A Cartography of a Global Civil Society Advocacy Alliance: The Case of the Global Call to Action against Poverty

The last few decades have witnessed the emergence of global civil society advocacy networks as major players in global governance. The Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP) is one of the recent phenomena in this arena and epitomizes high-level involvement of a multiplicity of actors in GCAP, with various multilateral governance institutions, as well as states. This article analyses the origins of GCAP, motivations for its formation, evolution, and operations, with specific references to its structures and architecture. It argues that alliances are very different from ‘normal’ forms of organizations because they are made up of diverse forms of organizations, coming together voluntarily to achieve a specific purpose and therefore are by their very nature complex, unstable, and difficult to co-ordinate. The result of such, within GCAP, is an organization that is somewhat amorphous and exhibits both aspects of anti-systemic protest (in Polanyian terms) as well as a pacifying force (part of the hegemonic historic block in Gramcsian terms). I argue that the loose nature of global civil society alliances is a positive contributor to mass mobilization but causes frustrations in decision-making and actions. This, in effect, calls for a more bureaucratized and institutionalized architecture, albeit with a potential to alienate some constituencies. A key lesson from GCAP's evolution, structures, and strategies, I posit, is that it is not possible to push through individual positions without compromising so as to accommodate others.     

Semiotics and urban culture: architectural projections of structuralism in a socialist context

The paper studies the relations between architecture, urbanism and structural anthropology, and makes a contribution to the interpretation of how the architects of former Yugoslavia translated structuralism into architectural theory and practice as a means of reading and shaping Yugoslav culture in the context of radical socio-political change. In striving for freedom of opinion, expression, communication and action, and autonomy of scientific and cultural practices, the Yugoslav society through its avant-garde cultural role initiated a shift of focus in urban culture towards semiotics, historicity, dialectics, creativity, criticism and a revival of the humanistic values of traditional culture. From this viewpoint, the paper examines the interests in theory and practice of the most influential Yugoslav architects in the context of structuralism: Mutnjakovi?, Neidhardt, Grabrijan, Bogdanovi? and Delalle. Their theoretical approaches effected a change of functionalist principles and values and advocated the return of values of the old city centre and vernacular architecture, specifically its vitality, symbolism, historical continuity, environmental values and diverse urban forms.     

‘On the outskirts of the Empire’: Joseph Brodsky and Lithuania

This article explores the role of Lithuania in Joseph Brodsky’s life and works before and after his exile from Russia in 1972. As a former Soviet republic, Lithuania represented an intermediary space for Brodsky both culturally and geographically, contributing to his realization that it was a ‘rehearsal’ for his actual emigration. However, Brodsky’s notion of Lithuania changes when, after 1972, instead of representing a simulacrum of the ‘abroad,’ the poet sees Lithuania as a ‘home’ from afar. Emigration, in Brodsky’s case, thus became a realization of the myth of exile implicit in his earlier texts about Lithuania.     

Risk, Gender, and Development in the 21st Century

Globalization creates wealth but also financial crises. Although these systemic risks are generated by all participants in the world economy, their costs are disproportionately borne by the poor, especially women, who live in developing nations, with irrevocable damage to their capabilities. Since current reform proposals do not address inequities in the distribution of the costs of financial crises, we suggest changes in the design, implementation, content, and funding of policies that could provide security to women during crises. We argue that our suggestions will not succeed without women's participation in the debate on the reform of international financial architecture.     

Subterranean successes: Durable regulation and regulatory endowments

Scholars sometimes criticize durable regulatory systems for being costly, inefficient, ineffective, and inequitable. This article reassesses regulation, arguing that a mis-categorization of types of regulatory activity has led critics astray. More specifically, the article observes that regulation “hardened” by being built into infrastructure often ceases to be seen as regulation and its benefits are therefore inappropriately omitted from assessments of regulatory accomplishments. Hardening into one or another durable form can create two important benefits: durable regulation moves some items off the agenda of regulators, conserving resources for other regulatory work; durable regulation also creates regulatory endowments, preserving key bargains struck at the time infrastructure was created and reducing future opportunities for capture. Such endowments can then become the foundation for other regulatory work. Examples from the regulation of drinking water in the United States and brief discussions of road safety and disability regulation illustrate the argument.     

Introduction: Regional powers in contest and engagement: making sense of international relations in a globalised world

Over the last couple of years, ‘African ownership’ has become a buzzword in many fields. Economic development initiatives like the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) are based on it, partnership agreements like the Joint AU–EU Africa Strategy are built around it and its central concept of Africanisation guides virtually all external relations of the continent. African leaders (rightly) insist on it, international organisations (rightly) preach it and many non-African actors are (unsurprisingly) hiding behind it. The concept of African ownership is so omnipresent today that it is more than surprising that the simple question of who actually owns it has not yet been asked. It is the declared purpose of this paper to disentangle rhetoric from reality and identify the owner as well as the limits of African ownership in the sphere of peace and security.     

From walls to membranes: fortress polis and the governance of urban public space in 21st century Britain

Drawing on the work of Paul Virilio, this paper addresses changes in the architectural and legal topography of the urban landscape through an examination of regulatory patterns, which increasingly intensify governance through, and as, ‘control’. Such regulation is ambivalent in that it cuts across many traditionally discrete regimes of power melding them into new forms with new effects; as a consequence it is no longer sufficient to think in terms of such distinctions as private/public, civil/criminal, and so on. This paper argues that a concern with patterns of enclosure and privatisation in our urban centres must now be placed within the context of changes in architectural practice and technology, which the authors term ‘open architecture’, and the embedding of governance through partnership, which give particular emphasis to the use of dematerialised and diffused modes of control. The paper utilises Virilio’s history and image of the fortress, which he tracks from a material form to a dematerialised form, to envisage these developments and to provide the foundation for an understanding of the importance of the development of practices of surveillance into, what the authors term, ‘total registration’ as a feature and function of governance through ‘control’.

建筑——凝固的音乐

通过若干建筑实例,从音乐所表现出的连续、渐变、起伏和交错等节奏感与韵律感,说明作为凝固音乐的城市建筑,给人一种强烈的空间音乐感和艺术的享受.     

Building transregional and historical connections: Uyghur architecture in urban Xinjiang

Economic investment and the growing immigration of Han Chinese from other parts of China to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region over the last three decades have increased the presence of eastern Chinese architecture in the urban built environment. This paper refers to the making of, residing in and speaking about the materiality of urban architecture by Turkic-speaking Muslim Uyghur middle-class actors. Besides creating personal comfort through Uyghur elements they draw ethnic boundaries to the Han Chinese. In highlighting the materiality of architecture, the analysis expands beyond the individual house by investigating the ways in which urban architecture offers spaces of meaning for social and ethnic communities. Based on ethnographic data, this paper argues that due to the political context and the state-controlled urban development with Chinese characteristics, urban Uyghur architecture was relegated from the outside of houses to an emphasis on interior decoration.