The European airline industry: law and economics of low cost carriers

This article offers an analysis of the European airline industry in order to understand the new dynamics of the competitive field. The liberalization process did not lead the entrance of competitors similar to incumbents, but a new organizational model has been developed, the one of low cost carriers. The incumbents’ reaction to the liberalization process coupled with the entrance of low cost companies into the sector are hence considered. Two theories are analysed: the contestable markets theory, to understand the theoretical vision that has influenced the liberalization process, and the core theory, a modern approach to the concept of destructive competition that, according to some authors, is a recurring problem in the sector. While numerous barriers to entry still exist, the paper examines how the organizational model of low cost companies has helped new entrants to overtake these obstacles. By the same token, the application of the core theory does not seem to justify strategic alliances taking place in these years. The competitive framework is definitely clearer if we analyse sector changes in a different way, from the point of view of low cost companies considered as new market actors.     

Remortgaging Women's Lives: The World Bank'sLand Agenda in Africa

In recent months, the World Bank has issued a series of draft policy reports on land relations. This is the first time in over two decades that the Bank has sought to review its policy on lending in the land sector. Access to the draft reports and participation in the consultation process has, however, been severely limited. Nonetheless, the World Bank expects to issue the final Report by the end of this year. This paper presents a gender analysis of the two draft documents that have been made available to date. It assesses their implications for gender relations in Africa. It explores the World Bank's promotion of formal rural credit and challenges the assumption of the availability of women's unpaid agricultural labour. The paper argues that, far from being over, the struggle over land relations which has characterised the last decade in Africa, must continue. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

'I'm Proud of the British Empire': Why Tony Blair Backs George W. Bush

This article considers the three main reasons behind Tony Blair's support for the post-9/11 foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration, especially the war on Iraq: first, Blair is on a neo-imperial mission, with deep roots in his personal development, to re-order the world to better suit British interests; secondly, Bush and Blair independently agree that the post-1989 period represents wasted time, years of drift that could have been used to press home Anglo-American dominance; and thirdly, an agreement that 9/11 opened the space for a radical restructuring of international relations and the setting of a more interventionist global agenda.     

Civil society and state-centred struggles

This article is about civil society and state-centred struggles in contemporary Zimbabwe. I first identify and outline three current understandings of civil society. Two understandings (one Liberal, one Radical) are state-centric and exist firmly within the logic of state discourses and state politics. A third understanding, also Radical, is society-centric and speaks about politics existing at a distance from the state and possibly beyond the boundaries of civil society. This civil society-state discussion frames the second section of the article, which looks specifically at Zimbabwe. It details civil society as contested terrain (from the late 1990s onwards) within the context of a scholarly debate about agrarian transformation and political change. This debate, which reproduces (in theoretical garb) the key political society (or party) fault-lines within Zimbabwean society, has taken place primarily within the restricted confines of state-centred discourses.     

Deliberative democracy and the politics of traditional leadership in South Africa: A case of despotic domination or democratic deliberation?

A heated debate developed in South Africa as to the meaning of ‘deliberative democracy’. This debate is fanned by the claims of ‘traditional leaders’ that their ways of village-level deliberation and consensus-oriented decision-making are not only a superior process for the African continent as it evolves from pre-colonial tradition, but that it represents a form of democracy that is more authentic than the Western version. Proponents suggest that traditional ways of deliberation are making a come-back because imported Western models of democracy that focus on the state and state institutions miss the fact that in African societies state institutions are often seen as illegitimate or simply absent from people's daily lives. In other words, traditional leadership structures are more appropriate to African contexts than their Western rivals. Critics suggest that traditional leaders, far from being authentic democrats, are power-hungry patriarchs and authoritarians attempting to both re-invent their political, social and economic power (frequently acquired under colonial and apartheid rule) and re-assert their control over local-level resources at the expense of the larger community. In this view, the concept of deliberative democracy is being misused as a legitimating device for a politics of patriarchy and hierarchy, which is the opposite of the meaning of the term in the European and US sense. This article attempts to contextualise this debate and show how the efforts by traditional leaders to capture an intermediary position between rural populations and the state is fraught with conflicts and contradictions when it comes to forming a democratic state and society in post-apartheid South Africa.     

On scale work: evidential practices and global health interventions

Abstract

Scalability can be understood as the ability to expand without changing. Yet, expanding an intervention to a global scale, we suggest, is a significant and difficult accomplishment. In this paper we propose to explore the kind of evidential exigencies that this accomplishment involves. To do so, we focus on the field of global health and examine how child immunization against the pneumococcus bacterium has been scaled up in low-income countries. The paper first attends to initial epidemiological scrutiny that revealed the existence of a large-scale public health problem and the possibility of an expandable solution (vaccination). It then describes the set-up of a funding arrangement using overseas aid to purchase vaccine doses manufactured by pharmaceutical companies, before paying attention to various frictions that affect the widespread use of pneumococcal vaccines. In these different moments through which scalability is accomplished, always partially and temporarily, we show that a dual activity can be witnessed, a pivoting between referential work and forward projection. To conclude, we suggest that scalability is more usefully approached as a form of expansion that is always attentive to the possibilities of change.     

Carbon sink geopolitics

Abstract

This paper explores an example of global politics in action by attending to the modalities and outcomes of United Nations negotiations on global warming. More precisely, the paper ethnographically traces how the capacity of tropical forests to act as carbon sinks is turned into a matter of global concern. The focus is on a negotiated policy called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) and its anchoring in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose territory contains the second largest area of rainforest after Brazil. The paper discusses the importance of the promissory in climate actions, the multivalence of what is at stake and the porosity and resilience of national demarcation. To do so, it identifies three moments and sites of geopolitical re-composition: the formulation of international consensus, the work of preparatory agents and the quest for metrological inclusiveness. These moments and sites point to the theatricality and semi-secrecy of United Nations negotiations, the mobilizing activities of expatriate consultants hired with overseas aid funding and the unstable evidential grounds on which emission reduction efforts are based. The paper suggests that, through this series of processes, the carbon stored by tropical forests becomes a matter of global exigency.     

Is ‘good enough’ peacebuilding good enough? The potential and pitfalls of the local turn in peacebuilding in Timor-Leste

There is a palpable sense of humility within the United Nations and other international institutions regarding peacebuilding. Rather than seeking to implement the liberal peace, they now pursue the more modest goal of ‘good enough’ outcomes. This shift reflects a growing consensus in the critical literature that space needs to be provided for the local agency that will ultimately determine the outcomes of peacebuilding. At first blush this emphasis on local agency is positive; it offers an important correction to the technocratic and generally top-down nature of liberal peacebuilding. But, is the ‘good enough’ approach to peacebuilding good enough? What are the pitfalls and potential of the local turn? This article uses a case study of Timor-Leste to answer these questions. It finds that the local turn can help lend legitimacy to the state and increase opportunities for political participation and the delivery of public goods at the local level. However, the emerging evidence from Timor-Leste also highlights the pitfalls of the local turn. Most significantly, the state can transfer responsibility for public goods provision to the local level in order to lessen the burden on the state and to divert attention from ineffective or illegitimate central institutions.     

Listening to color: a set of propositions on pain as feminist aesthetic

This performative text asks whether it is possible to imagine an antisocial feminist aesthetic that does not invoke the wounded body. Its form – numbered propositions that engage with critical theory, literature, and memoir – riffs on that of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, a key interlocutor for this question of aestheticizing embodied pain. How does Nelson’s genealogy of blue model a methodology for a “queer genealogy of femininity,” to borrow Jack Halberstam’s term? How does looking at color in this way offer an approach to narrating trauma, one that displaces the primacy of the visual? Turning to the work of Christina Crosby, Toni Morrison, Fred Moten, and José Esteban Muñoz, as well as drawing upon the author’s experience as a volunteer for a peer listening hotline, this essay considers the implications of “listening to color” for minoritarian knowledge formations and feminist praxis.     

The EU and the Global Order: Contingent Liberalism

Abstract

Politicians, diplomats and analysts commonly assume that commitment to multilateralism and liberal norms is part of the EU’s very DNA. Increasingly, however, the EU’s commitment to the liberal global order is more selective. We demonstrate the shift to a more contingent liberalism by examining the EU’s recent record in relation to four different challenges: international trade; US leadership; Russian actions in the eastern neighbourhood; and security in the Middle East. We speculate on what this may portend for the EU’s self-identity, European interests and the integrity of the prevailing global order.