A new dynamism in Sino-Japanese security relations: Japan's strategic use of foreign aid

Abstract

In November 2004 a Chinese nuclear submarine cruised into Japan's territorial waters near the Okinawa Islands. In response, the Japanese government dispatched several Japanese naval ships and planes to chase the Chinese submarine until it navigated into international waters. This event, which potentially could have become the first exchange of fire between Japan and China since the Second World War, illuminated increasingly problematic security relations between the two neighbouring countries in the twenty-first century. In fact, deterioration of Sino-Japanese security relations is not a recent phenomenon but has already been evident since the mid-1990s, when Japan imposed a series of economic sanctions on China. Between 1995 and 2000 Japan had suspended its foreign aid to China in protest against: China's nuclear weapons tests; China's large scale war game including the launch of missiles across the Taiwan Strait; and Chinese naval activities in disputed areas in the East China Sea. This article looks at Sino-Japanese security relations since the mid-1990s through three case studies of the aid sanctions imposed by Japan on China. It clarifies the domestic political and bureaucratic interests that motivated aid sanctions and determined the decision-making process leading to these sanctions. The article argues, that with certain politico-security interests, Japanese governments actively used foreign aid as a strategic instrument to counter provocative military actions by China in the East Asian region since the mid-1990s. Despite the limited influence that Japanese aid sanctions have actually had on Chinese military behaviour, Japan's strategic use of foreign aid has undeniably created a new dynamism in security relations between the two neighbouring great powers in Asia.     

Diamond signs: generic stones and particular gems

Analysis of narratives from ethnographic research with diamond consumers representing the target market (largely middle-class white women between 20 and 50 years of age) reveals how symbolic associations promoted by industry are refracted through interpretations of both adverts and diamonds in general, but shows that local contingencies (basic attitudes and knowledge about diamonds and their production, circumstances of acquisition, and personal histories) are significant in determining meanings of people's own specific diamonds. Far from being batch absorbers of advert discourse, consumers are idiosyncratic, creative, and sometimes playful interpreters, and furthermore may distinguish between these strategies and those suggested by adverts or as performed by others. These findings are in part explicable on introducing for diamond consumption an important distinction between type and token, whereby a token is a specific instantiation of a generic type. This approach contributes to developing methods supple enough to capture consumers’ multi-dimensional interpretive strategies.     

Effective Communication and Frame Persuasiveness for Food Safety Controversies： The Young Male Consumer＇s Perspective

This study explored effective risk communication for food safety targeting young male consumers who frequently dine outside by examining the controversy of US beef importation in Taiwan in 2012. Guided by risk perception theory and framing theory in issues management, the researcher developed a risk profile of young male consumers based on interview data. Persuasiveness of message frames used by the government was analyzed according to three distinct communicative objectives： to reduce risk perception, to motivate beef consumption, and to gain support for beef importation. The study suggested that the young male consumer＇s knowledge of US beef was formed by news reports and information from family members with experts as the most trusted source. They perceived US beef as risky but safe to eat if they wished. They seldom actively sought information about the beef. The new media were the most used by them for seeking and receiving such information. Frame persuasiveness varied across communicative objectives and was associated with the schemata employed in the configuration of risk-benefit trade-offs for each targeted behavior.     

Citizens,Partners or Patrons? Corporate Power and Patronage Capitalism

Abstract

The addition of new social roles in public service and civil society to large business corporations' enormous economic power and substantial political influence suggests novel but little-understood changes in the institutional relations between business, state and civil society. Sociological emphasis on the centrality of power relations in business conduct and radical diagnoses of a corporate ‘take-over’ of public and civil society institutions is contradicted by other literature which portrays corporations as socially responsible benefactors rather than all-powerful behemoths. The present analysis assesses rival emphases on power relations and normative shifts toward corporate social responsibility in the sphere of business–civil society partnerships. It argues that, in the United States and Britain, a new set of institutional relationships is emerging to fill a vacuum in tackling social and environmental problems. In this new institutional field, large corporations are taking on the role of patrons to a variety of clients amongst public and civil society organisations. This social relationship parallels similar episodes of patronage when systems of community and public welfare disintegrated during the rise of capitalism.     

Opposition and Dissent in Soviet Type Regimes: Civil Society and its Limitations

Abstract

Following the collapse of Communist regimes in 1989, academics and dissidents alike were quick to claim that agents of ‘civil society’ had played an integral role in the 1989 ‘Velvet Revolutions’. However, the appropriation of civil society to explain events in Eastern Europe is highly problematic. In arguing that civil society offers an inappropriate framework in which to study opposition and dissent in Soviet type regimes, this article recommends dismissing the typology for this particular scenario. Instead, a new typology, the totalitarian public sphere, is introduced. This article concludes by elaborating on why the totalitarian public sphere serves as a more comprehensive typology by which to explain dissent and opposition in Soviet type regimes.     

Rethinking the New ENP: A Vision for an Enhanced European Role in the Arab Revolutions

This article assesses European responses to the Arab uprisings and, in particular, the introduced change in the European Union policy toward its southern neighborhood. The presented analyses provide a profound scrutiny and assessment of the new version of the European Neighbourhood Policy, empirical evidence of persisting security considerations post-2011 in Euro–Arab relations, and a more elaborated vision of future Euro–Arab relations, attempting to balance between three considerations: security, democracy, and governance.     

Sport,civil society and social integration: The case of Norwegian voluntary sport organizations

Abstract

Voluntary sport organizations make up the largest part of voluntary sector in many countries. Yet, in light of the renewed social and political interest in civil society, we do not know very much about how sport organizations operate and function. Accordingly, this article addresses the question of how voluntary sport organizations contribute to social integration through differences in community structures. First a theoretical framework making it possible to distinguish between various forms of community structures—strong, weak, mediated and pragmatic communities—is developed. Then, the first empirical part describes how members in sport organizations belong to such various forms of communities. Next, the article explains differences in social integration through social background, variation in participation in sports and various recruitment channels. Finally, the article explores how differences in community structures matters for the experience of sport activity, for organizational democracy and social capital (trust and political interests).     

Social capital,voluntary associations and collective action: Which aspects of social capital have the greatest ‘civic’ payoff?

Abstract

Despite a great variety of theoretical approaches, empirical analyses of social capital are surprisingly similar. Virtually all of them treat membership in voluntary associations as the chief indicator of community involvement while neglecting another form of community involvement: participation in elite-challenging actions. Likewise, authors readily attribute manifold civic benefits to associational life, while hesitating to attribute such benefits to elite-challenging activity. We question these views on two grounds. Firstly, we argue that elite-challenging action reflects social capital, even though this is a specific form of it: an emancipative form typical of self-assertive publics. Secondly, we use data from the Value Surveys to demonstrate that elite-challenging action is linked with greater civic benefits, at both the individual and societal level, than is membership in voluntary associations. This finding confirms the concept of human development, which suggests that emancipative forms of social capital are more civic in their consequences than others. Following this concept, we show that mass self-expression values nurture emancipative social capital, in motivating elite-challenging action. Finally, we locate self-expression values and elite-challenging actions in a theory of emancipative social capital.     

Using the Law as a ‘Harmonious Weapon’: The Ambiguities of Legal Activism in Favour of Migrant Workers in China

Abstract

Legal mobilization has spread in China over the past 20 years and is generally considered by both activists and scholars as a way to advance democracy and rule of law. Focusing on the mobilization in favour of migrant workers and on politically moderate practices, which are both more frequent and widely held as more successful, I argue to the contrary that resistance and reproduction of political domination are mutually constitutive. Public interest litigation and administrative litigation appear as new forms of political participation that constitute an internal regulation to the authoritarian regime, thus contributing to explain the regime's capacity to adapt and its durability. This article also accounts for new strategies developed by some lawyers that shun the courts and use law to ‘empower civil society’ and that thus do not contribute to structural reproduction. Though activists are struggling to turn their strategies into more institutionalized practices, they remain an ad hoc mechanism of internal control.