Suchergebnisse

A Most Enterprising Country -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Enterprising Country -- 1. Surviving the Arduous March through Enterprise -- 2. State Trading Networks versus the World -- 3. Entrepreneurialism, North Korea-Style -- 4. A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Investment Environment -- Conclusion: The Future -- Notes -- Index

What explains the recent (perhaps temporary) resurgence of sophisticated maritime pirate attacks in Southeast Asia in the face of strong regional counter-piracy efforts? Given Southeast Asian countries' relatively well-functioning institutions, political, economic, and conflict-related explanations for the return of piracy are incomplete. As an innovative extension to structural arguments on piracy incidence, we take an approach that focuses on adaptation by the pirates themselves, using incident-level data derived from the International Maritime Organization to track how sophisticated pirate organizations have changed what, where, and how they attack. In response to counter-piracy efforts that are designed to deny pirates the political space, time, and access to economic infrastructure they need to bring their operations to a profitable conclusion, pirates have adapted their attacks to minimize dependence on those factors. Within Southeast Asia, this adaptation varies by the type of pirate attack: ship and cargo seizures have moved to attacks which move quickly, ignore the ship, and strip only cargo that can be sold profitably, while kidnappings involve taking hostages off ships to land bases in the small areas dominated by insurgent groups. The result is a concentration of ship and cargo seizures in western archipelagic Southeast Asia, and a concentration of kidnappings in areas near Abu Sayyaf Group strongholds. (Pac Aff/GIGA)

How has the involvement of the North Korean state influenced the geographic development of North Korean drug trafficking networks? In this paper, I use global value chain analysis to examine the characteristics of North Korean trade networks engaged in drug trafficking in two time periods during which state hostility toward drug trafficking varied markedly (from the early 1990s until 2005, when the central state encouraged production and trafficking, and since 2005, when North Korea cracked down on drugs). Access to a favourable institutional environment and state resources was associated with a spatial distribution of drug trafficking activities that was both territorially concentrated and territorially dispersed while the North Korean state sought to control as much of the value chain as possible. In the second period, the North Korean central state deprived many drug trafficking networks of state support, leading to networks with territorial distributions of production, distribution, and retail concentrated within both North Korea and adjacent countries, and more complex business relationships with various levels of the North Korean state, leading to a more distributed capture of value along the value chain. Adapted from the source document.