Financing the peace: Evaluating World Bank post-conflict assistance programs

Does World Bank aid to countries damaged by civil conflict meet its stated goals of speeding economic recovery and reducing the risk of conflict recidivism? We contend that the Bank’s success depends on its ability to bolster and signal the credibility of politicians’ commitments to peaceful politics and tailor its programs to the post-conflict environment. In the first systematic evaluation of World Bank post-conflict assistance, we estimate selection-corrected event history models of the effect of Bank programs on recovery and recurrence using an original dataset of all World Bank programs in post-conflict environments. Among key results, we find that the Bank tends to select aid recipients according to their pre-existing probability of conflict recurrence and that, once we control for this non-random selection, the Bank has no systematic effect on either conflict recurrence or economic recovery.     

Ford first? Corporate security and the US Department of War's Plant Protection Service's interior organization unit 1917–1918

The Ford Motor Company's corporate security unit is widely considered to be the prototype of in-house corporate security. Drawing on archival research, we demonstrate that beginning in 1917 and continuing through the early 1920s the US Department of War's Plant Protection Service and their interior organization units represent an early example of corporate security emanating from the public sector. The existence and character of this unit challenges the notion that Ford pioneered corporate security and the surveillance, secrecy, employee control, and pre-emptive techniques it typifies. The work of interior organization unit personnel exhibits strategies and features associated with today's professional corporate security managers. We then reflect on the implications of these findings for understanding the history of labor suppression and the origins of corporate security in the United States.     

世界正经历前所未有的大调整

2017年既是美国次贷危机爆发10周年和俄国十月革命胜利100周年,也迎来举世瞩目的中共十九大,世界大发展大变革大调整全面深化。在经济领域,历经近十年的动荡调整,世界经济渐呈清晰复苏态势,但深层结构性问题依然待解。在大国关系与国际安全领域,随着多极化深入发展,大国博弈水涨船高,国际安全风险明显加剧。在社会政治领域,各种社会政治乱象与转型风险进一步凸显。在全球治理领域,既有治理议程艰难推进,多边治理体系亟待升级。     

International diffusion of regulatory governance: EU actorness in public procurement

This paper attempts to go beyond actor‐centered explanations of the European Union's (EU) presence in regulatory politics by examining the role of the EU in the diffusion of regulatory norms and practices. We explore the international diffusion of public procurement policy, to which multiple organizations and especially the EU and the World Trade Organization have made an active contribution. Using the “opportunity‐presence‐capability” scheme, we argue that the EU is actively co‐shaping the global agenda on public procurement, mainly as a result of the “opportunity” and “presence” dimensions of its global actorness and its role in the horizontal diffusion of public procurement regulations between international organizations. For “EU as a global actor” literature to offer valuable explanations, an in‐depth analysis of its relationship with other international organizations, such as the World Trade Organization, reveals significant interactions and the co‐shaping of policy agendas.     

“The (final) solution of the Gypsy-question:” continuities in discourses about Roma in Hungary, 1940s–1950s

Although the repression and elimination of Roma from Hungarian society in the 1940s did not reach the same extent as in the German and Austrian part of the Third Reich, their characterization as lazy and work-shy, used to justify their persecution, was similar. This paper establishes the presence of racial hygienic discourse related to Roma during the late 1930s and the first half of the 1940s in Hungary, and traces its survival and influence on regional policy-making in the postwar period. It furthermore explores the transformation and adaptation of racism and eugenics to the socialist ideology of equality based on citizens’ participation in productive work in the early state socialist period, including the first Party declaration on the situation of Roma in Hungary in 1961. Specific attention is paid to the role of medical experts who discussed the “radical solution of the Gypsy-question” in the early 1940s and the immediate years following World War II. Reflecting on wider transformations of racism in the postcolonial and post-World War II period in Europe and North America, the paper contributes to scholarship that complicates the evaluation of the state socialist past, including the connection between medicine and politics in Cold War Europe.     

Global South rhetoric in India’s policy projection

While an on-going statist project tries to portray India as a ‘rising power’ in world politics, the fact remains that India’s global projection continues to be heavily fashioned by the Global South rhetoric. Such rhetoric is inclusive of irredentism and contestation with western norms and ideals along with cooperation leading to a complex process of interactions shaping up the global order. For countries like India being claimant to the status of ‘civilisational state’, the strong urge for autonomy along with the self-perception of national and cultural greatness is shared by the elite along with a sense of strategic importance. Such identity formation, however, reduces and sometimes obliterates the gaps between ‘internal’ and ‘external’, bringing into academic scrutiny the whole range of policymaking and to what extent it matches the state rhetoric.     

Confounding Conventional Wisdom: Political not Principled Differences in the Transatlantic Regulatory Relationship

The transatlantic complaints over hormone-treated beef and genetically modified organisms before the World Trade Organisation (WTO) seem to confirm two separate but related conventional wisdoms about the transatlantic economic relationship: that it is highly conflictual and that many of the conflicts are rooted in profoundly different approaches to regulation. This article argues that neither of the two conventional wisdoms is accurate. Rather, it contends that they are products of two, compounding analytical shortcomings: one methodological, one empirical. The methodological shortcoming takes the form of an implicit selection bias. While WTO complaints are high profile they are rare and extreme examples; it is, therefore, unsound to generalise from them to the regulatory relationship as a whole. The empirical shortcoming has to do with neither the beef hormones nor the GMO dispute demonstrating what it is purported to. The article thus serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of relying on obvious cases and the need to question whether evidence really does support a prevailing popular narrative.     

The British,the Tudeh party and the 1947 World Federation of Trade Unions’ visit: battle for labour reform in Iran

ABSTRACT

After the British-Soviet occupation of Iran during the Second World War, Iran became the key battleground for the international labour movement. The plight of the workers had become an important political issue with the Iranian government in conflict with the socialist Tudeh party for leadership over the trade unions. The Labour government in Britain was also deeply interested in the matter but regarded the Tudeh as too dangerous and too aligned with the Soviet Union to be supported. Within this climate, the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) made an official visit to Iran. With its international delegates, they represented different views over the Tudeh, which caused much conflict during the visit. This article sheds crucial light on this important visit and reveals how international the Labour questions were in Iran and how the WFTU visit brought the various tensions to light. This research will also show how the timing of the visit may have impacted on the removal of the Iranian strong-man Ahmad Qavam by the end of 1947. This work is of particular significance as it looks at the previously understudied role and interest of the British government on the Iranian labour.     

Immigrants and undesirables: “terrorism” and the “terrorist” in 1930s France

This article investigates French understandings of the terms “terrorism” and “terrorist” in the period of the late Third Republic when a series of assassinations, murders and bombings suggested that France was dangerously exposed to the threat of terror. The article deconstructs contemporary understandings of the phenomenon, showing that, if a variety of actions were labelled “terrorist”, the term was deployed in particular in relation to matters of foreignness. It was believed that immigrants, refugees and foreign secret agents imported terrorist violence to France. French citizens did not – could not even – perpetrate terrorism. Parallels may be drawn between discussions of citizenship in the wake of twenty-first century acts of terrorism and manifestations of such violence during the 1930s when notions of terrorism, Frenchness and foreignness were intimately connected.     

Liberal internationalism meets third worldism: the politics of international election observation in the DRC’s post-war elections

In this article, we draw on the contradictions in, and the geopolitics of, international election observation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s 2006 and 2011 elections to identify and analyse the emergence of a neo-third world behaviour among African states intended to counter the excesses of Western liberal democracy promotion on the continent. We argue that the decision by African states to quickly endorse the 2011 elections and close ranks around Joseph Kabila’s government, amidst mounting international criticisms of the electoral process, should be understood in the context of a new form of third worldism that is emerging in the global South in response to the unrestrained exercise of US power.