Introduction: New directions in agrarian political economy

For four decades, The Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) has served as a principal arena for the formation and dissemination of cutting-edge research and theory. It is globally renowned as a key site for documenting and analyzing variegated trajectories of agrarian change across space and time. Over the years, authors have taken new angles as they reinvigorated classic questions and debates about agrarian transition, resource access and rural livelihoods. This introductory essay highlights the four classic themes represented in Volume 1 of the JPS anniversary collection: land and resource dispossession, the financialization of food and agriculture, vulnerability and marginalization, and the blurring of the rural-urban relations through hybrid livelihoods. Contributors show both how new iterations of long-evident processes continue to catch peasants and smallholders in the crosshairs of crises and how many manage to face these challenges, developing new sources and sites of livelihood production.     

Living in an Age of Precarity in 21st Century Asia

ABSTRACT

The term “precarity” pays attention to the various ways in which policies and processes that promote economic growth can also, at the same time, induce a state of precarity or precarious living. In this introductory article, we interrogate one of the paradoxes of Asian development: greater precarity set against the backdrop of an economic “miracle.” The focus is on how policies and processes that are part of neo-liberal orthodoxy create new forms of marginalisation or precarity and new classes of the marginalised or the precariat. These include: transnational migrants without basic protection; factory workers employed on casual contracts; elderly with no old age state support; minorities dispossessed by land grabbing or resettled to make way for mega-projects; and farmers facing declining terms of trade, shrinking landholdings, and growing debts as they invest in new farm technologies. These disparate experiences provide a telling antidote to the growth-at-all-costs philosophy that favours economic expansion over matters of distribution, material prosperity over human flourishing, and corporate profitability over workers’ basic incomes.     

Extreme versus quotidian: addressing temporal dichotomies in Philippine disaster management

Brief narratives of two recent events in Luzon island—a flashflood in Angeles City and an eruption of Mayon volcano—underscore the disparity between natural hazards as amplifiers of everyday hardship for many Filipinos and the Philippine disaster management system's orientation towards extreme‐event response. Three major factors contribute to this dichotomy. First, population dynamics combined with the lack of access to resources compels poor Filipinos to live and work in hazardous areas, discounting risk from extreme natural events to focus on daily needs. Second, the institutional setting of the country's disaster management within the military establishment makes it difficult, though not impossible, to focus and address the underlying causes of vulnerability. Third, existing modes of funding disaster expenditures are all biased towards immediate response rather than long‐term risk‐reduction. The implications of these findings to disaster management and research in the Philippines are identified. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

脆弱性、不安全感与印度尼西亚的外交政策——从苏加诺到苏哈托

外交政策在很大程度上是国内政治的延续，作为后殖民国家的印度尼西亚，其国内社会的特性对外交政策的影响尤为显著。这种影响表现在其内部的脆弱性——多样而分裂的族群、宗教、领土等问题，被视为对国家潜在的威胁，因此而产生的不安全感影响了外交政策。其独立自主外交、不结盟政策、对大国的疑虑都是这种脆弱性的体现。在中国对印尼以及东南亚的外交政策中，要充分考虑后者的脆弱性及由此衍生的不安全感。     

被害性与被害预防

被害预防是犯罪预防的重要一环,被害预防应该从被害性分析着手。被害性即指人身上所存在的足以导致犯罪侵害的一切特性,它与犯罪心理紧密相关。从犯罪人犯罪前的心理状态分析,犯罪人选择作案对象有一定规律,这种规律决定了被害性。被害人就其有无过错可分为两类,不同的类型具有不同的被害性,被害预防应从一般预防和特殊预防进行。     

中国石油安全再思考——析油价回落时的石油安全问题

供求缺口不断扩大的趋势使中国越来越依赖海外石油,石油安全由此成为影响中国经济安全和国家安全的一个重要因素.国际油价的高位回落短期内有助于提升中国的经济安全,但长远来看可能会加大中国海外石油的供应风险.为了应对海外石油供应的脆弱性问题,即对外石油依存度高、石油供应中断风险大以及应付供应中断能力弱,中国需要采取"远交近攻"策略,进一步推动进口石油供应来源与运输渠道的多元化.     

Distanced suffering: photographed suffering and the construction of white in/vulnerability

There has been much debate about the ethics and effectiveness of the circulation of photographs of suffering. An analysis of commentaries and reviews of such photographs shows that the genre interpellates a particular spectator, for whom the “distance” of suffering is viewed from a comfortable centre. This mode of spectatorship is identifiable as “white” in its claim to unmarked privilege. The photographs threaten to destabilise this unmarked privilege in potentially productive ways, but the reproduction of colonial viewing relations means that whiteness remains centred. The paper concludes by attempting to destabilise the centre by bringing the discussion of the relation between suffering and sovereignty closer to “home”.     

Economic Integration and Vulnerability in the EU Neighbourhood

In 2004, the EU launched the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), a unified policy framework towards its neighbours in the external EU periphery, aiming at strengthening prosperity, stability and security around its geopolitical borders. However, in-depth empirical analysis provides clear-cut evidence that, while the size and composition of trade flows between the EU and the ENCs may be growing, they are not favourable for the ENCs from the perspective of export diversification, in terms of either products or number of destinations. This condition increases their exposure to volatility in international markets. These results provide valuable insight into economic integration theory and for policymaking.     

Sex and Capacity: The Management of Monsters?

The first consideration by a civil court of the test of capacity to engage in sexual relations – X City Council v MB, NB and MAB – is as recent as 2005. This article places this and subsequent cases in the historical context of the way in which the law has constructed the sexuality of persons with intellectual impairment. The article argues that, beginning with a series of rape cases in the mid to late nineteenth century, which recognised the concept of consent given through the expression of animal instincts, the law has accepted and deployed a model of intellectual impairment which understands expressions of sexuality in terms of an increasingly unstable opposition between vulnerability and danger, understood as the presence or absence of instinct, and as indicating an underlying ‘monstrosity’. The article argues that the historical continuity apparent in the modern case law is unfortunate and should be rectified.     

How electoral vulnerability affects pension politics: Introducing a concept,measure and empirical application

Are electorally vulnerable politicians really less likely to support controversial legislation, such as pension reforms? While the literature on welfare state retrenchment has increasingly pointed to the role of electoral factors in the dynamics of social policy cutbacks, there are few studies that actually measure the magnitude of electoral pressure and its consequent impact on the politics of reform. To this end, the authors have developed a quantitative measure of the electoral vulnerability of politicians and tested its impact on pension reform outcomes using an original dataset comprising 16 Western European countries from 1980 to 2003. In line with expectations, the results show that the impact of electoral vulnerability on reform depends upon the system of interest intermediation. In corporatist systems, electoral vulnerability indeed impedes reform. But in pluralist systems, increased electoral vulnerability is associated with higher levels of reform. This is because unions in corporatist (but not in pluralist) systems can exploit electoral vulnerability in pre‐legislative bargaining, and thus pressure politicians. Consequently, this study has broader implications for the differential responsiveness of democracies to redistributive issues more generally.