Foreign aid,debt relief and Africa's development: problems and prospects

In recent years, the Paris club granted a number of African countries, including Nigeria, debt relief. This elicited widespread celebration in the capital cities of affected countries, where it was portrayed as a veritable launch-pad to Africa's development. This paper takes a critical look at the debt relief, with emphasis on its problems and prospects for Africa's development. It is argued that while debt relief does offer some prospects for development, there is little or no evidence to suggest that such an outcome is automatic. The conditions that precipitated the debt crisis in the first instance, including an inequitable international economic order and political conditions tied to aid, are still very present in the debt relief regime. Corruption of the foreign aid regime by both internal and external actors has been compounded by the recent global economic crisis, posing further constraints on the effectiveness of foreign aid in Africa. If debt relief must yield the desired result, it has to be accompanied by a sustainable campaign to fundamentally reform the world order to make it more equitable, together with a drive for good governance that is not only democratic, but also efficient and development-oriented in Africa.     

The foreign policy of the Zuma government: pursuing the ‘national interest’?

It was after much anticipation that members of the new Jacob Zuma foreign policy executive announced that, for the duration of their term, South Africa's foreign policy would be based on the doctrine of advancing ‘the national interest’, conceptualised simply as the ‘most vital needs’ of the country. However, almost two years since taking control of the levers of policy and political power, the South African government has yet to spell out in detail what constituted the national interest or how such interest would be pursued. In spite of this lacuna, senior members of the new foreign policy inner-elite continue to proclaim the national interest, and proceed to spell out grander foreign policy goals that they would pursue under the banner of a ‘new’ developmental agenda. These include consolidating the African agenda; deepening South–South cooperation; expanding South–North relations; strengthening foreign political and economic ties generally; and participating in a global system of governance. To date, this proclamation that the national interest will be the beam that will guide foreign policy has remained little more than a statement of intent and much conjecture. The challenge is to move beyond rhetoric and intentions and to define the national interest and to articulate a coherent foreign policy going forward. This will require concrete proposals on the basis of thorough-going domestic–foreign policy linkages.     

East African Economic Development Over the Next Twenty Years: Some Forecasts About Qualitative Changes

Combining social movement approaches to resource mobilization and collective identity, this article investigates the role of external material resources in shaping the direction of collective action against HIV/AIDS within the Kamwokya Christian Caring Community (KCCC), a Catholic community-based initiative in Kampala. From its origins in the late 1980s as a community of Christians providing “holistic care” to people living with HIV/AIDS, the KCCC has in the wake of increasing external funding been transformed into a professional development non-governmental organization (NGO). In the process, the ideals of holistic care have gradually been overshadowed by neo-liberal development rationalities and bio-political concerns. The article therefore argues that successfully mobilizing donor funding can have unintended consequences for the nature of religious collective action against HIV/AIDS.     

The politics of ethnic cleansing: The P.P.R., The P.Z.Z. and Wielkopolska's nationalist revolution, 1944‐1946

The Pussy Riot affair was a massive international cause célèbre that ignited a widespread movement of support for the jailed activists around the world. The case tells us a lot about Russian society, the Russian state, and Western perceptions of Russia. It also raises gender as a frame of analysis, something that has been largely overlooked in 20 years of work by mainstream political scientists analyzing Russia's transition to democracy. It has important implications for how Western feminist categories can be applied to the Russian context. This introduction summarizes the main events associated with the trail of the three group members who were accused of staging a “punk prayer” performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in February 2012. It also introduces the findings of the six papers that make up this special section.     

Manipulating the Census: Ethnic Minorities in the Nationalizing States of Central Asia* 1

Even though self-critical dealing with the past has not been an official criterion for joining the EU, the founding of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research and the Holocaust conference in Stockholm at the beginning of 2000 seem to have generated informal standards of confronting and exhibiting the Holocaust in the context of “Europeanization of Memory.” Comparative analysis shows that post-Communist museums dealing with the World War II period perform in the context of those informal standards. Both the Jasenovac Memorial Museum in Croatia and the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banská Bystrica were founded in the Communist era and played an important role in supporting the founding myths of the two countries. Both were subjected to historical revisionism during the 1990s. In the current exhibitions from 2004/2006, both memorial museums stress being part of Europe and refer, to “international standards” of musealization, while the Jasenovac memorial claims to focus on “the individual victim.” But stressing the European dimension of resistance and the Holocaust obscures such key aspects as the civil war and the responsibility of the respective collaborating regime.     

Look who's talking! Islamic discourse in the Chechen wars

An expanding literature on money and identity is built around the assumption that political elites deliberately use currency design to foster national identities. However, the empirical evidence in favor of this assumption has been fragmentary. Drawing on detailed primary sources we demonstrate nationalist intentions of political elites involved in currency design. We also examine how political elites use banknotes as official pronouncements on who is and who is not part of the nation and what the official attitude toward foreigners is. By tracing changes in the inclusive and exclusive messages directed at an intra-state or international audience we document that there is no connection between ingroup (national) love and outgroup (foreigners, minorities, opposition) hate. The amount of exclusive messages to outgroups culminated in conditions of perceived threat when political leaders tried to mobilize pre-existing identities to secure or maintain political power. In contrast, the officials deliberately tried to broaden ingroup boundaries in order to build international communities. Finally, we document that in the case of limited support for the new conception of identity, officials tried to depict the old and the new identity as complementary, embedding the new identity in existing discourses.     

Stalin's Genocides

In this essay I explore the ways in which the internal Albanian politics of memory in Kosovo rely on a longer, lived history of militant self-organisation than the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) war period alone. On the basis of recent ethnographic research, I argue that the memory of prewar militant activism is symbolically codified, ritually formalized, and put on the public stage in Kosovo today. Not only has this process effectively rehabilitated and consolidated the personal, social, and political status of specific former activists, it also has produced a hegemonic morality against which the actions of those in power are judged internally. On the one hand, this process reproduces shared cultural references which idealise ethno-national solidarity, unity and pride and which have served militant mobilisation already before the 1990s. On the other, it provides the arguments through which rival representatives of the former militant underground groups (known as Ilegalja) compete both socially and politically still today. Although this process demarcates some lines of social and political friction within society, it also suggests that international efforts to introduce an identity which breaks with Kosovo's past and some of its associated values, face a local system of signification that is historically even deeper entrenched than is usually assumed.     

Impact of the 1996 Welfare Reform and Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Acts on Caribbean Immigrants

SUMMARY

This paper examines the impact of the 1996 Welfare Reform and Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Acts on Caribbean immigrants in the United States. Drawing from the conceptual framework posited by Dye's (1984) Elite Preference Modelof policy analysis, the author argues that the three laws have created enormous economic and psychological difficulties among families in the United States. Developing countries in the Caribbean region have been severely impacted by the law since they have had to accommodate returning citizens when they are deported under provisions of immigration policies. The question for consideration by this paper is how may the legal and human rights of deportees be balanced against the rights of the U.S. government to secure its borders and ensure the security of its citizens? The paper also addresses issues of immigration, and international relations particularly the north-south dialogue between powerful developed countries such as the United States and small developing states of the Caribbean.     

Seeing/being double: how African immigrants in Canada balance their ethno-racial and national identities

With increased transnational ties to their homelands, immigrants' ontology now verges on being double – and, consequently, on seeing double – most of the time. This double consciousness, and the attendant dearth of fixity in identity among immigrants, has led some to wonder where the allegiance of minority immigrants, in particular, lies. Can these immigrants be loyal to both their ethno-racial identity and their host national identity? Is the identification with one's ethno-racial background and national identity a zero-sum game in which one side of the loyalty equation gains only at the expense of the other? This study examines these issues, using African immigrants (specifically, Ghanaians and Somalis) in Canada as a case study. In particular, we use multinomial logistic regression to predict the factors that prompt these immigrants to identify as: ‘just Canadians’, ‘just Ghanaians/Somalis’, or as ‘Ghanaian-/Somali-Canadians’. The study is significant not only because of the lack of research on African immigrants' identity formation in Canada, but also because immigrants' identity has significant bearing on their settlement and integration in host societies.     

Critical infrastructure protection and Russia's hybrid regime

The Russian policy on critical infrastructure protection was outlined in the early 2000s and has been consolidated in recent years as a part of the national security strategy. This policy is evolving against a background composed of an uneasy combination of factors: the degeneration of infrastructures critical for the country's economic and social development, and the de-legitimization of political institutions responsible for protecting ‘population’ and ‘territory’. The recent major catastrophes in Russia, the notorious forest fires in 2010 in particular, have become examples of political events that offer a point of reference for the current regime's failure to uphold its promises of ‘order and stability’.