With friends like these: foreign policy as personal relationship

Governments are run by humans who have sympathies and moods. The study of leaders' personalities, albeit not widespread, is an important tool for foreign policy analysis. Plus, friendship is a feeling that decision-makers like to express for each other. This paper analyses the activity of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's three times premier, who has made ‘friendship’ a central tenet of his personal foreign policy. Three cases are considered, namely, Berlusconi's relationship with George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin. The paper concludes that his friendship-based foreign policy has somehow worked; but, because he decided to ignore Italy's structural constraints in the international arena, he ended up wasting opportunities and resources.     

Globalisation, Peasant Agriculture and Reconversion

Abstract — The agrarian issue in Chile is largely defined by the problematic impact, particularly on the peasantry, of the country's continuing integration into the world market. This paper focuses on the shift from a market-led to a state-mediated process of 'reconversion' of agriculture's pattern of production and land use. Although the 'Concertación' governments have designed specific and novel policies aimed at enhancing the productive and transformative capacity of peasant farmers these have not yet been able to reduce the widening technological and economic disparity between capitalist and peasant farming. Thus the future of the peasant economy is far from being assured in an increasingly globalised and competitive environment.     

小微企业和谐劳动关系构建的财政扶持政策研究

小微企业存在着大量的体面劳动赤字,要构建和谐劳动关系面临着许多现实困境。除了促进劳动法在小微企业的有效实施外,还应该通过财政扶持政策促进小微企业和谐劳动关系的构建。这些具体的财政扶持政策包括就业岗位、工会会费、劳动安全卫生、企业培训、社会保险费的财政补贴政策以及劳动关系规范化管理的财政激励政策。     

Roads of change: political transition and state formation in Nepal’s agrarian districts

This paper explores the political field that has opened up in the wake of the recent civil war in Nepal. We focus on cultural-political developments in agrarian districts, where some of the most intriguing openings, and indeed the most pernicious closures, can be witnessed (as opposed to the national-state restructuring that commands more media and popular attention). Our research asks what spaces open up in the emerging political field at the district scale to entrench or transform dominant cultural codes and sedimented histories of socio-economic inequality. Preliminary research identifies specific sectors of local governance that have emerged as significant sites of struggle over the shape and meaning of ‘democracy’, namely forest management and infrastructure development. The primary contribution of the paper lies in specifying an analytical approach to the study of ‘post-conflict’ governance at the local scale via three conceptual terrains of inquiry – governance and planning, political subjectivity, and cultural politics. The ultimate objective is to develop a framework for assessing the conditions of possibility for a democratic restructuring of economy and society to accompany the official political institutions of liberal democracy.     

International democracy promotion and democratization in the Middle East and North Africa

This article offers an overview of the literature on international democracy promotion in relation to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It draws on the criteria of process tracing to evaluate the mechanisms, processes and episodes of democratization associated with international democracy promotion in the region. It finds that the literature lacks a clear account of how international democracy promotion relates to conditions for democratization and could pay greater attention to the role of media in either supporting or counteracting democracy promotion activities which impact democratization processes in the region.     

“It Was Like I Lost Everything”: The Harmful Impacts of Homeless-Targeted Policies

In response to housing crises across the country, many localities are implementing homeless-targeted policies that attempt to regulate public space by prohibiting sitting, lying, sleeping, and storing property in public places such as parks and sidewalks. We term these sociospatial control policies. Our research investigates the direct impacts of such policies in the city of Honolulu, which had become notorious for legal measures targeting homeless residents. We interviewed members of 70 households living in temporary shelters in public spaces, all of whom had experienced enforcement of city ordinances, such as receiving citations or being forcibly moved by city agents. Our data revealed three interconnected ways that enforcements of sit–lie and nuisance policies harmed homeless households. (a) Our respondents described feeling dehumanized and treated unfairly by city agents. We therefore argue that enforcement catalyzed both civic and social exclusion. (b) Second, the city’s confiscation of property spurred material hardship and posed obstacles to work, education, and access to services. And, finally, (c) respondents’ narratives revealed that enforcements provoked lasting worry, fear, anxiety, and despair.     

Fiscal Policy Learning from Crisis: Comparative Analysis of the Baltic Countries

The experience of a major crisis is often expected to lead to policy learning but the empirical evidence about this is limited. The goal of the paper is to explore comparatively whether the crisis of 2008–2010 has led to fiscal policy learning by civil servants in the three Baltic countries. Despite some differences in the crisis experience, the finance ministry officials in all three countries have identified the same lesson from the crisis: fiscal policy should be counter-cyclical and help to stabilize the economy. The paper also discusses how various factors have influenced policy learning, including the acknowledgment of failure, blame shifting, and analytical tractability.     

Regional lobbying and Structural funds: Do regional representation offices in Brussels deliver?

In recent years regional representation offices have proliferated in Brussels. Among the many aims of these offices are influencing the allocation and securing the transfer of European Structural and Cohesion funds. However, our knowledge about whether they have succeeded in this goal is limited. In this paper, we assess whether regional offices in Brussels have managed to affect the commitment and payment of Structural and Cohesion funds beyond the officially stated economic criteria of eligibility. The paper uses a custom-made survey of Brussels offices, complemented by economic, institutional, and political data. The results of the analyses for 123 regions over the period 2009–13 highlight that the capacity – proxied by the budget and staff of the office – of the regional offices to influence the commitment and payment of Structural and Cohesion funds has been negligible, when not outright negative. Regional lobbying in Brussels does not lead to more funds or to an easier disbursement of regional development funds.     

The Impact of Advertising and Media on the Arab Culture: The Case of the Arab Spring,Public Spheres,and Social Media

The Arab world has experienced some unprecedented social movements, labeled by the media as the Arab Spring. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of public policy, advertising, media, and public spheres on the Arab Spring. The media and economic policies enacted in the Arab world in the 1990s played a significant role in changing consumer culture in the Arab region, resulting in significant changes in public policy. Two studies were conducted to test how the change in consumer culture along with new public polices in the region contributed to the uprisings.     

Meeting development goals: evidence from the Civil Society Education Fund

In recent years, the Civil Society Education Fund has supported national education civil society coalitions (NECs) in low-income countries so that they put pressure on governments and donors to implement the Education for All agenda and the Millennium Development Goal on education. This article draws on literature on global governance as well as on an extensive evaluation of the CSEF to explore the actual contribution of this initiative to the activity of NECs. The article highlights the achievements and shortcomings of the CSEF and includes a set of practical recommendations on the role of global civil society in international development processes.