Taking Intervention Politics Seriously: Media Debates and the Contestation of African Regional Interventions ‘from Below’

ABSTRACT

Scholars increasingly investigate how the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) is contested and negotiated in practice. Yet little knowledge exists on the politics African regional interventions provoke in the societies affected by such interventions. Based on an analysis of media reports from Burkina Faso and The Gambia, we show that regional interventions are indeed contested locally, irrespective of the means of intervention applied. Our analysis demonstrates how local elites use regional norms and policies in order to claim power and define what is going (wr)on(g). With this, we provide evidence for the (contested) local effects of APSA and for the relevance of media for researching such effects.     

Innovations, externalities and the problem of economic progress

In modern industrial societies innovativeness is seen as a source of economic growth and welfare increases. Following this assessment economic research presently focusses almost exclusively on the question of how to elicit innovations. Yet innovative economic activities have always also meant losses, sometimes even hardship, to some members of society, and incalculable risks. The present paper tries to develop a more balanced picture by acknowledging these less pleasant implications. Whether, and under what conditions, the permissive regime which modern societies have adopted towards innovations can be justified is discussed within the framework of a contractarian approach.     

Studying African interventions ‘from below’: Exploring practices,knowledges and perceptions

ABSTRACT

This article argues for a shift in researching African interventions: from a top-down study of African regional norms and institutions towards a view ‘from below’ on the actual practices of intervention and how they play out on the ground. Such a view is important in order to understand the contested politics of African interventions as well as disconnects between grand regional architectures and their imprints on the ground. In doing so, this article also seeks to link research on African interventions to the academic debate on peacebuilding and peacemaking interventions more generally. While this literature has increasingly taken the ‘local’ into account, such a localisation in terms of researching African interventions has yet to take place. This article suggests three dimensions in which a view ‘from below’ could be translated into the research agenda on African interventions.     

Crime, Prison, and Female Labor Supply

This paper introduces the vector autoregressive (VAR) methodology into themainstream of applied criminological research as an alternative to theestimation of structural models of crime. The paper presents cointegrationtest statistics for a second-order VAR of crime, prison population, femalelabor force participation, and durable consumption. Our results for theimpact of imprisonment on the crime rate are similar to Levitt's (1996)and substantially larger than previous estimates (e.g., Marvell and Moody,1994). We find that the short-run response of the crime rate to increasedlabor force participation of women is larger than the long-run effect. Theimplication is that major social changes, like the increased labor supply ofwomen, may have surprising impacts and that social institutions may takesome substantial period of time to adjust to such major changes.