This book maps the policy process and political economy of policymaking in Africa. Its focus on trade and industrial policy makes it unique in the literature. Detailed case studies help the reader to understand how the process and motivation behind policy decisions can vary from country to country depending on the form of government, ethnicity and nationality, and other social factors. The book will appeal to students and academics in economics, political economy, political science, and African studies. Professionals, practitioners, and policymakers in the international donor community and bot.
"An awareness of the cultural entanglements in the Global South has become an evident as well as urgent factor in the global constitution of knowledge and the knowledges of globalization. This book contributes to the growing field of research on the relations between Latin America and Asia. From multiple perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds, it addresses the cultural and intellectual entanglements between Latin America and India in the 20th century. The Sur / South cultural cartography that emerges reveals the need for a new reflection on Orientalism as well."--P. [4] of cover
Este artículo utiliza las hemerotecas de dos periódicos para estimar el índice de incertidumbre sobre las políticas económicas —Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU)—en España en 1905-1945, un período de gran polarización política. Encontramos que el estallido de la Guerra Civil en 1936 fue anticipado por un sorprendente aumento del nivel de incertidumbre en ambos periódicos. Estudiamos la dinámica presente detrás de este aumento y aportamos evidencia de una fuerte asociación empírica entre el incremento de la incertidumbre y la mayor relevancia de los asuntos políticos divisivos en ese momento: conflicto socioeconómico, separatismo regional, poder militar y papel de la Iglesia. Estos resultados se mantienen incluso cuando utilizamos variación en contenido a nivel de periódico. ; This article exploits two newspaper archives to track economic policy uncertainty in Spain in 1905-1945, a period of extreme political polarization. We find that the outbreak of the civil war in 1936 was anticipated by a striking upward level shift of uncertainty in both newspapers. We study the dynamics behind this shift and provide evidence of a strong empirical link between increasing uncertainty and the rise of divisive political issues at the time: socio-economic conflict, regional separatism, power of the military, and role of the church. This holds even when we exploit variation in content at the newspaper level.
The period since the signing of Northern Ireland's 'peace deal', the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA), has seen a shift in the votes of many Protestants to the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), hitherto seen as a hardline, anti-GFA organisation fusing religion and politics. This article uses a case study of the Orange Order, the largest religious-cultural organisation in Northern Ireland containing almost one-in-four Protestant voters, to examine the basis of the appeal of more militant Protestant Unionism in the DUE. The article suggests that a radical ethnic militancy is apparent amongst younger 'Orange' Protestants in particular. This shift in Protestant-Unionist opinion has been exacerbated in a post-conflict party system, in which electoral competition is based upon intra-ethnic bloc rivalry around the defence of the interests of a particular bloc. [Copyright 2006 Elsevier Ltd.]
This study is devoted to politics of nationalism under Bulgarian communism (1944-89). The research aims to analyse the actual content of the Bulgarian communist policies on three main national questions and the ideas behind them. How did Bulgarian communism understand nation and nationalism? How did the Bulgarian Communist Party policy on issues of nationalism change over time? What was the legacy of communist politics of nationalism after the fall of the regime in 1989? This thesis focuses on three national questions in Bulgaria: `the Macedonian Question', the position of the ethnic Turkish minority, and the politics of Jewish identity. It argues that revealing the ideas behind the communist policies in relation to these questions explains how communism understood national identity in Bulgaria. Chapter 1 provides an overview of theories of nationalism and communism in relation to Bulgarian communism. Chapter 2 analyses the understanding of communist internationalism and nationalism of the founders of Bulgarian communism and their followers in the contest of Marxism, Marxism-Leninism and Stalinism. Chapter 3 discusses Bulgarian communist mythology and argues that under communism Bulgarian national mythology was at the basis of promoting cultural nationalism which in its own turn was used for political mobilisation against ethnic diversity. Chapters 4,5 and 6 are dedicated to the three national questions mentioned above and their development under communism. Chapter 7 examines politics of nationalism after the fall of the communist regime in Bulgaria in 1989 and argues that by promoting cultural nationalism based on ethnic homogeneity the policies of the BCP in relation to ethnic minorities determined the politics of nationalism during post-communism in Bulgaria. The chapters are linked by the argument that Bulgarian communism changed its original idea of building a communist ration-State as a political community with class identity at its core to building an ethnically homogenous nation-state with ethnic Bulgarian identity as its organising principle.
India's largest SEZ – an Amoebal Zone – has constantly changed shape, name, and purpose. The material, regulatory, cartographic, and classificatory flexibility of 'unfixed land' underlies these contortions. The multiplicity of land also informs political adversariality towards the Zone. Over 2.5 decades, a heterogeneous group of farmers, fishworkers, pastoralists, and local to global NGOs have contested the takeover of lands along registers of access, use, property, environmental sustainability, and more. This multiplicity is somewhat ordered through the coercions, mediations, and compromises of everyday and Party politics. Politics temporarily and imperfectly settles the making, distribution and use of unfixed land.
In this special issue of Historical Social Research, indicators are considered epistemic devices that render the world governable by quantification. While endowed with an aura of objectivity, indicators are not neutral devices. Instead they transform the world they claim to describe. Against the backdrop of a global proliferation of indicators, we argue in favour of research that strategically focuses on the processes that lead to the institutionalisation and systematic use of key indicators in politics compared to cases in which these processes fail. This type of research strategy could enhance the accumulation of systematic knowledge as well as the relevance of social studies of quantification. Furthermore, we propose a heuristic for analysing how indicators are involved in shaping imaginations of the future following the three distinct dimensions of meaning (factual, social, temporal) as introduced by Luhmann. We also review diachronic and synchronic approaches to analysing the genesis and use of indicators in order to derive testable hypotheses about the gap between indicator design and policy use. Finally, we introduce the articles of this special issue.
The issue of loss and damage has historically been politically contentious, with developed countries being afraid of being held responsible, and developing countries demanding some form of compensation for being disproportionately impacted by climate change-induced loss and damage. After much debate between developed and developing countries, the Paris Agreement took the middle road between the varying outcomes envisioned by developed and developing countries. The Agreement recognised the most vital demands of the developing countries to incorporate loss and damage as an independent pillar of the UNFCCC process and made the Warsaw International Mechanism permanent. Considering the discomfort among the developed block, the language of the Agreement was general and non-binding in character, overtly excluding the possibility of liability or compensation under loss and damage, which many have been described as a failure for vulnerable countries. Thus, the major challenge for the COP22 will be to expedite the discussion around financing and legal responsibility for loss and damage. This article discusses the road towards the Paris Agreement in light of the history of negotiations on loss and damage under the UNFCCC and aims to understand how it will impact the future of loss and damage.
ABSTRACTMultiple knowledges are available for utilisation in policy choice. The rank ordering of knowledges for use in decisionmaking is thus a fundamental predecision. This article shows how this predecision necessarily constrains the processes associated with a politics of ideas, using cases from American international commodity policy. Even when the supposed preconditions of this sort of politics are present, policy change did not occur when the proposed ideas arose from a knowledge accorded secondary status in policymaking circles. Several implications are discussed for the influence and the study of ideational politics. Ultimately, the politics of ideas, so often portrayed through cases of innovation, may be quite conservative, contained by knowledge hierarchies which reflect prior political circumstances.
Genetic testing has become a vehicle through which basic constitutional relationships between citizens and the state are revisited, reaffirmed, or rearticulated. The interplay between the is of genetic knowledge and the ought of government unfolds in the context of diverse imaginaries of the forms of human well-being, freedom, and flourishing that states have a duty to support. This article examines how the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States governed testing for Alzheimer's disease, and how they diverged in defining potential harms, benefits, and objects of regulation. Comparison before and after the arrival of direct-to-consumer genetic tests reveals differences in national understandings of what it means to protect life and citizenship: in the United Kingdom, ensuring physical wellness through clinical utility; in the United States, protecting both citizens' physical well-being and freedom to choose through a framework of consumer protection; and in Germany, emphasizing individual flourishing and an unburdened sense of human development that is expressed in genetic testing law and policy as a commitment to the stewardship of personhood. Operating with their own visions of what it means to protect life and citizenship, these three states arrived at settlements that coproduced substantially different bioconstitutional regimes around Alzheimer's testing.
