沙特阿拉伯宪政历程的源头--自由亲王运动

"自由亲王"是沙特阿拉伯现代化发展初期的第三种政治力量,是沙特阿拉伯经历从传统君主制到"发展的独裁模式"之历史性变革的重要推手。自由亲王运动根源于石油时代沙特阿拉伯经济社会秩序的变动,在沙特阿拉伯首次提出宪政民主等现代政治理念并尝试付诸实践,由此成为沙特阿拉伯宪政历程的源头,对沙特阿拉伯政治现代化的发展具有启蒙意义,预示着沙特阿拉伯政治现代化进程的发展方向。     

Covering the Building of a Kingdom: The Saudi Arabian Authority in The London Times and The New York Times, 1901–1932

The orientalist literature subjected the Middle East in an exotic way — mostly as an “Arabian Nights” society ruled by traditional sultans and/or tribal chiefs — rather than modern governance structure's “bureaucracy.” The presumption within postcolonial scholarship has been that this perception influenced the policy landscape in the United States and Europe, especially the media depictions of the oriental leaders and leadership. The paper empirically tests this hypothesis through content analysis using Weber's categorization of leadership of two newspapers of record — The New York Times in the United States and The London Times in the United Kingdom — during the period of state building in Saudi Arabia (1901–1932). I find that rather than depicting the Saudi leadership as “backward,” these newspapers in particular, tend to overstate the development of the Saudi state during this period. As Weber is best known for his three types of authority, it benefits the discipline to see how the interpretive communities of Western journalists operationalized “authority” in terms of politics and religion of Saudi Arabia as this monarchy emerged.     

Saudi Arabia's Wahhabism and Nationalism: The Evolution of Wataniyya into Qawmiyya

For many scholars, the Arab Spring was actually an Islamic Winter, especially when ISIS rose up in Iraq and Syria, and the Muslim Brotherhood won democratic elections in Egypt and took control over the state. But in other unshaken regions in the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia and the GCC states, the Arab Spring or the Islamic Winter led to something different, which I will call “rethinking nationalism.” This article asserts that since Saudi Arabia's independence in 1932, the royal family has succeeded in forming Wahhabi nationalism, meaning that despite the fact that all Saudi civilians enjoy Saudi citizenship, only those who ascribe to the Wahhabism creed can be part of the nation in terms of political participation and policy decision‐making. Although some steps in affirmative action have been taken in recent years — also as a Saudi response to the Arab Spring — toward women and the Shi'a minority, these groups or sectors still are not perceived by the royal family as part of the nation, and probably not as equal citizens, for religious reasons that over the years have distinguished between real Saudi nationalist groups and Saudi civilians.     

Islamist violence and regime stability in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia, homeland of Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers of September 11, 2001, experienced low levels of internal violence until 2003, when a terrorist campaign by ‘Al‐Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula’ (QAP) shook the world's leading oil producer. Based on primary sources and extensive fieldwork in the Kingdom, this article traces the history of the Saudi jihadist movement and explains the outbreak and failure of the QAP campaign. It argues that jihadism in Saudi Arabia differs from jihadism in the Arab republics in being driven primarily by extreme pan‐Islamism and not socio‐revolutionary ideology, and that this helps to explain its peculiar trajectory. The article identifies two subcurrents of Saudi jihadism, ‘classical’ and ‘global’, and demonstrates that Al‐Qaeda's global jihadism enjoyed very little support until 1999, when a number of factors coincided to boost dramatically Al‐Qaeda recruitment. The article argues that the violence in 2003 was not the result of structural political or economic strains inside the Kingdom, but rather organizational developments within Al‐Qaeda, notably the strategic decision taken by bin Laden in early 2002 to open a new front in Saudi Arabia. The QAP campaign was made possible by the presence in 2002 of a critical mass of returnees from Afghanistan, a clever two‐track strategy by Al‐Qaeda, and systemic weaknesses in the Saudi security apparatus. The campaign failed because the militants, radicalized in Afghan camps, represented an alien element on the local Islamist scene and lacked popular support. The near‐absence of violence in the Kingdom before 2003 was due to Al‐Qaeda's weak infrastructure in the early 1990s and bin Laden's 1998 decision to suspend operations to preserve local networks. The Saudi regime is currently more stable and self‐confident—and therefore less inclined to democratic reform—than it has been in many years.     

WHERE IS AN OIL SHOCK?

Much of the literature examining the effects of oil shocks asks the question “What is an oil shock?” and has concluded that oil‐price increases are asymmetric in their effects on the U.S. economy. That is, sharp increases in oil prices affect economic activity adversely, but sharp decreases in oil prices have no effect. We reconsider the directional symmetry of oil‐price shocks by addressing the question “Where is an oil shock?” the answer to which reveals a great deal of spatial/directional asymmetry across states. Although most states have typical responses to oil‐price shocks—they are affected by positive shocks only—the rest experience either negative shocks only (five states), both positive and negative shocks (five states), or neither shock (five states).     

How Oil Twists the Hegemon's Arm: The Case of the United States and Saudi Arabia and Their Ambivalent Partnership

The U.S.–Saudi relationship is often seen as an oxymoron. These allies have differed in their foreign policy interests — varied in the need, one for the other — but never severed ties. When the 9/11 attacks are added to the mix, questions are raised about why these ambivalent allies continue to tolerate each other. This study argues that although the United States is the preponderant power, Saudi Arabia has primacy in the energy market. This has caused both countries to remain allies through the different oil crises, the 9/11 attacks, and in spite of the Arab‐Israeli conflict. This contravenes the hegemonic stability theory about alliance formation and duration. Saudi Arabia's roles in the 1973, 1979, 2008, and 2012–2015 oil crises all demonstrate its ability and willingness to act independently of the United States. The fact that it can do this and still maintain its strategic partnership with the United States is incredulous. This invites a revision of the hegemonic stability theory since strong and persistent defection from the hegemon's wishes should catalyze some comparable form of punishment or a severance of the relationship.     

The Evolution of Administrative Systems in Kuwait,Saudi Arabia,and Qatar: The Challenge of Implementing Market Based Reforms

The dramatic plunge in oil prices since the second half of 2014 poses serious challenges for the oil dependent states of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, and revives their interest in accelerating the implementation of market‐based reforms such as outsourcing, privatization, and public–private partnerships. This article challenges the assumption that these reforms offer a panacea for administrative change, and argues that while they might appear to be a solution to the growing fiscal constraints in the three Gulf states, considerable administrative, cultural, economic, and political barriers hinder their effective implementation. The conclusion reached is that western labels of market‐based reforms offer limited options for the three states in the absence of strong political will to make fundamental reforms that could alter the state–society relations. It is suggested that further theorization of administrative change is required in cultural contexts, such as the Gulf region, where administration and society are intertwined, and where trying to minimize the role and size of the state, poses a direct threat to the political legitimacy of the ruling elites.     

Social Relations and War Remembrance: Second World War Atrocities in Rural Tuscan Villages

This article addresses the issue of how long‐term memory of extreme conditions is socially transformed. It focuses on elements of the social structure and pre‐war habitus that might help understanding of the divided memory of massacres that were perpetrated by the Nazis in three rural Tuscan villages between 1943 and 1944. Within the “mnemonic communities”, discrepancies arise since some of the villagers paradoxically blame the partisans instead of the Nazis. An attempt is made to trace current representations of historical events in the framework of traditional social institutions and political life of these small villages in time of crisis. Battles over memory are seen as a twofold process—that is, as part of “internal”, intra‐village relations as well as a form of reaction toward the “external” world of which they feel victims. The article argues that long‐term memory of past political violence is strictly bound up with local power relations.     

Storm Drains as Assemblages: The Political Ecology of Flood Risk in Post‐Colonial Bangalore

Cities around the world are increasingly prone to unequal flood risk. In this paper, I “materialize” the political ecology of urban flood risk by casting stormwater drains—a key artifact implicated in flooding—as recombinant socionatural assemblages. I examine the production of flood risk in the city of Bangalore, India, focusing on the city's informal outskirts where wetlands and circulations of global capital intermingle. Staging a conversation between Marxian and Deleuzian positions, I argue, first, that the dialectics of “flow” and “fixity” are useful in historicizing the relational politics of storm drains from the colonial to the neoliberal era. Second, flood risk has been heightened in the contemporary moment because of an intensified alignment between the flow/fixity of capital and storm drains. Storm drains—and the larger wetlands that they traverse—possess a force‐giving materiality that fuels urban capitalism's risky “becoming‐being”. This argument raises the need for supplementing political‐economic critiques of the city with sociomaterialist understandings of capitalism and risk in the post‐colonial city. The paper concludes with reflections on how assemblage thinking opens up a more distributed notion of agency and a more relational urban political ecology.     

The Coverage of Saudi Arabia in the “Introduction to Sociology” U.S. Textbooks between 2001 and 2015

This article discusses the coverage of Saudi Arabia in “introduction to sociology” textbooks in the context of two variables — the September 11, 2001 attack, and globalization. The study covers 24 major textbooks, all published between 2001 and 2015. The textbooks were chosen with the help and consultation of many colleagues in numerous sociology departments throughout various parts of the United States. Also, the publishers of sociology textbooks were consulted throughout the process of selection. The method of investigation was content analysis which relied heavily upon studying the content of the text. The findings were organized in the following subsections: Islam; the Wahhabi version of Islam; Politics; September 11th and Bin Laden; Women in Saudi Arabia; Human Rights and Civil Rights Abuses; Social Media; Miscellaneous Positive or neutral comments on Saudi Arabia; Visual Sociology; and closing remarks. The finding of the article is more or less negative, as textbooks rarely mentioned positive things about Saudi Arabia.     

A study of social‐market interventions in the shaping of the field of cultural production

A social analysis based on extensive evaluation of the Dance and Drama Awards programme reveals the social‐market political paradigm underpinning the formation of cultural policy in the UK underthe New Labour government. This specific intervention in the field of cultural production is placed in the context of broader government interventions in the cultural domain that seek to give respect to undervalued social and cultural groups. There is a political analysis of the characteristics of the social‐market political formation that underpin New Labour’s “affirmative” actions, and the political strategies informing the government’s “access” and “inclusion” agendas and their impact on the cultural and creative industries. The authors argue that the construction of a “social‐market” position in New Labour’s cultural policy represents an attempt to bridge or “hyphenate” the contradictory claims of social democracy, on the one hand, and economic fatalism, on the other. Despite the rhetoric of social and cultural “transformation”, the authors argue that a “faith” in the market prevents New Labour from transforming the political‐economic and cultural structures that generate economic and cultural injustices.     

The New Maternal State: The Gendered Politics of Governing through Behaviour Change

Abstract: Policies explicitly aimed at changing people's behaviour and recasting state–citizen relations are becoming prevalent in the UK. New political rationalities of “co‐production”, “personalisation” and ‘soft” or “libertarian paternalism” seek to cultivate a relationship between the adaptive state and the active citizen which is increasingly pedagogical. Informing these new pedagogies of governing is research from behavioural economics, psychology and the neurosciences, from which policy strategists draw insights aimed at improving the effectiveness of behaviour‐changing interventions across a range of policy spheres. This paper develops perspectives from feminist economics, critical psychology and feminist political theory in order to demonstrate how such research offers a gendered account of human behaviour and thus is used to assert a conversely gender‐blind explanation of the legitimate role of the state in governing through behaviour change.     

The Uses of Neoliberalism

Abstract: The term “neoliberalism” has come to be used in a wide variety of partly overlapping and partly contradictory ways. This essay seeks to clarify some of the analytical and political work that the term does in its different usages. It then goes on to suggest that making an analytical distinction between neoliberal “arts of government” and the class‐based ideological “project” of neoliberalism can allow us to identify some surprising (and perhaps hopeful) new forms of politics that illustrate how fundamentally polyvalent neoliberal mechanisms of government can be. A range of empirical examples are discussed, mostly coming from my recent work on social policy and anti‐poverty politics in southern Africa.     

The Politics of Carbon Market Design: Rethinking the Techno‐politics and Post‐politics of Climate Change

Carbon markets have provided fertile ground for research on the changing nature of political contestation. MacKenzie locates a “techno‐politics” of carbon markets that creates new possibilities for a “politics of market design”. In contrast, Swyngedouw argues carbon markets are part of a “post‐political” shift that narrows potential pathways through “depoliticisation”. This article engages with these debates by examining three recent attempts to reform the ailing European Union Emissions Trading System: restricting industrial gas offsets, backloading allowance auctions and the 2030 climate and energy package. It conceptualises the respective episodes as contests over the reach, force and priority of value determinations in climate policy, emphasising the contradictory imperatives facing states on each issue. The outcomes of contestation between industry groups and environmental organisations—real but limited reforms and a consolidation of the carbon market over alternatives—demonstrate the constraints facing technocratic campaigning and the ongoing politicisation of climate change.     

Planned International Technology Transfer:

Since the mid-1980s, Saudi Arabia has required that a percentage of all defense contracts awarded to foreign suppliers be reinvested back in the kingdom into new technology companies. The result has been three “economic offset” programs, encompassing Western defense producers and their home-country governments in the world's largest example of planned international technology transfer. This paper reviews the three main Saudi offsets—attached to the Peace Shield (United States), al-Yamamah (United Kingdom) and Sawari (France) arms deals—for their genesis, operations, achievements, and problems, using interviews with participants and statistical data on companies formed. It then attempts some evaluation of them against their own original explicit and implicit goals, and draws out some lessons and implications.     

Creative shifts and directions

The availability and “readiness” of culture as a mode of governmental control makes cultural policy a matter of great importance in any contemporary society. This is true not only in liberal democracies with established arts councils or cultural policies, it is also proactively pursued by a technologically advanced yet illiberal regime like Singapore, eager to position itself as the global “Renaissance City” of the twenty‐first century. What this “renaissance” model entails remains highly cryptic, not least because cultural terms and political markers are often elusive, but also because the very concept of “cultural policy” shifts along with the political and economic tides in Singapore. Drawing on a rarely cited essay by Raymond Williams, this article offers an historical look at cultural policy in Singapore – from its first articulation in 1978 to its present standing under the rubric of “creative industries” (2002). It considers some of the problems encountered and the societal changes made to accommodate Singapore’s new creative direction, all for the sake of ensuring Singapore’s continued economic dynamism. This article contends that cultural policy in Singapore now involves extracting creative energies – and economies – out of each loosely termed “creative worker” by heralding the economic potential of the arts, media, culture and the creative sectors, but concomitantly marking boundaries of political exchange. In this regard, culture in Singapore has become more than ever a site for governmentality and control.     

“WHAT HAS POSTERITY EVER DONE FOR ME?”: FUTURE GENERATIONS,INTERGENERATIONAL JUSTICE,AND THE CHRONOPOLITICS OF DISTANT FUTURES

“Future generations” play a key role in current political debates. In the context of the climate crisis especially, political controversies are often framed as moral problems of “intergenerational justice.” This article aims to historicize the use of the concept of “future generations” in modern political discourse and to uncover its long—and often ambivalent—history. Its main argument is that talking about “future generations” was part of an attempt to integrate (distant) futures into the political discourse of the time. The first part of the article outlines a theoretical perspective on the relationship between generations and temporalities. The second part focuses on how anticipating “future generations” became an important part of the history of utopian thinking and political planning in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the realm of demographic and economic discussions. The third part analyzes the emergence of “future ethics” and “intergenerational justice” as important political discourses in the 1970s. This part refers both to the academic debates about “future generations” and to the way political decision-makers used the concept to legitimize their policies. The article argues that the concept of “future generations” should not be taken as an ethical principle that transcended the political debates of the present. Rather, it was itself the result of intense political controversies.     

Understanding Saudi Arabia's Influence on Pakistan: The Case of the Islamic Military Alliance to Fight Terrorism

The launch of the Saudi‐led so‐called Islamic Military Alliance to Fight Terrorism (IMAFT) in 2015 tested the strong strategic alliance between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In light of concerns about the positioning of the coalition of 41 states against Iranian interests in the Middle East, Pakistan's initial response to the Saudi demand to join the war in Yemen was a polite refusal by means of a unanimous decision of the parliament. However, under tremendous pressure from Riyadh and other Gulf States, Islamabad later capitulated and backtracked from its initial decision. This paper analyses the unique nature of the relationship between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia through a dissection of the various dimensions of the Kingdom's cultural and political influence on Pakistan. It also illuminates Saudi hegemonic strategies and the manner in which Islamabad adjusts and is influenced as well as coerced to revise its foreign policy choices. This paper argues that Saudi's diplomatic strategies, political pressure and pledges of generous financial assistance ensured Pakistan's participation in IMAFT.     

Dancing to the Rhythms of the Fossil Fuel Landscape: Landscape Inertia and the Temporal Limits to Market‐Based Climate Policy

This article makes a contribution to the critique of market‐based mechanisms for climate and energy policy. It explores the environmental effectiveness of market instruments by engaging a broadly conceived “fossil fuel landscape”, or the material, social, and political inertia of fossil energy dependence, as a factor delimiting policy outcomes. The argument is developed through a focus on the idea of economic efficiency as a key ideological construct underlying market‐based policy, and draws on examples from two different market instruments, namely the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, and the Flemish tradable green certificate scheme. I argue that an understanding of the shortcomings of these, and similar, policies requires acknowledgment of the political and socio‐economic power that emanates from the temporal dynamics of fossil fuel capitalism, which are reproduced when economic efficiency becomes the key focus of climate policy.     

Declining Food Security in a Philippine Oil Palm Frontier: The Changing Role of Cooperatives

The long‐held redistributive function of agricultural cooperatives — one of moral economy and poverty alleviation — has changed dramatically as they emerge as core brokers for agro‐industrial development in the so‐called ‘green economy’. This article examines the changing role of cooperatives involved in brokering oil palm production and its impact upon the food security and livelihoods of smallholders who labour in plantation regimes situated in historically uneven agrarian political economies. Findings show how, increasingly, cooperatives reinforce uneven agrarian social relations of production and exchange in which indigenous smallholders experience loss of land, poor wage labour conditions tinged with insecurity and prejudice, and mounting debt in an expanding oil palm complex. The article suggests that these changes in agrarian social relations negatively influence indigenous farmers’ food security pathways, with their access to and use of appropriate foods diminishing. It asserts that understanding the impacts of cooperatives on food security pathways requires a relational and situated analysis of livelihood change and agrarian relations in extractive frontiers.