Demanding a safer tomorrow: Japan's anti‐nuclear rallies in the summer of 2012 (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article discusses Japan's nuclear energy policy and describes the anti‐nuclear protest demonstrations that were held in Japan throughout the summer of 2012, including the author's personal experiences at some of these protests, illuminating the grassroots nature of the current anti‐nuclear movement.     

The Politics of Crisis Policymaking: Chernobyl and Swedish Nuclear Energy Policy

Public policy scholars often accentuate the key role of crises in explaining policy change; however, much empirical work still remains to be done in order to explain crisis‐induced policy outcomes. This article explores the prediction of the Advocacy Coalition Framework that stable coalitions and impediments to learning reduce the likelihood for policy change after a crisis. Strategic action is emphasized as a supplementary variable focusing on the role of political motivations in post‐crisis policymaking. Sweden's decision not to accelerate the nuclear power phaseout following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster provides a case study to assess the utility of these explanations. Findings corroborate theoretical expectations about stable minority coalitions, cast doubts over the presumed rigidity of policy core beliefs, and emphasize strategic action and cognitive heuristics as important motivations for policy choice. The article concludes by outlining three sector‐specific variables (ideological salience, level of conflict, and previous crisis experiences) that add to the explanation of crisis‐induced policy outcomes.     

Pax Ottomanica No More! The “Peace” Discourse in Turkish Foreign Policy in the Post‐Davutoğlu Era and the Prolonged Syrian Crisis

Turkey's eight years between 2008 and 2016 has been dominated by Ahmet Davuto?lu's vision of foreign policy, which was derived from his multi‐edition book Strategic Depth (2000). In order to be able to present itself in its larger periphery as a pro‐active, trustworthy actor, Davuto?lu argued, Turkey needed to change the foreign‐policy paradigms with which it was stranded. As the Strategic Depth vision unfolded, it drew explicit parallels between modern Turkey and the Ottoman neighborhood policy. Turkey‐Syria relations since 2008 had been providing the seekers of neo‐Ottomanist tendencies in the contemporary Turkish foreign policy with abundant examples, because Syria, once an Ottoman territory and always a challenge to modern Turkey, came to be the first poster country in the shift towards Turkey's imperial awakening. In the post‐Davuto?lu era, however, the rhetoric and practices of the past eight years seemed suddenly to disappear from the use of the Turkish agents of foreign policy; the new code of terms and actions to replace the Strategic Depth version is yet to be decided. This study seeks to pin down the neo‐imperialist character of Turkey's foreign‐policy discourse of the aforementioned eight years and contribute to discussions of the Turkish aspiration of neo‐Ottomanism with focus on the Syrian crisis through the Justice and Development Party's re‐invented peace discourse. In doing so, it aims to find out and elaborate on the current tendencies of Turkish foreign policy, which are no longer as explicit and articulated as they were during Davuto?lu's ministry and prime ministry. As Turkey's cross‐border operation to Syria — the Euphrates Shield — ends and another one in Idlib begins, a discursive analysis stretching from Davutoglu's diplomatic “zero problems” with Damascus to the military use of ground troops and air force is timely. Such an endeavor would be essential in understanding the spectacular swing from one edge to the other in Turkey's inclination over a phantasmagorical empire.     

The roots of the global economic crisis (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The world economic crisis should be seen as an episode in the history of money. “National capitalism” was the main way of organizing money in the twentieth century and its symbol was national monopoly currency. This system has been unravelling since the US dollar de‐pegged from gold in 1971. The result is a disconnect between politics which are still largely national and the money circuit which is decentralized and global. The work of Georg Simmel and Karl Polanyi is enrolled to explain this development which entails the loss of money's physical substance, a shift in the social institutions supporting it and a break‐up of the forms and functions of “all‐purpose money”. The euro crisis reveals the historical mistake of treating market economy as a driver of society and politics. Good intentions at this stage will not reverse what has become a Greek tragedy in more senses than one.     

The morality police are coming! Muslims in Norway's media discourses (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In early 2010, a series of reports appeared in the influential liberal‐conservative Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten drawing attention to what appeared to reporters to be a self‐appointed, de facto Muslim ‘morality police’ attempting to use harassment to exert social control over non‐hijab‐wearing women of immigrant background and gay men in the district of Grønland in the inner city of Oslo. What came to be known in Norway as the ‘morality‐police debate’ demonstrated the extent to which the figure of the Muslim male as an embodied threat to Norway's presumed relative gender equality and lack of homophobia had come to be embedded in the country's media and political discourse. This article suggests that the debate can tell us much about why certain tropes central to Norway's anti‐Muslim discourses have gained such currency across the Norwegian political board in recent years.     

Rethinking Development Space in Emerging Countries: Turkey's Conservative Countermovement

Despite an increasingly flexible global policy context, most emerging countries refuse to venture beyond their pre‐existing development strategies. This article contends that in some cases domestic political constraints under liberalized markets might preclude policy dynamism. In particular, it draws attention to the tension between market expansion and social cohesion as a formative influence over policy patterns. This tension is sometimes addressed through a conservative countermovement whereby liberally‐oriented governments entice sections of the poor into broad electoral coalitions by employing palliative interventions alongside market‐expanding policies. Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is one example. Central to the Turkish case has been the redeployment of the country's historic foreign capital‐dependent pattern of growth in the service of selective redistribution and credit‐fuelled consumerism. The ensuing deficit‐led neoliberal populism assured stable and equitable growth in the extraordinary international and domestic context of the mid‐2000s, but has proven unfeasible since the global crisis. However, this coupling of market and social preferences has become politically so firmly entrenched in time that it now constrains the policy options to address Turkey's developmental impasse.     

Russia's European policy under Medvedev: how sustainable is a new compromise?

This article argues that Dmitry Medvedev's term in office, despite the continuity in Russia's foreign policy objectives, brought about a certain change in Russia's relations with the European Union and the countries of the Common Neighbourhood. The western perceptions of Russia as a resurgent power able to use energy as leverage vis‐à‐vis the EU were challenged by the global economic crisis, the emergence of a buyer's market in Europe's gas trade, Russia's inability to start internal reforms, and the growing gap in the development of Russia on the one hand and China on the other. As a result, the balance of self‐confidence shifted in the still essentially stagnant EU–Russian relationship. As before, Moscow is ready to use all available opportunities to tighten its grip on the post‐Soviet space, but it is less keen to go into an open conflict when important interests of EU member states may be affected. The realization is slowly emerging also inside Russia that it is less able either to intimidate or attract European actors, even though it can still appeal to their so‐called ‘pragmatic interests’, both transparent and non‐transparent. At the same time, whereas the new modus operandi may be suboptimal from the point of view of those in the country who would want Russia's policy to be aimed at the restoration of global power status, it is the one that the Kremlin can live with—also after the expected return of Vladimir Putin as Russia's president. Under the current scheme, the West—and the EU in particular—does little to challenge Russia's internal order and leaves it enough space to conduct its chosen course in the former Soviet Union.     

Sir Edward Grey,Germany, and the Outbreak of the First World War: A Re-Evaluation

ABSTRACT

Historians have variously condemned British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey for contributing to the escalation of the July Crisis of 1914, and praised him as an heroic advocate of peace. Addressing this conundrum, this article first assesses historiographical debates around the significance of Grey's policy towards Germany in the events that led to the outbreak of the First World War. It then traces Grey's foreign policy vis-à-vis Germany on the one hand, and the Entente on the other. Finally, it provides an innovative analysis of Grey's policy from the vantage point of Berlin, arguing that in July 1914 decisions taken by the governments of other countries escalated the crisis and were taken regardless of Grey's position. The article concludes that current historiography overestimates British agency in July 1914 and that Grey was not as important to the outcome of the crisis as both his critics and his defenders have claimed. His actions could not change the minds of those on the continent who were bent on war.     

The future of NATO enlargement after the Ukraine crisis

Russian President Vladimir Putin claims that his country's annexation of Crimea in March 2014 was partly in response to NATO enlargement. NATO leaders counter that eastern enlargement is not a cause of the Ukraine crisis, and they argue that enlargement does not threaten Russia, but rather it creates stability for all of Europe. This article examines the history of NATO–Russian tensions over enlargement, considers how NATO's enlargement policy factored into the Ukraine crisis, and reviews options for the future of enlargement. Drawing on diplomatic history and geopolitical theory, the article explains Russia's persistent hostility towards NATO's policy of eastward expansion and highlights NATO's failure to convert Russia to its liberal world‐view. The alliance's norm‐driven enlargement policy has hindered the creation of an enduring NATO–Russia cooperative relationship and helped fuel the outbreak of conflict in Georgia and Ukraine. In light of this, NATO should alter its current enlargement policy by infusing it with geopolitical rationales. This means downgrading the transformative and democratization elements of enlargement and, instead, focusing on how candidate countries add to NATO capabilities and impact overall alliance security. A geopolitically‐driven enlargement policy would prioritize countries in the Balkan and Scandinavian regions for membership and openly exclude Georgia and Ukraine from membership. Ultimately, this policy would have the effect of strengthening NATO while giving it more flexibility in dealing with Russia.     

China and world anthropology: A conversation on the legacy of Fei Xiaotong (1910–2005) (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Fei Xiaotong (Fei Hsiao‐Tung, 1910–2005) obtained his PhD under Bronislaw Malinowski's supervision at the London School of Economics in 1938. Of the 20 volumes of his completed works, two books are well‐known in the West: Peasant life in China, published in English in 1939, and Xiangtu zhingguo (1947), translated as From the soil by Gary Hamilton and Zheng Wang in 1992. As one of China's finest sociologists and anthropologists, Fei was instrumental in laying a solid foundation for the development of sociological and anthropological studies in China, and his work helped to influence China's social and economic development. This is a translated, abridged and revised version of a conversation originally conducted in English, but published in Chinese to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Fei Xiaotong. Wu Zitong, the editor of China Reading Weekly, puts a series of questions to Gary Hamilton and Xiangqun Chang.     

The euro crisis and European citizenship: The euro 2001–2012 – celebration or commemoration? (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The Eurozone crisis has highlighted the problems of European economic integration, but what effects is it having on social cohesion in the European Union? Using symbolic, historical and anthropological perspectives this article examines the relationship between the single currency and European citizenship. I argue that the roots of the crisis lie in the euro's origins. Economic and monetary union (EMU) was an assemblage of two very different rationales: one economic and based on neoliberal assumptions, the other political and geared towards forging social cohesion among Europeans. Binding Europe through a common currency was always a risky endeavour, placing heavy expectations on the identity‐effects of money. EU leaders also seemed curiously oblivious to the possible negative effects that weaknesses in the euro might have for European solidarity. Drawing on theories of money and its role as a technology of citizenship and symbolic boundary marker, I argue that the euro continues to symbolize European integration, only now it has come to symbolize the cleavages and tensions that divide Europe. Paradoxically, one effect of the Eurozone crisis is not fragmentation but an acceleration of the deepening of European economic governance. However, the centralization this entails imposes heavy costs on the EU's peripheral members and raises concerns about the future of democracy in Europe.     

The International Monetary Fund and its New Economics

This article focuses on a key element of the IMF's agenda for change: the repackaging of its economics of crisis around inflation targeting. It examines how this new policy regime redefines the political economy of the IMF's policy advice, and contextualizes it by focusing on Eastern Europe, the region worst affected by the global financial crisis which began in 2007. The article compares the conditionalities designed under the new and old policy regimes and argues that the mainstreaming of inflation targeting reproduces the IMF's function within a neoliberal political economy. It shows how, depending on the role of the IMF in the policy process, the models that inform policy are employed differently. During ‘normal’ times, models engender a contractionary bias that favours speculative capital. When acting as ‘lender of last resort’, the IMF retains the traditional emphasis on fiscal contractions, paying only lip service to its new economics of crisis while further ignoring crucial questions of macroeconomic policy coordination or the destabilizing potential of short‐term capital inflows.     

The house gun: White writing,white fears and black justice (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

One way of understanding the Pistorius case is through the powerful writings of white South African authors such as Nobel Prize laureate Nadine Gordimer's anticipatory post‐apartheid novel, The house gun, in which she imagined a scenario similar to the one played out in the Pistorius trial where white fears and black justice met in the courtroom. South Africa is not unique. The mobilization of white peoples' fear of black or brown ‘intruders’ has infected other divided nations, like the United States and Israel. Here the social and architectural construction of ‘white’ settler or settler‐like special enclosures fortified by the legal right to self‐defence with private weapons has reproduced a colonial ‘paranoid ethos’ and a dangerous denial of the violence that is nested like a coiled rattlesnake from within their own segregated and hypervigilant enclosures.     

National and regional identities in Brazil: Rio Grande do Sul and its peculiarities

ABSTRACT. From the 1930s, Brazil experienced a growing national centralisation and the construction of Brasilidade (Brazilianness). The military regime (1964–85) deepened centralisation and emphasised national identity, little space being left for regional identities. With the political opening and the redemocratisation of Brazil, starting at the end of the 1970s, the stress was on differences in a period in which Brazil had already achieved a high degree of integration. Identities were re‐created, among them that of Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state of Brazil, where a strong revival of gaúcho culture took place. The 1980s and 1990s were marked by a growing development of activities and disputes linked to the gaúcho tradition. In spite of the fact that Rio Grande do Sul is predominantly urban and industrialised, this process reached out to the state's rural past and the equestrian figure of the gaúcho.     

Talking to strangers (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The language used by politicians and its social effects have been of long‐standing interest to social anthropology. Opinion‐formers on both sides of the North Atlantic have recently argued that this language can inflame tensions and reinforce divisions. In the UK, the discussion has centred on relations between a white majority and a Muslim minority, while in the US, in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of a Democratic Congresswoman in Arizona, it has focused on the risk of political language provoking violence. The antidote to inflammatory language is often assumed to be moderation, defined as a (self‐) disciplined engagement with divided publics. Drawing on the insights of Danielle Allen's Talking to strangers, here I suggest that moderation might be re‐imagined, not as a vague commitment to centrism and the ‘middle ground’, but as a powerful resource for citizens and communities to challenge the ideological excesses of politics, religion and the market in the twenty‐first century.     

Enter the myopticon: Uncertain surveillance in the Danish asylum system (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Asylum seekers in Europe face increasingly restrictive policy regimes across the continent. In Denmark, they are held at designated asylum centres while their cases are processed and are subject to limitations on their movement, education and employment, as well as to a degree of surveillance from both the state and the Danish Red Cross, which operates the majority of the asylum centres. While these structures are in some ways reminiscent of Foucault's panopticon, I want to suggest a counterpoint to the panopticon, which I call the ‘myopticon’ to indicate the near‐sightedness of the central surveying eye. The myopticon is a near‐sighted system of surveillance practices, knowledges and sanctions, deployed as though it were panoptic. I want to suggest that the uncertainty that has soaked through the Danish asylum system and profoundly affected the asylum seekers in it is not a byproduct of bureaucratic processing, but intrinsic to the operation of the myopticon. By drawing out points of distinction with Foucault's panopticon, I sketch the outlines of a new technology of power that has powerful consequences for the daily lives of asylum seekers in Denmark.     

Sovereignty,Risk and Biotechnology: Zambia's 2002 GM Controversy in Retrospect

The southern African food crisis of 2002 led to one of the most significant controversies over the use of genetically modified (GM) crops in the developing world to date. Zambia's staunch opposition to GM food aid during the crisis is still frequently used as a reference point in debates over GM seed technology in agricultural development, and the morality of advanced biotechnology. This article re‐examines the controversy and its contemporary relevance using oral history interviews with key scientists, policy makers and development practitioners engaged in debates and decision‐making processes in Zambia in 2002, alongside a review of discourses in the Zambian press. The author argues that, rather than different perceptions of health and environmental risks derived from GM crops, it was questions of sovereign regulatory control of technology in a context of diminished state capacity — and the decline in the Zambian state's capacity for agricultural science research in particular — that played a central role in shaping anti‐GM attitudes. In addition, trust in the arguments of GM advocates was diminished by communication efforts which treated Zambian scientists and policy elites as a lay rather than an expert audience.     

Public anthropology and the financial crisis (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

When anthropologists write about finance and the economy, their publications seldom reach audiences as wide as those of economists or journalists. Is there a space for anthropologists in public debates about our era's acute economic dilemmas? The short answer should be yes, partly because anthropologists are trained to probe social silences and make the invisible visible, and because we reject the pitfalls of Econ 101, oversimplifications that pervade public discourse. Academic anthropologists can draw lessons from what we might term ‘public economics’, as well as from the writings of Gillian Tett, an award‐winning financial columnist trained in anthropology. Perhaps we can also learn a little from tricksters – or from satirical activists who deploy irony, caricature, and paradox as sharp instruments in this age of austerity and billionaires. As we analyze finance and the economy in the aftermath of a financial meltdown whose causes and policy implications are intensely debated, our challenge still is to satisfy journalists' appetite for sound‐bite narratives without sacrificing nuance, historical contingency, and complexity.     

The African Union and the International Criminal Court: counteracting the crisis

In October 2016, South Africa became the first nation to withdraw from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), after Burundi began taking steps to leave it. Kenya is likely to follow, and other states, like Uganda, could take the same cue. The ICC is facing the most serious diplomatic crisis of its history, with the African Union (AU) denouncing double standards, neo‐colonialism and ‘white justice’, and regularly threatening to withdraw from the Rome Statute en masse. This article adopts both an interdisciplinary and a pragmatic policy‐oriented approach, with the aim of producing concrete recommendations to counteract the crisis. It firstly outlines the context of this crisis which, although not new, is becoming increasingly serious. It then responds to the AU's objections to the ICC. The court's ‘Afro‐centrism’ is explained by objective facts (the occurrence of mass crimes taking place on the African continent, the large number of African parties to the Rome Statute, the principle of complementarity) as well as by subjective decisions (a convergence of interest between the African leaders who brought the cases to the court themselves to weaken their opponents, and the prosecutor who needed quickly to find cases). Afro‐centrism should also be nuanced, as the ICC has already shown an interest in cases outside Africa and the extent to which it is a problem is a matter of perspective. The article also responds to the ‘peace vs justice’ objection, and emphasises that African states were instrumental in creating and sustaining the ICC. It finally formulates recommendations to ease relations between the ICC and AU, such as to investigate more outside Africa, reinforce African national jurisdictions, create intermediary institutional structures, promote regional‐level action, and rely more on ICC‐friendly African states and African civil society.     

Cartoon epic heroes in indigenous Siberian revival: The meaning of ethnicity in Putin's Russia (Respond to this article at https://www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today/debate)

This article outlines a motivation for the Russian Federation's incursion into the Crimea, which concerns the Putin administration's relationship with Russia's citizens, rather than the outside world. I use a case study from Siberia – the Sakha people's revival of their national epic, the Olongkho – to explore the possibility that Putin's behaviour during the Ukrainian crisis serves to legitimate his authority within Russia, by appealing to conceptions of ethnicity that have their roots in Soviet‐era social engineering. Rather than deducing the Putin administration's motives from the events and relationships they immediately concern, I explore motivations emerging from the configuration of values, perceptions, and conventions that shapes and reproduces social difference in Russia. The Sakha Olongkho revival shows how the perceptions of ethnicity fostered during the Soviet era have become powerful indexes of morality and authority. Individual Sakha citizens now demonstrate their identities and values through adopting a stance towards a reified conception of Sakha ethnicity expressed in their choices of recreation, fashion and consumption. Sakha ethnicity has become integrated into the process whereby hierarchical social groupings emerge within Sakha society according to their avowal of specific tastes and norms. The relatively small size of the Sakha population – which is nevertheless the dominant ethnic group in their republic, Sakha (Yakutia) – enables us to see trends affecting the rest of Russia in microcosm. Thus, I suggest that former Soviet ethnicity has become so closely woven into Russia's morality that Putin's invasions of foreign states, in the name of the ethnic Russian community, bolster his claim to be a moral person and a legitimate and authoritative national leader.