Marxism and bureaucracy: A paradox resolved

This article describes one apparently paradoxical course of development of the concept of bureaucracy within Marxism. The paradox has to do with the striking difference between the role attributed to bureaucrats by Marx and by a number of prominent members of the heretics from the Marxist tradition. In Marx's own analysis of contemporary societies, bureaucracies were rarely given a central and never a primary role. In his portrayal of the future society, bureaucrats were swept from the stage altogether. In the writings of Trotsky and theorists of a new bureaucratic class, bureaucrats have come to play a central and ultimately the central role. The argument of the article is that both elements of the paradox stem from precisely the same set of theoretical commitments, in particular the same combination of claims as to what the fundamental activities and actors in societies are, what are the dynamic forces in societies and what is the destination of modern societies. Notwithstanding serious and much‐debated differences between them, what these theories have in common lies deeper than anything on which they disagree. The article concludes by arguing that neither of these approaches is likely to lead to successful analyses of the place of bureaucrats in modern societies.     

Partitioned identities? Everyday national distinctions in Northern Ireland and the Irish state

How does political structure affect ethno‐national distinction? Partitioned societies are a good test case where we can see the effects of changed socio‐political circumstances on historically inherited distinction. This article takes nominally identical distinctions of nationality and religion with common historical roots and shows how they are differentially understood in two polities partitioned in 1920: Northern Ireland, a devolved region of the United Kingdom, and the Irish state. Using a data base of interviews with over 220 respondents, of which 75 in Northern Ireland, conducted between 2003 and 2006, it shows how complex, potentially totalising and exclusive ‘ethnic’ and ‘ethno‐national’ divisions are built up from simpler and more permeable distinctions. Respondents interrelate the same elements into a loosely‐knit symbolic structure – different in each jurisdiction – which frames expectations and discourse, and which is associated with different logics of national discourse, one focussing on personal orientation, the other on group belonging. The resultant ‘ethno‐national’ distinctions function differently North and South.     

THE GREEN ECONOMY,SUSTAINABILITY TRANSITIONS AND TRANSITION REGIONS: A CASE STUDY OF BOSTON

This article is focused upon exploring the development of the green economy in particular locations, with the aim of identifying why some cities and regions have been successful in engendering green growth. To date we have little idea where the green economy is developing, nor much insight, beyond anecdotal evidence, into why certain cities and regions appear to be more successful than others in this regard. We position our analysis within the context of research on socio‐technical transitions that has theorized the potential shift to a more sustainable economy. We review the literature on sustainability transitions and the development of the multi‐level perspective encompassing niches, regimes and landscapes. However, most research into socio‐technical transitions has not given adequate consideration to the influence of places and spatial scale in these transition processes, and we therefore critique the socio‐technical transitions literature from a geographical perspective. In this article we are interested in four key questions. What role does the enabling and facilitative state play in these cities and regions? What new institutional forms and governance structures are being developed? How do actors in particular cities and regions construct their green vision, and how do they encourage other actors to buy‐in to this vision? How are links across levels and spatial scales developed to connect niches with the regime? We address these through a focus upon the Boston city‐region in the USA, drawing upon both primary and secondary research material. We utilize this case study example to re‐examine and re‐theorize work on sustainability transitions from a spatial perspective.     

Mapping character types onto space: the urban-rural distinction in early statistical writings

This article investigates the construction of urban/rural binary distinctions in 18th- and 19th-century social scientific literature, and in particular in the writings of the statistical societies in England. The 18th-century writers were primarily concerned with the spread of luxury, vice, and effeminacy among the upper social strata in large cities. Later on, statisticians began to focus on moral hazards among the urban working poor. These writings are significant in several respects: they contributed to the spatial mapping of moral character, played a role in the development of quantitative social scientific techniques, and foreshadowed later sociological debates over the nature and consequences of social evolution from simpler to more complex societies.     

Soviet rule,nation and film: the Kyrgyz ‘Wonder’ years

ABSTRACT. What happens if a community is encouraged to imagine itself visually when its political vessel is a modernising nation‐state within a multinational communist federation? Cinematic works, in their distillation of time and space, contribute to the kinds of imaginings that sustain nation‐states. How this cultural technology reflected and promoted nation‐building in the Soviet era is the subject of this article. It explores how the tensions within the diktat ‘national in form, socialist in content’ played out in practice in the Soviet cultural landscape of 1960s Kyrgyz film, dubbed by Soviet critics as a ‘wonder’.     

Inventing truth and building power in Russia

Next year marks a quarter century since the end of the Soviet Union. How has power evolved in the region? What might the future hold? What are the implications for the West? Three important works illuminate these questions from different angles. Henry Hale argues that (except for the Baltic states) post‐Soviet regimes are fundamentally similar to one another in being constituted by informal networks that dominate resources and institutions. They converge around, and compete for, influence with a powerful presidency that imposes selective rewards and punishments. Succession is the key weakness, and an unpopular lame duck leader invariably leads to upheaval. Karen Dawisha charts the rise of Vladimir Putin's network of friends and colleagues, and documents allegations of corruption and illegality. She shows how quickly this network, on gaining presidential power, revived state strength and undermined other networks. Peter Pomerantsev vividly portrays a society of simulations ruled by a deft and disorienting ‘post‐modern authoritarianism’. But as systemic popularity has declined this has given way to a harder, shriller anti‐western course, and ultimately to the annexation of Crimea. The future may see the international context play a greater role in regime evolution than before. The compelling anatomy of power laid bare in these three works points to growing tensions and flaws in patronal rule across the post‐Soviet space.     

殖民地时期美国史研究中的若干重要问题

国内美国史学界对殖民地时期研究相对薄弱,而美国学者的研究则至为丰富。在研究中通常会遇到许多棘手的难题：如何确定殖民地时期在美国历史中的地位?如何看待不同种族和族裔群体的历史作用?如何理解英格兰文化与北美文化的关系?如何解释北美13个殖民地从分到合的变化过程?如何借鉴和利用美国学者整理的历史文献和发表的研究成果?这都是研究殖民地时期美国史所必须处理的问题。     

Frank Cass THE JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES

Much environment and development discourse assumes that women are the ‘natural’ constituency for conservation interventions. This article attempts to illuminate this assumption with the lens of a gendered critique of environmentalisms (technocentric, ecocentric and non-western). How do the intellectual roots of Western environmentalisms influence the positions, or non-positions, of contemporary environmentalism with regard to gender? What does research on environmental perceptions in non-Western societies imply about gender differentiation in environmental relations? The article concludes that there are no grounds for assuming an affinity between women's gender interests and those of environments and that such a view is symptomatic of the gender blind, ethnocentric and populist character of western environmentalisms. By contrast the application of gender analysis to environmental relations involves seeing women in relation to men, the disaggregation of the category of ‘women’, and an understanding of gender roles as socially and historically constructed, materially grounded and continually reformulated. The issue of how far women's gender interests and environmental interests go hand in hand leads us to pose a broader question of the degree to which environmental conservation is premissed upon social inequality.     

Governance,Policy Innovation,and Local Economic Development in North Carolina

This article examines the extent to which local governments in North Carolina embrace innovation in their economic development activities. The study makes a distinctive theoretical contribution by examining the relationship between innovation in how economic development policies are administered and implemented (using concepts associated with governance and NPM), and innovation in what is substantively done (policy innovation). An analysis of the results from a statewide survey of local governments in North Carolina finds that certain governance/management variables are significant determinants of economic development policy innovation. An implication of this finding is that new ways of doing economic development may go hand‐in‐hand with new ways of governing and managing. Many of the governance/management variables are also positively associated with the use of a greater number of traditional economic development strategies and tools. This suggests that local governments may find it helpful to be innovative in how they implement economic development irrespective of the substantive policy orientation of particular strategies and tools.     

(Re)framing identity claims: European and state institutions as opportunity windows for group reinforcement

How do we account for the reinforcement of identity particularisms despite transnational integration? This paper addresses the question by comparing two ethnolinguistic groups, Silesians and Kashubs in Poland. It is argued that in order to obtain state protection and tools to develop and survive, ethnic entrepreneurs adjust to institutions and discourses. Census politics, state laws' elaboration, transnational institutions represent openings to which groups adjust by reframing identity claims. In doing so, they re‐imagine and reinforce their communities. Following Rogers Brubaker, group‐making is presented as an eventful process where ethnic elites invest identity categories with groupness by taking advantage of opportunity windows at hand. Further, tracing changing political opportunities, strategic adjustments and groups' boomerang effect bid, the paper embeds identity groups within the social movement literature.     

State reconstruction in Africa: the relevance of Claude Ake's political thought

Studies on post‐conflict reconstruction in Africa have glossed over the need for state transformation as a prerequisite for sustainable peacebuilding in post‐conflict societies. This article fills this gap and discusses the relevance of Claude Ake's political thought for state reconstruction in post‐conflict Africa. It underscores the need for the autochthonous transformation of the state as a central component of peacebuilding and post‐conflict transition in the continent as Ake had suggested. Drawing on Sierra Leone, it theorizes Ake's works on the state in Africa against the backdrop of externally driven state reconstruction projects hinged on hegemonic discourses of ‘nation‐building’ in post‐conflict situations. It presents Ake's corpus as a basis for critiquing ongoing state rehabilitation attempts and urges a return to endogenous initiatives of rebuilding the state from below as a condition for achieving a sustainable democratic reconstruction of the state in post‐conflict Africa.     

Emergent Geographies of International Education and Social Exclusion

This paper explores the socio‐spatial implications of recent developments in the internationalisation of education, which includes the growth in numbers of foreign students and the establishment of offshore schools. It demonstrates the relationship between emergent geographies of international education in the “West” and social reproduction in both student “sending” and “receiving” societies. Drawing on fieldwork in Hong Kong and Canada, it argues that international education is transforming the spatial scales over which social reproduction is achieved: on the one hand, upper‐middle‐class populations in East Asia are able to secure their social status through the acquisition of a “Western education”, thereby creating new geographies of social exclusion within “student‐sending” societies. On the other hand, primary and secondary schools in Canada are able to harness the benefits of internationalisation in order to offset the negative effects of neoliberal educational reform, thereby facilitating local social reproduction.     

Nebulous nationalism: Walker Connor in an era of rising populism

Walker Connor's extensive writings on nationalism covered a wide range of issues and an even wider range of societies, from North America to Western Europe, from the countries of the Communist bloc to the evolving forms of identity and affiliation throughout the postcolonial, developing world. No theme in his work is perhaps more salient than his critical distinction between state and nation, one that was so often blurred by a loose terminology that saw political units and forms of ethnic identity as synonymous. For Connor, this sin was perpetrated by both academic scholars and general writers and led to a lack of appreciation of one of the foremost forces – what he called ethno‐nationalism – shaping the contemporary world.     

Introduction

The aim of this special issue of International Affairs is to address the changing dynamics in the international economic system from an interdisciplinary standpoint, in order to unpack some of the emerging processes of globalization and to investigate the relationship between power and rule‐setting. The idea is to bridge the gap between the traditional realist accounts of the international system that place the nation‐state at the centre of the analysis, and the liberal, market‐driven approach that focuses on the problems of an increasingly integrated global economy and fragmented political authority. The framing question is how the global order (governance) has to change in order to accommodate the enlargement of the playing field and in particular the emergence of fast‐growing developing economies. How is this shift going to affect the distribution of power, both among nations and between state and non‐state actors? Is this shift going to drive a fundamental rethinking of the rules governing relations between countries—and regions—and institutions? The thread that links the articles in this special issue is the rather benign view of globalization, leaning towards ‘liberal ingenuity’ that sees governance as a way to accommodate conflicting interests through institutions in such a way as to minimize the potential for conflict.     

Multiplex Network Analysis for Complex Governance Systems Using Surveys and Online Behavior

Text analysis, web scraping, and other computational techniques enable policy network researchers to efficiently obtain objective measures of network connections. However, the extent to which these observational methods differ from traditional survey instrument‐based measures remains an open question. Focusing on a large regional policy network of 221 organizations, this study compares a measure of collaboration generated via survey instrument to two different measures based upon internet hyperlinks and Twitter interactions between network actors. We address two questions: (1) To what extent do objective network measures based upon observed online interactions and subjective measures based upon self‐reported relationships reveal the same inter‐organizational partnerships and structural network dynamics? and (2) How useful are online network measures for supplementing survey‐based network measures? We find a significant, but substantively small, correlation between survey‐based measures and online interactions. Thus, online network measures may complement survey‐based measures, but likely reflect different aspects of the overall policy network. We conclude by discussing the potential for multiplex measures of policy networks that draw upon multiple measures to more fully understand policy network landscapes. These results bridge and help to contextualize prior work on policy network measures and virtual policy networks within the broader context of complex governance systems.     

Introduction: national identity in transition? Moving out of conflict in (Northern) Ireland1

This thematic section of Nations and Nationalism starts from a question of substantive political importance: How does institutional change – in particular reforms towards ethno‐national equality and the opening of borders – affect national identification in divided regions? It takes the case of Northern Ireland where a radical process of institutional change is under way. It uses new approaches to national identity to map different aspects of change and continuity – in categories of identity and in their interrelations and contents, in elite and in everyday popular identifications (for useful overviews, see Abdelal et al. 2003; Ashmore et al. 2004 ). It examines the trajectory of the Protestant minority in the Irish state to show possible repertoires of change. The authors look respectively at self‐reported categories of identity, official discourses of identity, and popular understandings of nationality. The introduction outlines the relevance of this research to current comparative and theoretical debates.     

Territorializing Armenians: geo‐texts,and political imaginaries in French‐occupied Cilicia, 1919–1922

This article examines the petitions, letters, opinion pieces and scholarly works that Armenian intellectuals generated to convince French decision‐makers to carve an Armenian nation‐state out of Cilicia (present‐day southern Turkey). This colonial encounter took place within the process by which European powers dismembered the defeated Ottoman state following the First World War. These “geo‐texts”—textual representations of territory and population—were strategic attempts at adjusting the parameters of French imperialism, and thus tapped into French notions of history and ethnology to make a case for an Armenian state. First, I show how Armenians adopted and inflected French epistemologies to depict their ancient homeland. Then, I trace the shift from a representation based on historical commonalities between the Armenians and French to one that stressed the ethnological specificities of Armenian nation and territory. Finally, I argue that the static notions of territory, text and population that lobbyists produced continue to fuel scholarly debate over the confessional and ethnic make‐up of Cilicia. This study on “geo‐texts” provides insights into how, at a certain historical moment, differences and similarities among people, both within a society and between societies, are established in text.     

A Nation‐state without the nation? The trajectories of nation‐formation in Montenegro1

ABSTRACT. Following the successful referendum of May 2006, Montenegro became the last of the former Yugoslav republics to opt for an independent state. Only fifteen years earlier, when the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia collapsed, Montenegro was resolute to continue the Yugoslav state‐formation in a union with Serbia. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: Why did it take so much longer for the Montenegrin population to follow the experience of other republics in its decision on independence? How can one explain a staggering change in public opinion on questions of national self‐determination over such a short time‐span? And, finally, what are the dominant discourses of “Montenegrin‐ness”? The authors argue that the answers to these questions are to be found in the particularities of Montenegro's historical development, and especially in the structural legacies of state socialism. The consequence of these developments was the formation of two separate Montenegrin national ideologies: one which sees Montenegrins as ethnically Serb, and the other that defines Montenegrins in civic terms. The paper concludes that these two divergent trajectories of nation‐formation in Montenegro are largely the unintended consequence of intensive state‐building, cultural and political modernisation and, most of all, the gradual politicisation and institutionalisation of high culture.     

Seeking the State: Appropriating Bureaucratic Symbolism and Wealth in the Margins of Southeast Asia

Anthropological research on Southeast Asian states has contributed to understanding how local communities engage with states in their everyday lives. Two approaches drawing out the complexities of state‐society entanglement stand out. First is Foucault's idea that states possess the art‐of‐government. Through techniques such as mapping, census data, biometrics and so on, states are believed to achieve new levels of control over people, who are thus rendered as individual citizens. Second is Scott's idea that societies possess the art‐of‐not‐being‐governed. People, particularly in peripheral areas, seek to escape state control, for instance by sheltering in the hills and forests of Asia. In this article, we seek to identify and expand upon a literature which we see as emerging from the space opened between Foucault and Scott's work, to demonstrate the many creative and diverse ways that peripheral societies seek out states. In doing this we present a synthesis of diverse forms of entanglement to provide new insights into understanding relations between societies and states.     

Beyond the civic–ethnic dichotomy: investigating the structure of citizenship concepts across thirty‐three countries

ABSTRACT. The traditional distinction between civic and ethnic citizenship continues to dominate the study of citizenship concepts. In recent years, various authors have questioned the dichotomous character of these concepts. In this article, we empirically investigate the applicability of this dichotomy based on an analysis of International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) survey data across thirty‐three societies. The analysis demonstrates that this dichotomous structure can indeed be detected and therefore the theoretical dichotomy can be considered as empirically valid. While ethnic citizenship refers most strongly to having national ancestry, for civic citizenship the most important criterion seems to be to obey national laws. However, the ethnic concept of citizenship can also be defined in a negative manner: for ethnic citizenship, obeying the national laws is clearly not a sufficient condition. Further analysis also reveals that the measurement of both concepts is not equivalent cross‐nationally, so that findings on civic and ethnic citizenship are difficult to compare across societies.