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Thirty years of civil war in Sri Lanka has affected economic, political, social, cultural and psychological aspects of the society significantly. This paper presents an overview of postwar development strategies in Sri Lanka and compares it with the prewar economy from a political economic perspective. The paper specifically examines the progress of the overall postwar development in the war affected Northern Province of Sri Lanka. Using mixed methodologies data was gathered on critical aspects related to political economy. According to the current study, no clear progress has been made in the areas of economic growth, FDI growth, household income, and poverty and income inequality in the postwar economy of Sri Lanka when compared with the prewar economy. Government fiscal policy targets the postwar reconstruction works while monetary policy enjoys the amalgamation of North and East provinces to countrys aggregate supply apart from introducing very few loan schemes. Security phobia of the government of Sri Lanka limits local, national, regional and international none-government organizations especially in the North and East. There is a considerable amount of progress made in the area of infrastructure development and resettlement of displaced persons. However, primary data from the study indicates these strategies lack conflict sensitivity and public trust. This study emphasizes that postwar economic development strategies should address the critical determinants of sustainable recovery, peace and development aiming at protecting human rights, ensuring rule of law, establishing efficient public service system and finally offering constitutional reforms in Sri Lanka.

Abstract Recent scholarship on the shift to the right in Asian democracies has predominantly been focused on political organisations, leaving social movements outside of them largely understudied. This article brings forth the link between the rise of right-wing politics in Indonesia—often associated with Islamic populist narratives—and the role of the market. It studies the way halal consumerism has helped shape the narrative of the ummah, an idea that was mobilised during the largest religiously-driven demonstration in the capital city Jakarta on 2 December 2016. By explicating the melding of Islamic piety and consumerism, this study illustrates how halal consumerism aid middle-class Muslims in navigating the neo-liberal social world they live in. The article uses survey data to explore the social status and religious views of participants in the mass rally, and delves deeper through interviews with urban, middle-class female Muslims who envision a cross-class ummah that defends Islam against an imagined oppressor. This paper discusses their role in social process related to politico-religious conservatism, specifically in defending the ideal marriage and family through market mechanisms. Through this analysis, I find that the combination of Islamic morality and neo-liberal values politicises the domestic and traditional role of the female Muslim; this has contributed to social changes that hinder democratic developments.

ABSTRACT: There are ongoing academic and public debates on the nature of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). While some observers hold that the BRI is primarily about economic development, others see it as a grand strategy of a great power with hegemonic aspirations. Is the BRI about development or geopolitics? This article adopts a political economy approach to bridge the developmental and geopolitical perspectives. The main argument is that the BRI signifies an attempt by the Chinese state to manage internal problems of capital accumulation by externalizing development on a trans-regional scale. The problems of capital accumulation under China's export-oriented growth model indicates a particular form of spatial fix via the BRI, which goes beyond the exportation of excess industrial/financial capacity and seeks to transform external productive spaces through inter-regional connectivity. The process of constructing new nodes and infrastructures of capital creates space for new forms of asymmetric interdependencies, rendering it prohibitively costly for most BRI partners to exit China-centered networks. To the extent that such asymmetric dependencies can be leveraged for strategic purposes, the BRI serves a geopolitical as well as a developmental function. KEYWORDS: China, the Belt and Road Initiative, geopolitics, development, interdependence

The past year has seen attention directed, both in policy discourse and the media, towards the implication of Central African non-state armed groups in poaching and ivory trafficking. Engaging with both mainstream political economy analyses and work on the "geographies of resource wars," this paper turns to the case of ivory as a "conflict resource," through the case study of the Lord's Resistance Army. It begins by outlining the contextual specificities and conditions of access, before assessing the compatibility of the resource's biophysical, spatial and material characteristics with the needs of regional armed groups and the LRA in particular. Though the direction of causality is difficult to untangle, the paper finds that poaching and the trade in ivory by armed groups in Central Africa appears to incur low opportunity costs for relatively high potential gains. Moreover, that ivory qualifies as a "conflict resource" under Le Billon's (2008) definition in the extent to which it is likely to be implicated in the duration of conflict in the region, both financing and benefitting from a context of insecurity. Future research would benefit from more accessible and robust data; interesting avenues would include an evaluation of the effects of the increasing militarization of poaching strategies - including shoot-to-kill policies - and the potential of igniting grievance-based conflict.

Rather than second the popular assertion that social classes are in decline in the globalizing world, it is contended that a Marxist perspective demonstrates the continuing importance of social classes. Contemporary literature that has gainsaid the contemporary significance of social classes or has stated that social classes no longer exist is reviewed & essentially refuted. Indeed, it is contended that the working class, which constitutes the largest social class, continues to be dominated & exploited within capitalist systems. It is subsequently argued that the delineation of the three processes of capitalist production -- production, distribution, & circulation -- as inextricably connected has problematized efforts to challenge the authority of capitalist systems. After using V. I. Lenin's (1977 edition) understanding of social classes to highlight the predominant characteristics of the bourgeois class, two circumstances that have accelerated the increase in size of the working class are noted, eg, the emergence of new sectors & the transformation of service industries. Indeed, analysis of service empirical data collected in Manuel Castells's (1997) cross-national study demonstrated that the working class is substantially larger than the bourgeois class in several industrialized nations. It is concluded that the persistence of ideological, political, & economic inequality are largely responsible for the current status of the working class in capitalist nations. 1 Table, 81 References. J. W. Parker

Since national independence and national unification are often viewed as norms of the international polity, divided states and peoples are considered abnormal, and there are a variety of theories seeking to show how a divided people can achieve unification. Some theories stress the role of attitudes, others focus on material conditions, such as levels of communication and trade. In the study of integrative efforts in Western Europe, there has been some controversy over the assessments based on disparate theoretical perspectives. In order to identify the issues involved, the paper provides a guide to the theories and definitions used by the following: Karl Deutsch, Ernst Haas, David Mitrany, Joseph Nye, Amitai Etzioni, Leon Lindberg and Stuart Scheingold, Johan Galtung, and others. Applications of integration theory paradigms to Third World countries have demonstrated additional problems in academic theorizing about political unification. Nonetheless, while interest in European integration is decreasing, the era of the New International Economic Order presupposes increased concern for integrative efforts in the Third World. The paper concludes with an examination of current prospects toward Korean unification in light of existing theoretical approaches and trends. The main need today is to construct an infrastructure of informal interaction between the peoples of North and South. After social communication is frequent, the two regimes can take up proposals for formal integration in more practical terms.

Nurit Schleifmann, The Internal Agency: linchpin of the political police in Russia.
The purpose of this article is to outline several of the characteristic features of police infiltration into the revolutionary movement by means of the secret agent. These features stem largely from the underlying conception of the Police Department which viewed its cardinal objective as "liquidation": the surveillance of revolutionary groups with the aim of eliminating them at an appropriate moment. Thus the Internal Agency - as the secret agents were collectively dubbed by the Police - had pride of place in the activity of each Okhrana section; the data gathered by the agents were given top priority in appraising the situation and since this information was tendentious, this led to incongruities between the revolutionary tide and the deployment of the police to combat it. Moreover, the underlying conception dictated police concentration on the individual revolutionary act and brought about the erroneous assumption that the larger the revolutionary organization, the greater its menace. Police comprehension of reality determined also their attitude towards the various components of the revolutionary camp. However, the scope of infiltration into a given movement was affected by a combination of three factors: the degree of interest evinced by the police in the movement's activity, the movement's size and the nature of its organization.

The English parliamentary system emerged from the dramatic struggle between the English Parliament and the Crown over the principle of political or "democratic" control. For leaders of the Commons such as Edward Coke a single false step beyond the line of the sovereign's endurance meant the Tower of London. Another struggle in a different key and on a different level has begun with little publicity on the Continent. The European Parliamentary Assembly in the newly established European Communities is seeking to assert some degree of control and influence not only over the mushrooming Commissions, but also over the powerful Councils of Ministers. Obviously, there is no danger of an irate Council of Ministers confining the obstreperous parliamentarians to the dungeons of Strasbourg. Moreover, the European Parliamentary Assembly is far from being a parliament. Members of the Community "executive" such as Jean Monnet have encouraged rather than fought the Assembly. In these as in other respects the analogy with the development of the English parliamentary system must not be pressed too far. But the broad contours of the contest, the pressures and counter-pressures, the use and abuse of legal argument, and the reliance on genuine and fabricated precedent offer an interesting study in the development of a parliamentary body.

This study assesses the evolution of inequality in Uruguay during 1981-2010, considered as subperiods built on the basis of the main policy regimes observed: extreme right (1981-84), centre-right (1985-89), right (1990-2004), and centre-left (2005-10). Income inequality diminished during the restoration of democracy, but started to grow steadily in the mid-1990s and despite recent redistributive reforms, continued to grow, albeit modestly, until 2007. In 2008 inequality lessened, continuing this trend through 2009 and 2010.Trade liberalization, suppression of centralized wage-setting mechanisms, the drop in minimum wages and the lack of a social protection system oriented to the most deprived households explain the rise in inequality during the last decade. In a context of a stable macroeconomic system, the recent fall in inequality resulted from a reduction in labour income inequality and the introduction of noncontributory public transfers schemes.