Malaysia’s Federal System: Overt and Covert Centralisation

In recent decades, many countries have implemented decentralisation drives to increase efficiency and responsiveness. However, Malaysia is an exception. Its federal system is more than 50 years old and, rather than decentralising, the country has pursued a sustained centralisation drive. The cause dates back to the pre-independence period, when the nationalist elite, the British and the traditional rulers negotiated the structure of the future government. The first two parties wanted a strong central government, but had to factor in pre-existing political structures centred on the rulers. The result was a federal system with a powerful central government and state governments with diminished responsibilities. Since independence, the ruling coalition founded by the nationalist elite has remained in power at the federal level. Enabled by the constitution’s “top-heavy” design and its unbroken tenure, the coalition has implemented a continuous centralisation drive. Further catalysts – but not causes – have been the implementation of the New Economic Policy and creeping authoritarianism. The centralisation drive has been pursued through a variety of tactics, including: appropriating state government responsibilities; altering incentive structures; privatising state government-owned assets; and “organisational duplication.” Recent policies look to continue this, precluding the potential benefits of a functioning federal system.     

‘The state starts from the family’: peace and harmony in Tajikistan's eastern Pamirs

Based on anthropological fieldwork between 2008 and 2011, this article focuses on how people in Tajikistan's eastern Pamirs conceptualize well-being through the establishment of peace and harmony. An exploration of the interactional use of the terms ‘peace’ and ‘harmony’ in Kyrgyz and Tajik (tynchtyk, yntymak, tinji, and vahdat) makes manifest that the meanings of these terms are connected to the fields of ‘family’, ‘leadership’, and ‘state’. Basing their reasoning on the officially promoted analogy between family and state, people in the eastern Pamirs distinguish between social spaces that are related to well-being and those that are not. As a factor of distinction, and crucial to the establishment of peace and harmony, the moral quality of leadership plays an important role. Positive experiences of such leadership as balanced and morally pure are mainly identified and witnessed within families and neighbourhoods and only occasionally in state institutions. This discrepancy raises the question of where to locate boundaries between good and bad, moral and immoral, harmonious and conflictual. Thus, this article contributes not only to the study of local concepts of well-being in Central Asia but also to the study of local concepts of ‘ill-being’ which challenge them.     

Discursive democracy and the challenge of state building in divided societies: reckoning with symbolic capital in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Current approaches to democratic state building place serious conceptual limits on policy options. A democratic future for Bosnia's people will require far more searching engagement with identity formation and its politicization than reform efforts have so far contemplated. Theories of discursive democracy illuminate how this might be possible. We deploy the discursive idea of symbolic capital to show how one might identify the lines along which people in Bosnia could constitute meaningful, internally legitimated political communities – or that would indicate the experiment was not worth attempting. Unless advocates of democratic state building can articulate, rather than assume, a sufficiency of common ground among the populations' multiple, overlapping and conflicting identities, they may have to revert to the default of separate political communities.     

Collapse at the WTO: a Cancun post‐mortem

This article offers an analysis of the collapse of the WTO talks in Cancun in September 2003. It argues that the collapse of the talks should not be regarded as a victory for the developing world, as many have suggested. Rather, the collapse should be seen as the inevitable result of deep‐seated tensions within the wto 's institutional framework, both in terms of the processes that underlie its working and the substance of its agreements. The article argues that these imbalances, if not corrected, will heighten the alienation of developing countries and work to the detriment of the legitimacy and survival of the wto.     

State building and the non-state: debating key dilemmas

This article unpacks the relationship between state building and the non-state. While accepting both the positive and corrosive characteristics of non-state actors and informal practices of governance, it attempts to (1) advance an argument in favour of mainstreaming ‘non-state’ forms that are positive and useful for state building; and (2) highlight the tensions between the practice of state building and the reality of the non-state. In thinking beyond the state and non-state dichotomy, the article seeks to identify factors that are necessary if state-building programmes are to work in complex environments. Drawing on received wisdom from recent experiences, this conceptual study focuses on important contextual, local, political and legitimacy issues to highlight prominent dilemmas. The conclusion suggests four policy-relevant lessons that reinforce the argument in favour of mainstreaming the non-state agenda into the critical thinking about security and development.     

Local Governance ‘in Swedish’? Globalisation,Local Welfare Government and Beyond

In this article local governance in the Swedish context is discussed. A case study of a Swedish city is framed in its historical, national and international context. By locating the redevelopment of an old harbour within a historical context, new insights are brought into the understanding of local governance. Cities are indeed nested. Deteriorating public finances, the deregulation of the economy (nationally and globally), the changed status of the welfare state, the restructuring of industry and the neo-liberal wave all taken together form a formidable challenge. A radical questioning of the values, principles and forms of the Swedish welfare state has tangible impacts on local governance. It is concluded that Swedish municipal actors face the dual challenge of acting efficiently (being sensitive to the needs and demands of local elites), while keeping democratic legitimacy (being sensitive to the needs and demands of all citizens).     

Iran's Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism: A view from the pulpit

Abstract

This paper examines the Friday prayer sermons delivered by Iran's new leadership to answer the question of whether Iran's Islamic fundamentalism has crested with the death of its spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini in June 1989. The analysis shows that an attempt is underway to articulate the Islamic identity of post‐Khomeini Iran in economic, political, and social relations. The study concludes that although President Rafsanjani is willing to reevaluate Iran's domestic and foreign relations, the totalitarian, Islamic, and revolutionary structure that Khomeini helped build is still intact. As such, the regime's tendencies toward radicalism and export of the Islamic revolution remain unchanged. In this scenario, resort to terrorism by the Islamic Republic in order to maintain its structure and tendencies cannot be ruled out.     

Mark S. Hamm. Terrorism as Crime: From Oklahoma City to Al-Qaeda and Beyond

Few issues are more important to scholars of security studies than understanding the impact of state sponsorship on the capabilities of non-state armed actors. The subject of our study—Lebanon's Hezbollah—was selected based on its reputation amongst scholars and policymakers alike as an exceptionally capable organization. In our inquiry, we seek to answer the following questions about Hezbollah's rapid emergence during the 1980s as one of the world's premier armed non-state actors: (a) how did Iranian sponsorship contribute to Hezbollah's effectiveness?; and (b) to what extent did Hezbollah's success depend on characteristics endogenous to the organization itself? To preview our conclusions, state sponsorship can contribute markedly to non-state actors' capabilities by providing resources and sanctuary. However, the ultimate effectiveness of non-state armed groups depends heavily on such internal characteristics as their decision-making processes and members' backgrounds. Thus, while state support may be necessary for non-state actors to achieve their goals, it is insufficient as a guarantee of their effectiveness.     

国家认同与族群认同:以马来西亚为例

国家与族群具有不同的结构与功能,因而国家认同与族群认同的要素,特别是二者的认同基础存在较大的差异。正是这种差异决定着二者关系的基本形态。国家的公共性要求它不应该将政治政策偏向任何一个族群。族群平等是国家认同与族群认同的平衡点,否则,可能会导致政策所损害的族群对国家存在意义的质疑。马来西亚独立后,特别是20世纪70年代后,实施的正是偏向马来人的政策,从而造成非马来人对国家的不满。     

Stateness problems or regime unification? Explaining obstacles to democratization in Burma/Myanmar

The fact that Myanmar is not democratic is too often taken as a given in international policy discourse without analysis as to why it has not democratized or what conditions might allow for democratization. Plausible theories to explain Burma's authoritarian politics include poor levels of economic development, colonial history, regional geopolitical factors, problems of state formation and the unification of the military. Determining which theories have the most explanatory power is important because different understandings of Burma's authoritarianism steer one toward some remedies and away from others. In this paper, I argue that problems of state formation – ‘stateness’ in one strand of the democratization literature – and ‘regime unification’ theories stand the best chance of explaining the lack of democracy in Myanmar. I examine the logic and evidence for each theory and conclude that while both explain some of the status quo, ‘stateness’ had more explanatory power before 1988 but in post-1988 Myanmar, ‘regime unification’ explains more.