Offensive for defensive: the belt and road initiative and China's new grand strategy

China's Belt and Road initiative came from the combined pressure of slowing down of Chinese economy, US pivot to Asia and deterioration of the relations with neighboring countries after weathering the storm of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. It also symbolizes a more proactive approach of Chinese new leader Xi Jinping in meeting the expectation on China's international obligation and leadership. Aimed to link Asia, Europe, Africa and Oceania, the initiative provides tremendous opportunities of international economic cooperation. The paper argues that as China's contribution to international public goods, it is in the line of economic liberalism; as China's grand strategy, it is more of defensive than offensive by nature. Despite risks and uncertainties exist, the enforcement will boost China's influence and position in regional and international institutions. US should consider making more strategic space to the rising China, and a better coordinated China–US relations will make Asia Pacific a safer and more promising region.     

Journeys to the limits of first-hand knowledge: politicians’ on-site visits in zones of conflict and intervention

ABSTRACT

This article explores the practice and political significance of politicians’ journeys to conflict zones. It focuses on the German example, looking at field trips to theatres of international intervention as a way of first-hand knowledge in policymaking. Paying tribute to Lisa Smirl and her work on humanitarian spaces, objects and imaginaries and on liminality in aid worker biographies, two connected arguments are developed. First, through the exploration of the routinized practices of politicians’ field trips the article shows how these journeys not only remain confined to the ‘auxiliary space’ of aid/intervention, but that it is furthermore a staged reality of this auxiliary space that most politicians experience on their journeys. The question is then asked, second, what politicians actually experience on their journeys and how their experiences relate to their policy knowledge about conflict and intervention. It is shown that political field trips enable sensory/affectual, liminoid and liminal experiences, which have functions such as authority accumulation, agenda setting, community building, and civilizing domestic politics, while at the same time reinforcing, in most cases, pre-existing conflict and intervention imaginaries.     

Violence and Statebuilding in a Borders Conflict Context: A Study of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

Violence, while conceived of and defined as objective, is in reality a subjective phenomenon that takes on myriad forms (political, physical, and psychological). From a constructivist perspective, the identification of violence is contingent on conflicts to signify actions as legitimate; in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the experience of different forms of violence has meant that violence has come to acquire multiple meanings. This violence is legitimate from both Israeli and Palestinian points of view, and it creates and fulfils a cycle that perpetuates intractable conflict. This article aims to demonstrate how strongly this culture of violence has affected the state-formation process in this area, and it calls attention particularly to ongoing statebuilding processes in Palestine. The paper will also explore the intricacies related to violence and border definition in terms of ‘mapping practices’ and territoriality, and examine how, in the wake of the Oslo agreement, the Palestinian statebuilding process is created under the ruling power of the Israeli military force, restraining Palestinian capacity to create state bodies capable of establishing and retaining the monopoly of violence.     

‘A second wife is not really a wife’: polygyny,gender relations and economic realities in Tajikistan

While polygyny in Tajikistan existed before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and has been a phenomenon of growing importance since Independence, it is still forbidden by law. To understand this renewal, I do not look at polygyny as a sign of religiousness, but as a form of patriarchal bargain in which women (who often experienced former matrimonial disjuncture) may have a greater power of decision in the spousal relations. I will explore women's points of view, from which polygyny is a strategy to accessing the symbolic and material resources they lack. I then explore the conditions to which becoming a second wife is possible: women's own resources, be they material, symbolic, familial, appear as of crucial importance in this accession to the status of being married anew.     

Fuel to the Fire: Natural Disasters and the Duration of Civil Conflict

Do natural disasters prolong civil conflict? Or are disasters more likely to encourage peace as hostilities diminish when confronting shared hardship or as shifts in the balance of power between insurgents and the state hasten cessation? To address these questions, this study performs an event history analysis of disasters’ impact on the duration of 224 armed intrastate conflicts occurring in 86 states between 1946 and 2005. I contend that natural disasters increase conflict duration by decreasing the state’s capacity to suppress insurgency, while reinforcing insurgent groups’ ability to evade capture and avoid defeat. First, disasters’ economic impact coupled with state financial outlays for disaster relief and reconstruction, reduce resources available for counterinsurgency and nation building in conflict zones. Second, the military’s role in administering humanitarian assistance can reduce the availability of troops and military hardware for counterinsurgency, prompt temporary ceasefires with insurgents, or both. Third, natural disasters can cause infrastructural damages that disproportionately hinder the state’s capacity to execute counterinsurgency missions, thereby making insurgent forces more difficult to capture and overcome. The combination of these dynamics should encourage longer conflicts in states with higher incidence of disaster. Empirical evidence strongly supports this contention, indicating that states with greater disaster vulnerability fight longer wars.     

Oil,Natural Gas,and Intrastate Conflict: Does Ownership Matter?

The impact of natural resources on intrastate violence has been increasingly analyzed in the peace and conflict literature. Surprisingly, little quantitative evidence has been gathered on the effects of the resource-ownership structure on internal violence. This article uses a novel data set on oil and natural gas property rights, covering 40 countries during the period 1989–2010. The results of regression analyses employing logit models reveal that the curvilinear effect between hydrocarbon production and civil conflict onset—often found in previous studies—only applies to countries in which oil and gas is extracted by state-owned companies. The findings suggest that only state-controlled hydrocarbon production might entail peace-buying mechanisms such as specific clientelistic practices, patronage networks, welfare policies, and/or coercion. At the same time, it seems that greed and grievance are more pronounced whenever resources lie in the hands of the state. Exploring the within-country variation, further analyses reveal that divergent welfare spending patterns are likely to be one causal channel driving the relationship between resource ownership and internal violence.     

Technology and Politics: Have the ICTs Turned into a Domain for Civil–Military Relations in Turkey?

The implications of technology have been widely acknowledged in international relations. Studies ranging from the causes of war and military effectiveness to terrorism and nuclear proliferation have explored how technology shapes international politics. However, the implications of technology in domestic politics have not been scrutinised much. This paper helps fill this vacuum through an analysis of Turkey’s civil–military relations. Although civilian control over the Turkish military has improved in the past decade, this process has not been smooth. With a focus on the recent court cases involving the military, the 2007 e-memorandum and the transfer of electronic military intelligence apparatus to the civilian authority, this paper demonstrates how technology has become an important domain for civil–military relations in Turkey.     

Encounters with Europe in an Era of Domestic and International Turmoil: Is Turkey a De-Europeanising Candidate Country?

Abstract

This article provides a novel conceptual framework to understand the impact of the European Union on Turkish politics and policies in the aftermath of the opening of accession negotiations in 2005. It argues that the post-2005 developments in Turkey not only attest to lesser and more limited Europeanisation, but also entail a process that is increasingly gaining momentum in the country and which is referred to as ‘de-Europeanisation’.     

From sacrum to profanum: reinterpretation of communist places of power in Baltic cities

Places always represent the social and cultural dimensions of societies, seen through relationships between ideas, beliefs, and hopes. Places and their social practices are interwoven into the urban fabric and have become vital components of urban and ideological identities. Ideological systems create unique arrangements and classifications of those special places, which can be called “hallowed” or “profaned.” This project focuses on the recent transformation of the communist system of “sacral” spaces and their recent “profanation.” The transformation of meaning, together with the use and attitude toward landscape, has become visible due to spatial and functional manifestations of post-socialist cities.     

South Africa and Japan: maintaining a difficult friendship

Japan's economic and political relationship with South Africa has been characterised historically by ambiguity. Throughout the twentieth century, economic ties were underpinned by mercantilist and strategic considerations. During apartheid, this placed Japan in an uneasy position as it sought to balance a relationship of expediency with wider foreign policy objectives in the rest of Africa and beyond. The demise of apartheid created the space for new forms of engagement centred on the pursuit of cognate goals. This has seen the intensification and deepening of economic ties in particular. Yet relations, especially at the political and diplomatic levels, have also been more complex than anticipated, and in recent years, the rise in Africa of other players from Asia and the Global South has had a bearing on South Africa–Japan ties. In this paper, it is argued that two related dynamics pivoting on policy elites’ changing conceptions (or self-view) of the nature of the state they are running and its place in the wider world order help explain the post-apartheid evolution of the South Africa–Japan relationship. First, there has been an apparent shift in South African foreign policy elites’ self-view, mediated by a changing systemic context. The development and manifestation over time of a stronger Global South self-conception in South African foreign policy, fashioned in juxtaposition to what have been considered in the past key Global North relationships, had direct consequences for South Africa–Japan ties. Second, meso- and micro-level dynamics – the role of the general operations in the diplomatic (i.e. bureaucratic) arena, and the personalities and shifting political preferences of individual executive leaders – had major impacts on how South Africa engaged with Japan in the past two decades.