Intervention Theatre: performance,authenticity and expert knowledge in politicians’ travel to post-/conflict spaces

ABSTRACT

This article explores the role of official travel activities by politicians to post-/conflict spaces in German foreign policymaking. Starting from the observation that official travel justifications stress the value of authentic insights and unfiltered information, while journeys in practice are meticulously planned and staged, it asks what kind of knowing is possible, how actors make sense of the staged nature of field trips, and how multiple performances create and/or undermine notions of authenticity and first-hand expertise. The article shows that official on-site visits are composed of multiple conscious performances by all actors involved, but that these performances do not undermine the notions of authenticity and expertise. On the contrary, knowledge authenticity—or truth claims on the basis of authentic insights—and related expert authority are produced through travel-as-performance. The emphasis policymakers put on on-site presence and (the performance of) localized knowledge contradicts intervention literature’s generalized finding of a prioritization of technocratic over localized knowledge. The article draws on politics and performance scholarship and authenticity theories in tourism studies to make sense of a wealth of empirical material on the claims, practice and functions of German MPs’ journeys to post-/conflict spaces as part of broader political struggles over policy knowledge.     

走下“过山车”——关于对“80后”认知问题的一些思考

长期以来,人们对“80后”的认知中,存在着“过山车”般大起大落的现象。这与成人社会的认知障碍有着直接关系。成人社会的认知障碍,主要与“80后”的独生子女身份、改革开放以来种种新生事物的层出不穷、成人社会期待回报的心理等等有着直接的关系。要准确认知和把握“80后”的特征和特质,成人社会必须加强对“80后”和新生事物的学习。     

利用aroA基因建立鸡传染性鼻炎PCR诊断方法

利用aroA基因设计了1对引物,分别对10株标准副鸡嗜血杆菌(HPG)菌株、14株分离的HPG菌株进行PCR扩增,结果均得到了与预期大小一致的片段,而对10株非HPG菌株和3株病毒进行扩增则无相应片段产生;该PCR能检测出10个菌细胞.与常规PCR方法相比,aroA-PCR的敏感性更高.     

Public Service Motivation,Organizational Social Capital,and Knowledge Sharing in the Korean Public Sector

This article investigates whether public service motivation (PSM) and organizational social capital predict knowledge sharing in the public sector. The hypothesized relationships in the proposed model are verified with the online survey data of 506 public employees in Korea. The test results show that the two dimensions of PSM (attraction to public service and commitment to public values) and the trust component of organizational social capital are both positively related to knowledge sharing in the Korean public sector, and that the associability component of organizational social capital is indirectly associated with knowledge sharing through its influence on PSM. The article discusses the ways that PSM and organizational social capital may contribute to overcome the social dilemma of knowledge sharing in public organizations. It also suggests that there is need for further research on the individual dimensions of the PSM construct.     

Civil society knowledge networks: how international development institutions reshape the geography of knowledge

What role have the processes and institutions of international development played in creating and propagating ideas around the world? This paper demonstrates that networks of development-focused civil society institutions can form global epistemic bridges even where communication technology, global markets, infrastructure, or state services do not reach. Given the penetration of these ‘civil society knowledge networks’ throughout the world, it is crucial to understand how these networks form, and how they create and spread ideas, mediating between global discourses and local needs. This paper builds on a multi-sited case study of one such civil society knowledge network, which includes an international foundation, its partner non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Kenya, and one village where these NGOs run a forest conservation project. The case study provides a closely textured analysis of the mechanisms of knowledge production and consumption in the network, including personality politics, language, technology, political connections and the power dynamics of knowledge flows. It demonstrates the ways remoteness and disconnection are overcome through the epistemic reach of institutional networks involved in development interventions.     

Managing governance complexity and knowledge networks in transparency initiatives: the case of police open data

Public organisations are often described as being subject to types of complexity that result from the interorganisational structure of governance networks. Transparency programmes add another level of complexity due to increased information openness. However, neither the nature of this complexity nor the network management approaches needed for transparency programmes has been conceptually developed. To address this gap, this article brings together governance complexity theory and knowledge management theory. An empirical model is tested using the case of police open data with regression analysis and 22 expert interviews. The results show that institutional and environmental complexity such as budget pressures, legal-normative constraints, and task complexity exert a negative influence on police information openness. However, network knowledge management practices including developing mission focus on people and communication and overcoming organisational boundaries through interorganisational collaboration can counteract these problems of complexity.     

Prevention,knowledge, justice: Robert Nozick and counterterrorism

ABSTRACT

This article explores questions of justice and moral permissibility of state action in counterterrorism through Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Using the case of the Berlin attack in December of 2016 and the ensuing political debate over whether potential terrorists could be put into preventive custody as an illustrative example, it engages Nozick’s argument on prevention, knowledge and justice. In Nozick’s fierce defence of individual rights, the state comes into being as an aggregate of individuals and their inviolable rights, and thus possesses no moral legitimacy of its own. Individual rights must therefore not be violated for the sake of common goods. In conjunction with his emphasis on free will and the ensuing unpredictability of human decision-making, the article highlights the Nozickian position as a powerful account against the justification of preventive custody, thereby providing a moral “fail-safe” in counterterrorism discourses that build on just war theory and utilitarianism.     

The demise of the intervention paradigm—resilience thinking in the Merida Initiative

Post-Cold War interventions have gone through a series of distinct paradigms—each allowing for its own oppositional discourse. This possibility seems to be diminishing with the rise of resilience thinking. In the early 1990s, liberal internationalist framings drove intervention by prioritising individual human rights over state rights to non-interference. Here, it was possible to oppose intervention as illegal boundary violation and unaccountable foreign rule. Neo-liberal approaches circumvented the legal problematic by conflating sovereignty with the capacity for good governance. However, they depended on a strong sociocultural dichotomy, giving rise to accusations of neo-colonialism. In contrast, the resilience discourse emphasises the positive, transformative aspects of local agency, rather than seeing it as deficient and needing paternal guidance. This paper argues that by claiming to merely plus up already existing social practices, international policy engagement in the Global South becomes difficult to conceive as boundary transgression or hierarchical imposition. These insights are drawn out with reference to the Merida Initiative, a US-Mexican security agreement signed in 2007.     

Rents,knowledge and neo-structuralism: transforming the productive matrix in Ecuador

This paper explores the relationship between ground rent, production and knowledge in Ecuador’s neo-structuralist, state-led project to transform the productive matrix. Based upon insights from the Marxian approach to the critique of political economy, we interrogate how neo-structuralism has conceptualised the relationship between ‘natural resource income’ and ‘knowledge-based’ economic development. The paper argues that a rent-theoretical perspective, which takes seriously the regional unfolding of uneven geographical development in Latin America, can highlight the limits of a national development plan conceived according to the logic of Schumpeterian efficiency. In doing so, the paper identifies the contradictory relationship between natural resource exports, state-led ‘knowledge’-based development and capital accumulation. On this basis the paper offers a historically and empirically informed critical analysis of selective import substitution industrialisation and vanguard science and technology strategies designed to transition Ecuador away from primary resource dependence.     

Addressing Information Needs in Employment Services Provision in Italy: The Role of Codesign Networks

This article examines how coproduction can contribute to information quality in support of labor-market decision-making. Data was gathered on different types of Labor Market Intelligence (LMI) as decision-support systems for stakeholders, and subsequently by analyzing a specific program, with a focus on the role of information within its coproduction process. Results confirm the importance of information systems to support employment services design, but highlight the limitations of existing channels, and outline the types of information needed for policy effectiveness: those that are gathered through continuous relations with employers and jobseekers, and that often derive from participation in policy networks.