From Socio-nature to Spectral Presence: Re-imagining the Once and Future Landscape of Johannesburg

What distinguishes the global novel from other kinds of boundary-crossing narrative? And why are there so few examples of this genre from South Africa, a country of such salient worldwide interest? This essay reads Mark Behr’s 2009 novel Kings of the Water as a conflicted attempt to globalize South African literature, specifically the farm novel or plaasroman. In contrasting the complexity of the work’s South African setting with its under-developed representation of San Francisco, it traces Behr’s problematic relation to conventional thinking on global émigré fiction. The essay concludes that Kings of the Water is a timely case study in the ethical challenges of locational fixation, one that through its narrative configuration questions the dominance of the transnational paradigm.     

新兴国家参与全球治理的成就与挑战——兼论中国的对策

进入21世纪以来,新兴国家的崛起对西方国家主导的全球治理体系产生重要影响。通过对全球治理的积极参与,新兴国家为国际社会提供了新的合作机制雏形和多样化的经济发展模式,提升了自身在国际事务中的话语权。但新兴国家在参与全球治理方面仍面临一系列现实挑战：国际格局尚未改变,受制于现有大国;新兴国家间差异大,磋商机制效力不足;各国经济存在短板,制约着其治理作用的发挥。作为新兴国家群体的一员,中国在参与全球治理进程中,应坚持发展中国家定位,以全球经济治理为主攻方向,注重新兴国家内部合作,并与西方传统大国积极协调,构建合理、公正、有效的全球治理体系。     

Collective Action and Citizen Responses to Global Warming

This paper expands the relevance of the collective interest model of mass political action to explain collective-action behavior in the context of global warming and climate change. The analysis is an attempt to answer Ostrom’s call for a behavioral model of collective action that can be generalized beyond political protest to other collective-action problems. We elaborate, specify, and empirically test a collective interest model approach to citizen policy support, environmental political participation, and environmental behavior related to the issue of global warming. Key elements of the collective interest model—perceived risk, personal efficacy, and environmental values—are found to be directly, and positively, related to support of government policies and personal behaviors that affect global warming. We also discuss the links between the collective interest model and other important approaches to political behavior.

How Serious is the Global Warming Threat?

Despite the media’s and politicians’ insistence that the science of global warming is “settled”, there are good reasons to distrust climate model projections of future global warming. While the supposed scientific consensus is that mankind is very likely to blame for recent global warmth, this is mostly a statement of faith made from a position of relative ignorance about natural variability in the climate system. Since we do not understand what causes decadal- to century-scale natural climate variability, it has simply been assumed to either not exist, or to be relatively small. But even if predictions of catastrophic warming are accurate, the worldwide demand for energy is so large that there is little mankind can do without radically new energy technologies. Since it is only the wealthy countries of the world that can afford the R&D efforts to develop those technologies, punishing the use of fossil fuels, and the resulting negative impact on economies, might well delay the development of cost effective carbon-free energy sources that so many people are now calling for.

企业国际化的全球商务系统浅探

全球商务系统(GBS)要求企业在全球环境下确定公司的全球战略,结合公司组织结构,设计自身的管理与商务过程,最终建立适宜的技术平台。这一过程的关键是在成本收益核算的基础上析出核心商务处理及核心处理系统,最后选择适合的商务系统建设。     

Corporate power,US drug enforcement and the repression of indigenous peoples in Latin America

Abstract

The question that motivates this article is: what are the mechanisms through which the prosecution of the drug war in Latin America lead to human rights repression? In answering this question, I theorise that drug enforcement is a coalition of actors that facilitates domestic and international consensus around prohibition as a mechanism for corporate expansion. Drug war infrastructure financing is likely to facilitate the expansion of corporate investments by resource-seeking industries that require greater land use, which encroaches on the ancestral territories of indigenous peoples. And, in response to indigenous resistance to corporate appropriation of ancestral lands, resource-seeking transnational corporations will collude with private security firms and paramilitary organisations to repress and eliminate indigenous resistance. In the process of accumulating capital in Latin America, transnational corporations, domestic security, and paramilitary organizations are the drug enforcement coalition’s mediators of terror.     

全球恐怖组织合作特征分析——基于社会网络分析的视角

运用社会网络分析方法,从整体结构、"小团体"、核心节点以及时间演化四个方面分析全球恐怖组织合作网络的结构特征,可以发现:合作已然成为恐怖组织间的发展趋势;合作网络具有无标度网络特征;网络内部派系分化明显;随着时间推移,网络规模不断扩大,整体联系降低,但节点的聚集程度上升。在制定打击恐怖主义措施时,应注意发动信息战,破坏恐怖组织间的合作;打击合作网络的集散节点,抑制网络的快速发展;分化瓦解合作网络,形成小规模的"派系网络";依据打击合作网络的性能要求,选取合作网络的特征节点作为打击目标。     

全球化语境中青年人爱国价值观的马克思主义审视

经济全球化浪潮在同质化整个世界的进程中,冲击着关于民族国家的价值观念,尤其是冲击着爱国主义信念,人们很容易在这一冲击中失去价值观判断力.马克思考察社会问题时持有理性和价值辩证统一的方法论,以此方法论来考察清楚当代全球化语境中民众应该正确持有的爱国主义价值观,具有理论和实践意义.同时,当代我国部分青年的爱国主义容易走向两个极端：一是青年人的非理性特质,使其容易走向一种独断的爱国主义;二是全球化的同质化倾向在青年人身上的表现更为明显,正消磨着青年人对国家的爱国主义热情.当代青年人的这两种极端倾向都是错误的,都需要详加考察,认真对待.     

Global IR through dialogue

This article aims to address how to ensure a two-way ‘dialogue’ across ‘the West/non-West distinction’ in international studies. To this end, I first discuss three different approaches to dialogue, the Socratic, the Habermasian, and the Weberian, and clarify what kind of thing dialogue should be if it is to overcome the ‘West-non-West divide’ and transform the current ‘Western-centric’ IR into a global discipline. I argue that dialogue should be understood as reciprocal feedback from different perspectives for mutual learning. In order to achieve this goal (i.e. mutual learning), I call for an ‘instrumentalist’ approach to dialogue. To elucidate this point, I offer an empirical illustration. The focus here is on dialogue as mutual learning between Western-centric IR theory, more specifically constructivism, and the indigenous experience and knowledge of East Asia.     

Purposefully Triggering Unintended Consequences: the European Commission and the Uncertain Future of the EU-ACP Partnership

ABSTRACT

The EU’s proposal to renew the EU-ACP Agreement in spite of a number of signals pointing in the opposite direction is, inter alia, the unintended consequence of independent decisions taken in three different policy areas (trade, environment, and foreign and security affairs). The common unintended consequence that the three decisions shared would not have materialised if the European Commission had not purposefully triggered it to justify its vision of future EU-ACP relations. These findings challenge the prevailing and superficial usage of the notion of the unintended as a synonym for unanticipated and undesirable, and demonstrate that unintended consequences do not necessarily presuppose lack of anticipation, but may well be the result of calculation by policymakers.