

Contestation and Transformation. Final Thoughts on the Liberal International Order

Abstract

The liberal international order, the inseparable mix of US geopolitical power and ideational project of organising international relations along normative frameworks such as internationalism, institutionalism and democracy, is reeling under the pressure of profound systemic changes such as greater interconnectedness and multipolarity. Predictions abound that increasing great power competition, most visibly at play in geographical areas of contested orders, will eventually tear it down. However, even if major actors – the US included – display a selective, irregular and often instrumental commitment to the liberal order, they are still repositioning themselves in that order and not outside of it. In addition, conflict is not the default outcome of order contestation, as hybrid forms of governance are possible even in troubled regions. No doubt, the world of tomorrow will be less American-shaped and less liberal, but transformation is a more plausible future than collapse for the liberal order.     

Aid and state-building,Part I: South Korea and Taiwan

Under what conditions does foreign aid in the aftermath of war foster state-building? This article argues that institutional legacy and continuity and the politics of aid may matter. In the aftermath of war, for an aid regime to reinforce state-building, it may need to ensure continuity in the strength of the state and to use recipient mechanisms and finance policies that generate a greater state capacity. The existence and continuity of a Weberian state may increase the likelihood of effective state-building. If the state is relatively strong, with a Weberian bureaucracy, aid can further reinforce it when aid is spent through national systems or is aligned with local priorities, with efforts to ensure that the recipient leaders reinforce state effectiveness by implementing policies that may require greater state capacity. Evidence for this argument is provided through pairwise comparison of state-building patterns between South Korea and Taiwan.     

Lifestyles/Routine Activities and Bullying among South Korean Youths

Research on bullying has been conducted primarily in the United States and other western cultures, with less attention paid to the magnitude and sources of the problem in eastern cultures. Framed within lifestyle/routine activities theories, we examined a random sample of 3,121 South Korean middle-school students in order to assess the main effects of factors reflecting guardianship, target suitability, and exposure to motivated offenders on a youth’s risk of being bullied by groups of juveniles. Latent growth curve modeling was used to estimate both cross-sectional and longitudinal effects on self-reported victimizations involving “collective” bullying. Findings and their theoretical implications are presented.     

South European Healthcare Systems under Harsh Austerity: A Progress–Regression Mix?

This article addresses the question of whether the economic crisis provides a politically opportune time to drastically curtail public healthcare in South Europe or whether, instead, there are signs of longer-term reform strategies for potentially balancing fiscal targets with the quest for enhanced value and health outcomes, when eventually growth resumes. After a brief examination of the profile of healthcare systems in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain prior to the crisis, we comparatively assess the mix of retrenchment, restructuring and recalibration strategies. The effects of the austerity-driven reforms on current (and expected) health outcomes are also briefly analysed. We conclude with reflections on the future of public healthcare in South Europe.     

Flying bananas: small producer tactics and the (un)making of Philippine banana export chains

Global production network (GPN) analysts argue that workers actively contribute to the shaping of GPNs through different forms of agency. In this contribution I extend this argument to the tactical agency of small producers. By focusing on the phenomenon of side-selling among Filipino banana contract farmers, I show that these tactics have contributed to the emergence of alternative trade networks that undermined traditional lead firm behaviour and inspired new struggles over chain governance. However, as a diverse and ambiguous group of growers engages in this tactical agency, predominantly as small capital, they also contribute to the continuation of broader dynamics of capital accumulation and labour exploitation.     

Plantation rubber,land grabbing and social-property transformation in southern Laos

This paper critically examines theories of accumulation, dispossession and exclusion for analyzing the agrarian transformations that result from contemporary large-scale land acquisitions across the Global South. Building upon Marx's primitive accumulation, Harvey's accumulation by dispossession and Hall et al.'s Powers of Exclusion, conceptual lenses are developed through which to examine how land grabs transform property and social relationships of resource-based production. I examine the concession of 10,000 hectares by the central government of Laos to a Vietnamese corporation for extracting timber and planting rubber in the southern province of Attapeu. This acquisition has excluded farmers from land and resources that constituted their primary sources of (re)production, reconfigured rural property relations, altered the peasant relationship to land and produced new exploitative forms of wage labor.     

East Is East and South Is South: The Cases of Sarojini Naidu and Arundhati Roy

Boehmer begins by outlining suggestive parallels between the doubly orientalizing reception of an Indian woman poet, Sarojini Naidu, in 1890s London, and the publicity and critical enthusiasm surrounding the appearance of Arundhati Roy's first novel, The God of Small Things , in the 1990s. Building on these century-broad connections, she goes on to observe how, despite its liberatory agendas, certain constructions within postcolonial criticism appear to emerge virtually intact out of the colonial discourses of the past: in particular, the conflation of biology and biography in representations of the writing of the South, and constructions of a singular oriental femaleness, and an extravagant oriental style. The second part of the essay examines more closely these seemingly 'neo-orientalist' underpinnings of postcolonial literary criticism located in the West, and then considers resistances to these, both in terms of cultural contextualization and verbal recalcitrance.