“Illiberal Spaces:” Uzbekistan's extraterritorial security practices and the spatial politics of contemporary authoritarianism

Research on comparative authoritarianism has tended to neglect spatial approaches to the politics of non-democratic states. This article argues that spatial theory offers a useful framework for exploring extraterritorial security practices designed to counter political opposition among migrant and exile communities. A case study of Uzbekistan explores how the state responded to the perceived security threats posed by rapidly growing communities of labor migrants and the activities of many political and religious activists in exile. The security services developed a network of extraterritorial intelligence and security mechanisms – including surveillance, detention, interrogation and forced returns – to pre-empt or respond to any perceived threats to the regime emanating from abroad. These security practices extended the state in complex ways beyond its borders, resulting in new “state spaces” that reproduced elements of domestic repression in other jurisdictions. The article suggests that such extraterritorial practices are typical of contemporary authoritarian regimes, as such states seek to manage the spatial challenges produced by mass global migration, international financial flows, and transnational processes of knowledge production.     

THE SPATIAL LEGACY OF INFORMAL EMPIRE: OIL,THE SOVIET UNION,AND THE CONTOURS OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN CHINA'S FAR WEST

Abstract

Beginning in the 1930s, Soviet geologists, engineers, and economic planners began laying the infrastructure of informal empire in China's westernmost province of Xinjiang. Seeking to gain access to its rich petroleum wealth in particular, these Soviet state agents helped create a blueprint for state investment and development in Xinjiang that continues to resonate today. Confronting the substantial Soviet investment in the province and driven by a border policy intent on minimizing capital expenditures for distant peripheries, economic planners in the Republic of China and the People's Republic alike relied heavily on Soviet reports, technology, and infrastructure in their own economic development plans. In the end, the efforts of Chinese and Soviet planners, often working in collaboration, helped create an enduring pattern of state investment in Xinjiang. Focusing on oil extraction, processing, and transport operations in Xinjiang, this work reveals the long-term resonances of informal empire in Chinese border regions.     

What a girl's gotta do: the labor of the biopolitical celebrity in austerity Britain

This article debunks the widespread view that young female celebrities, especially those who rise to fame through reality shows and other forms of media-orchestrated self-exposure, dodge “real” work out of laziness, fatalism, and a misguided sense of entitlement. Instead, the authors argue that becoming a celebrity in a neoliberal economy such as that of the United Kingdom, where austerity measures disproportionately disadvantage the young, women, and the poor, is not as irregular or exceptional a choice as previously thought, especially since the precariousness of celebrity earning power adheres to the current demands of the neoliberal economy on its workforce. What is more, becoming a celebrity involves different forms of labor that are best described as biopolitical, since such labor fully involves and consumes the human body and its capacities as a living organism. Weight gain and weight loss, pregnancy, physical transformation through plastic surgery, physical symptoms of emotional distress, and even illness and death are all photographically documented and supplemented by extended textual commentary, usually with direct input from the celebrity, reinforcing and expanding on the visual content. As well as casting celebrity work as labor, the authors also maintain that the workings of celebrity should always be examined in the context of wider cultural, social and real economies.     

Las fuerzas tras la migración global

Movements of people are a crucial element of global integration. Most destination countries favor the entry of highly skilled migrants, but restrict that of lower-skilled workers, asylum seekers and refugees. A major cause of migration is the growing inequality in incomes and human security between more- and less-developed countries. Further driving factors include uneven economic development; rapid demographic transitions; and technological advances in transport and communications. Increasingly, migrants do not shift their social existence from one society to another, but maintain transnational connections. The global economic crisis that began in 2008 has brought a hiatus in some of these factors, but has not undermined their long-term significance. Australia's traditional model of permanent-settlement migration needs to be adjusted to the new realities of global mobility and connectivity.     

Means of production versus means of coercion: can Russian business limit the violence of a predatory state?

In their most recent works, North and his coauthors (North, D. C., J. J. Wallis, S. Webb, and B. R. Weingast. 2012. In the Shadow of Violence: Politics, Economics, and the Problems of Development. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press; North, D.C., J. J. Wallis, and B. R. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press) name the formation of organizations capable of effectively restricting violence in society as a necessary condition for transition from developing societies to societies with sustainable economic growth. However, the mechanisms of emergence and conditions for the operation of such organizations in contemporary developing countries remain unclear. We follow the logic of formation of such organizations using the case study of collective actions of the Russian business community aimed at restricting “state violence” against business. We seek to identify the conditions leading to a shift in the choice of strategies from attempts at informal agreements with extortionists controlling means of coercion to cooperation of businessmen and trace the further evolution of organized forms of collective action. Finally, we assess to what extent the created organizations can be efficient and self-supporting in the long term.     

Navigating class power and inequalities: new deal liberals and the Los Angeles regional labor board, 1933-1934

ABSTRACT

This article examines how local state officials operated the Los Angeles Regional Labor Board, 1933-1934, a regional branch of the National Labor Board. Amid a surge in workers mobilizing strikes and organizing unions, which faced fierce business opposition in LA, one of the period’s most anti-union cities, local state officials discarded initial solutions to industrial conflict – solutions based on state paternalism and involved parties’ voluntary compliance – and proposed more robust state interventionist tools. Such efforts were to enhance state authority and power and forge greater class equality by accepting worker rights and limiting business prerogatives, while the officials also obsessively encouraged the economic ‘wheels be kept turning and the pulse quickened.’ Drawing on regional-based archives, we trace local officials navigating and shaping social relations, and investigate the unpredictable, everyday workings of local responses to national-level policy-making. Earlier scholarship on the period highlights the role of leaders, like FDR or Senator Wagner, or business elites crafting seemingly pro-working-class policy, alongside the accounts of structural political economy. We emphasize local state agencies tasked with policy implementation becoming sites of contention for class actors and state officials, reflecting more general patterns but also initiating institutional procedures with enduring implications for US capital-labor relations.

Abbreviations: LA: Los Angeles; NLB: National Labor Board; RLB: Regional Labor Board; NLRB: National Labor Relations Board; AFL: American Federation of Labor; LACC: Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce; M&M: Merchant and Manufacturers Association; NRA: National Recovery Administration     

信仰·境界与学报主体意识

信仰、境界、主体意识,都属于精神范畴,信仰是主体意识的自觉,境界是主体意识的自为.根据主体间性共生理论,学报编辑、作者、读者同为学报主体,他们共同面向学报这一客体.学报是多元主体意识融合的产物,要实现主体间性的共同感知,需要有平等、尊重意识,需要高层次的学术信仰对话.编辑与作者的境界沟通,在于放弃自我,揣摩作者的构思、意图、中心思想、表达方式,编辑角色转化为作者角色,又要高于作者;编辑与读者的境界沟通,在于思想的创新、与时俱进,掌握读者需求.     

Implementing Performance Budgeting at the State Level: Lessons Learned from New Jersey

This article considers barriers and strategies for implementing performance budgeting in real-time application by a state-level government. The lessons learned from the State of New Jersey’s implementation of the Governor’s Performance Budgeting Initiative offer guidelines for public and nonprofit sector organizations attempting similar efforts. Data was gathered through a series of focus groups with key executive-level administrators. Observations and recommendations for enhancing and reenergizing current performance budgeting strategies for a state or agency are suggested.     

Turkish foreign policy in the post-Arab Spring era: from proactive to buffer state

Our globalising world is presently in a state of global turmoil. Risk, uncertainty, and insecurity are the terms that shape global/regional/national/local affairs and developments. The refugee crisis and the war against ISIL constitute the twin crises creating seismic impacts and consequences that in turn escalate risk and turmoil. Turkey is situated at the heart of these two crises, being very much affected by them and, therefore, perceived as a pivotal actor in the way in which the West is dealing with them. Yet, the West’s current instrumentalist and functionalist approach to Turkey as a buffer state designed to contain these two crises in the MENA does not offer an effective and sustainable solution to these crises, much less provide the stability and order that is direly needed in regional and global affairs.     

State,region and order: geopolitics of the Arab Spring

State failure, sovereignty disputes, non-state territorial structures, and revolutionary and counter-revolutionary currents, among others, are intertwined within the Arab Spring process, compelling old and emerging regional actors to operate in the absence of a regional order. The emergent geopolitical picture introduces the poisonous mix of loss of state authority spiralling toward instability, defined by sectarianism, extremism, global rivalries, and ultimately irredentism within interdependent subregional formations. This assertion is substantiated by detailed and specific evidence from the shifting and multi-layered alliance formation practices of intra- and inter-state relations, and non-state and state actors. Analysis of the relations and alliances through a dichotomous flow from domestic to regional and regional to global also sheds light on prospective future order. A possible future order may take shape around a new imagination of the MENA, with porous delimitations in the form of emerging subregions.