Suchergebnisse

When Edward Snowden revealed that the United States government had been collecting domestic communications metadata in bulk, the administration responded that there was no great concern. The data were only how long, when, and which number called which, not what participants said. Two days after the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order ordering the collection was made public, President Obama said,When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program is about. As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content. (1)

Decades of neoliberal policy have left Chile with a skeletal state that administers social policy through targeting and outsourcing in public-private partnerships that lack coordination. The reconstruction after the 2010 earthquake and tsunami responded to the emergency largely according to these same principles. While official reports on the reconstruction effort show a state that is complying with its goals, evidence from fieldwork in the city of Constitución illustrates that this method is highly inadequate in the context of a natural disaster. Chile should establish a social policy structure for natural disasters that allows for a rapid response to a social emergency based on universal or near-universal allocation criteria.Varias décadas de políticas neoliberales han dejado a Chile con un estado débil que simplemente administra las políticas sociales por medio de la focalización y las subcontrataciones en alianzas público-privadas que carecen de coordinación. La reconstrucción después del terremoto y el sunami de 2010 respondió a la catástrofe mayormente de acuerdo a estos mismos principios. Mientras los informes oficiales sobre los esfuerzos de reconstrucción muestran a un estado que cumple con sus metas, el trabajo de campo en la ciudad de Constitución demuestra que este método es decididamente insuficiente en el contexto de un desastre natural. Chile debe establecer unas estructuras de política pública para lidiar con los desastres naturales que permitan dar una respuesta rápida a las emergencias sociales en base a criterios de asignación universales o casi universales.

Citizens and activists in Brazil were optimistic about their role in shaping public policies after the democratic wave of the 1980s, particularly in the field of international trade negotiations. Observers point out that the state is more open than in previous decades and that Itamaraty (the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs) is losing its grip over the decision‐making process. In this article, we dispute this affirmation. First, we demonstrate the analytical overlap between participation and influence in the literature. Second, we argue that the decision‐making process was far more democratic, and Itamaraty less powerful, from 1946 to 1973 than it is today; participation in the policy arena was associated with influence. Democratization in the political regime in Brazil after 1985 did not bring democratization to the decision‐making process in our case. We conclude by presenting some suggestions on how to bridge the current chasm between participation and influence in Brazilian foreign policy.

This article examines the changes that neoliberalism brought to the Mexican and Argentine cultural policies. Did the neoliberal turn of the 1980s and the deepening of the reforms in the 1990s have the same effects in both countries? The findings of this article show that neoliberalism had a greater effect on cultural policy in Mexico because, since the Miguel de La Madrid administration in 1982, all governments have deepened neoliberal policies. On the other hand, in Argentina, where cultural policy is less institutionalized and more dependent on politics, neoliberalism had a major influence in the 1990s but less so since 2003 and Néstor Kirchner's election.

This article offers a theoretical process‐tracing exercise on the interaction between power, the state, and the market. Special attention is placed on how the historical trajectory of the state's political and economic developments has varied. The account developed is theoretically informed and illustrated by Mexico's trajectories of reform. The current trends toward the recommodification of economic activities and the roles of the state are developing tendencies, not exempt from undertows. Although social, political, and economic contradictions are mediated through crises, they are sorted in two broad and distinctive ways. In the first of these, major changes involve a decisive intervention of the state in which a new trajectory might be imposed, whereas in the second one, adaptation and reformist strategies solve and negotiate some minor moments of crises in the pursuit of softer transformations. Although corporatism and import substitution industrialization involved processes of decommodification of economic activities, the outward‐oriented economic model meant a modification of the state's trajectory toward practices associated with processes of recommodification.

Law 1448 of Victims and Land Restitution was ratified in Colombia in June 2011. Intergovernmental organizations, countries and nonstate actors supported the Colombian government in the design and implementation of the initiative. Drawing on a framing analysis, namely Entman and Serra's analysis of international frame projection, this article explores the dynamics of convergence and contestation between international and domestic sectors in relation to the legislation's implications for rural development and peace. The results suggest a need to understand the "glocal" flows of political communication in contexts of governance and to illustrate the contradictions emerging from the humanitarian and developmental agendas of international cooperation.