Nontraditional security and China's transnational narcotics control in northern Laos and Myanmar

Regarding illicit drugs as a nontraditional security challenge (NTS), the Chinese state deploys a policy package combining coercive crackdown and development assistance to start transnational narcotics control in the Golden Triangle—the notorious illicit opium-producing area between Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand. This paper examines how illicit drugs are framed as a security challenge and how the state works with other forces to implement transnational narcotics control. Specifically, I focus on the Chinese state's efforts to implement transnational narcotics control in the notorious illicit opium-producing areas in northern Laos and Myanmar. My analysis draws first on the Copenhagen School's work on securitization, that is, how certain discourses are deployed to dramatize and present an issue as a security challenge requiring supreme priority. Then I situate drug trafficking in the tension between the territorial logic of national sovereignty and the transnational logic of NTS challenges in order to analyze the Chinese state's policy of narcotics control in the Golden Triangle. Through this analysis, I seek to underscore the longstanding but underdeveloped theoretical recognition of illicit drugs as a global commodity and an NTS challenge. The nexus of territorial sovereignty and extraterritorial subsystems spells out a new direction to understand NTS challenges in general and illicit drugs in particular.     

Making and remaking Tibetan diasporic identities

The fifty-year long Chinese occupation of Tibet has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and has produced a refugee flow that continues today. Although the plight of Tibetans commands international attention, this diaspora remains understudied and undertheorized. To speak to this silence, we follow Patterson and Kelley (2000) and argue that the Tibetan diaspora can be analysed as both a condition and a process. Diaspora as condition emphasizes the structural features of an exile population, such as race, gender, class and religion. Diaspora as process draws attention to lived refugee experiences--the making and remaking of diasporic identities. In the Tibetan diaspora, His Holiness the Dalai Lama holds a central position. Through his global profile, and a transnational nationalist political structure, he creates images of Tibet, builds community and works toward Tibetan self-determination. Within this nationalist frame, Tibetan identities assume a singular, unified and homogeneous form. Further analysis that focuses on individual voices, however, shows how Tibetan diasporic identities are contested, complex and embedded in not one but multiple narratives of struggle.     

LEVIATHAN AND KRAKEN: STATES,CORPORATIONS, AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

In our politico-philosophical bestiary, no monster has historically been more prominent than the Leviathan, the whale of the Book of Job, transformed by Hobbes, which has long been ubiquitous as a metaphor or as a signifier in all intellectual traditions touching upon the political. Like the state itself, we argue, the Leviathan has played an outsized role in the way we theorize and imagine relations of sovereignty in the world. This essay seeks to add a new hermeneutical creature to the bestiary: the Kraken. Said to be huge and to lurk in Norway's icy waters, the Kraken first emerged in the accounts of natural philosophers in the eighteenth century, at the very moment when political economy was becoming the premier science of governance in Europe. Leviathan is an emblem of a kind of state that no longer exists and has never existed, and it remains our most potent emblem of the state's reification, a relentlessly compelling figure that has long blinded historians to alternate sovereignties within, across, and outside the physical territories of states. From stateless financial capital to multinational corporations acting like states on the world stage, such forms of sovereignty are an essential feature of the global politics we are now living. These forms are not new, nor is their emblem: the Kraken.     

Tibet and the Problem of Radical Reductionism

Abstract:  This article takes issue with a mode of argumentation advanced by a number of left-leaning, radical scholars, including those associated with China's New Left, about the causes of the Tibetan unrest in China in spring 2008. According to this stance, the Tibetan protests were the result of external manipulation by neoconservative, reactionary forces, ranging from the CIA to the Dalai Lama. The unstated premise of this response is that taking a critical stance against western imperialism and neoliberal globalization necessitates a defense of China's policies in Tibet. Such arguments take the form of unfavorable comparisons between Tibetans and Palestinians especially because the former are often romanticized, suggestions that Tibetans are unfortunate ideological victims of US-funded propaganda, and claims that they should be grateful for Chinese state-funded development. This response renders Tibetans incapable of being authentic political subjects. A radical stance on Western imperialism and capitalism should reject such reductionism.     

Freethinkers,anarchists and Francisco Ferrer: the making of a transnational solidarity campaign

This article examines the transnational solidarity campaign for Francisco Ferrer, the Catalan anarchist and educator who was sentenced to death for his alleged involvement in Barcelona's ‘Tragic Week’ of 1909. The international scale of the protests against Ferrer's execution was much remarked upon by his contemporaries. While historians have examined both the nature of demonstrations in support of Ferrer and the way in which he was commemorated, they have mostly focused on specific national contexts. This article takes a different approach: it investigates the transnational dimensions of the campaign. It places the protests within the framework of the ‘culture wars’ surrounding church–state relations. These cleavages were inherently transnational, and the structures developed by the international freethought movement, for example, played a significant role in sustaining the Ferrer campaign. The article also draws attention to other factors that shaped the protests and transcended national categories: from widespread images of Spanish ‘despotism’ to the way in which a foreign case could be adopted for domestic political mobilisation.     

Agamben,Postcoloniality, and Sovereignty in South Korea

This paper examines modern Korean politics through the framework of Giorgio Agamben's theories of sovereign power, bare life, and the state of exception. Though his political analysis draws from the European history, we contend that the nature of his method attests to the possibility of analogical examples in non‐Western places. Thus, we argue that a postcolonial encounter with Agamben may enrich our understanding of sovereignty and political geography. In the Korean context, such an analysis needs to consider that sovereign power has been shaped by the itineraries of colonialism and empire. Korea's political space is deeply marked by the legacy of Japanese colonialism, the imperial interventions by the U.S., and the division of the peninsula. Thus, Korea offers a valuable lens through which to read Agamben's critique of sovereignty. Our paper offers such a reading to argue that a state of exception functions as the underlying nomos for postcolonial Korea.     

State Power,Civic Participation and the Urban Frontier: The Politics of the Commons in Karachi

Abstract: A martial state's neoliberal policies opened the nation's frontiers to new forms of globalization. This article investigates the political process that undergirded the military and global capital's sequestration of common land in Karachi and the concomitant contestation by a key civil society organization. Using Foucault's conception of sovereignty and government as an assemblage of authority and strategies of rationalization, this paper analyses the role of state and non‐state actors and changing power configurations in a conflict that surrounded the enclosure of a common and its transformation into a securitized zone of consumption in Karachi's Civil Lines. The conflict highlights the nature of the politics of space and citizenship in Pakistan's primary metropolis.     

南京政府对康藏纠纷的定性及解决措施分析

南京国民政府将 1930年爆发的康藏纠纷定性为地方性冲突事件 ,反对英国插手干涉 ;把解决康藏纠纷与恢复对藏主权、巩固西部边陲结合起来 ,决定用和平方式谋求纠纷的迅速解决 ,甚至可以做出让步 ;但中央与西藏地方在解决纠纷的程序和方式等问题上分歧较大 ,致使纠纷的核心问题得不到解决 ;这场纠纷中断了中央与西藏地方之间关系改善的进程 ,达赖和班禅的矛盾再次激化 ,康藏社会和经济发展停滞     

Following the caterpillar fungus: nature,commodity chains,and the place of Tibet in China's uneven geographies

Following caterpillar fungus as it travels from the Tibetan Plateau to wealthy Chinese consumers, this article makes several interventions into geographical studies of commodity chains. First, it argues for an expansion beyond the usual call to connect the political economy of production with cultures of consumption; the cultural politics of production and political economies of consumption must also be considered. Second, it argues for bringing together political economy and more-than-human analytical approaches to commodity chains, showing how nature and the nonhuman play a key role in an assemblage that has allowed Tibetans to navigate livelihoods in a rapidly changing economy. This challenges a tendency to assume a universal figure of ‘the human’ in more-than-human geographies. Third, by connecting the erasure of Tibetans from representations of various natures used to sell caterpillar fungus with the broader politics of Tibetans within the People's Republic of China, we show that commodity fetishism can conceal not just labor relations, but also political struggles not reducible to class. Finally, we show that following a small fungus can shed light on the unevenness of China's capitalist development obscured in monolithic narratives of China's rise, demonstrating the value of expanding commodity chain studies beyond those that end with Western consumers.     

Transnationalism in the Era of Nation-States: China, 1900–1945

Transnationalism tends to be seen as a late twentieth century development associated with advanced capitalism, flexible production and post-modernism. However, if, as many claim, nationalism emerged in the era of capitalism, then it surely had to deal with the boundary-crossing and globalizing impetus of capitalism from its inception. This article explores how nationalist regimes and spokesmen dealt with the transnational flows, demands, and ideals generated not only by capitalism, but by historical forces such as universalizing religions and the distribution and movement of populations across territorial nations. Focusing on East Asia in the first half of the twentieth century, three cases are studied: the convergence of Chinese and Japanese ideals of pan-Asianism; the Chinese republican regime's effort to incorporate the non-Chinese peoples of the vast peripheries into the territorial nation-state; and this regime's efforts to cultivate the loyalty of overseas Chinese to the nation-state. Mobilizing and deploying these transterritorial phenomena was crucial to the nation-state's internal power, yet such a mobilization tended to transgress the conception of territorial sovereignty upon which the nation-state was equally dependent both domestically and internationally. The recent signs of a tendency for the territorially sovereign nation to develop into a deterritorialized nation has consequences that can only be understood in the context of the nation's relationship to transnational forces in this earlier period.     

Global Public Policy,Transnational Policy Communities,and Their Networks

Public policy has been a prisoner of the word “state.” Yet, the state is reconfigured by globalization. Through “global public–private partnerships” and “transnational executive networks,” new forms of authority are emerging through global and regional policy processes that coexist alongside nation‐state policy processes. Accordingly, this article asks what is “global public policy”? The first part of the article identifies new public spaces where global policies occur. These spaces are multiple in character and variety and will be collectively referred to as the “global agora.” The second section adapts the conventional policy cycle heuristic by conceptually stretching it to the global and regional levels to reveal the higher degree of pluralization of actors and multiple‐authority structures than is the case at national levels. The third section asks: who is involved in the delivery of global public policy? The focus is on transnational policy communities. The global agora is a public space of policymaking and administration, although it is one where authority is more diffuse, decision making is dispersed and sovereignty muddled. Trapped by methodological nationalism and an intellectual agoraphobia of globalization, public policy scholars have yet to examine fully global policy processes and new managerial modes of transnational public administration.     

Transformation or stagnation? Rethinking Australia's defence

State on state conflicts are being replaced by hybrid wars and asymmetric conflicts in which there is no clear cut distinction between soldiers and civilians and between organised violence, terror, crime and war. Given the enormous changes in Australia's security environment, it is time to rethink our defence strategy which has four major failings. It is based on a misplaced geographical determinism that ignores the diverse and globalised nature of modern conflict. It has shaped the Australian Defence Force for the wrong wars. It gives insufficient weight to the transnational threats that confront us. And it fails to recognise that modern defence forces must win the peace as well as the war. Australia needs a strategy for the future not the past and a transformed defence force structured for the very different security challenges of the 21 st century.     

Asylum-seekers in Australia's international relations

The paper is divided into five sections. In the first, I offer some observations on the nature of 'sovereignty', and on the place of 'border controls' within sovereignty discourse. In the second, I discuss what it means to be a 'middle power', and what 'soft power' resources a middle power may need to use. In the third, I argue that crude populism has shaped recent responses to asylum-seekers, with scant regard to some of the wider consequences for Australia's reputation, but suggest that part of the blame lies with past failures of the foreign policy establishment to recognise genuine concerns entertained at mass level about the morality of Australian alignments and affiliations. In the fourth, I outline the key elements of Australia's recent policies towards asylum-seekers, and argue that they entail costs in terms both of Australia's reputation, and the nature of the Australian polity. In the fifth, I suggest some new directions to pursue.     

Gender and Welfare Reform in Post‐ Revolutionary Mexico

This article discusses the impact a gender and woman's history conference had on the development of my own research and writing. ‘Las Olvidadas’ was a conference held at Yale in the Spring of 2001, and was the first in a series of Mexican women's and gender history conferences organised. My own research, on the gendered nature of the welfare state in Mexico, explores how class and race intersected with gender to produce a welfare system that, while particular to Mexico, also nevertheless had much in common with other Latin American countries. These conferences shaped both my views of gender, but also the importance of the transnational to historical research.     

The religious self-alteration of Shem Irofa'alu during the anti-colonial Maasina Rule in Solomon Islands (1944–1953)

This essay explores the post-World War Two anti-colonial Maasina Rule in north Malaita, Solomon Islands, to show how a church leader Shem Irofa'alu decided to establish a religious movement independent of the state and the traditional evangelical church. Irofa'alu's movement indexes an important moment of culture change towards increasing enthusiasm for the often-overlooked Christianity-based forms of sovereignty in the region. It highlights that Maasina Rule was not only a powerful rupture in social processes, but also sharpened the growing division between state and church. Irofa'alu's role in Maasina Rule shows that his influence peaked between 1948 and 1950 and then went into rapid decline. This change in fortune coincided with a critical turning point in the colonial government's attempts to end the movement through appeasement. No longer the head of the evangelical church in Malu'u sub-district and frustrated about the mother church's governance, Irofa'alu retreated to his home area and set about establishing a new church, Boboa (‘Foundation’), his first attempt at organizing a self-governing assembly before introducing Jehovah's Witnesses in north Malaita. In later years, Irofa'alu became a prophet-exemplar for new generations of religious leaders trying to establish Malaitan sovereignties based on their own power to move the truth of prophecies away from foreign state and church organizations.     

The Biafran secession and the limits of self-determination

The Biafran secession crisis raised a series of profound and unanswerable questions about the nature and limits of self-determination, state sovereignty and African decolonization. A wide range of actors—both supporters and opponents of Biafra—viewed the Nigerian civil war and Biafra's attempt to carve out a new state as an important moment in the history of self-determination as a political and legal principle. Likewise, the collapse of Biafra seemed to offer a series of lessons for movements asserting their right to self-determination, as well as for those seeking to limit its application, suggesting the open-ended and contested nature of the concept even as it was institutionalized in the fabric of international human rights law. Ultimately, however, Biafra's failed secession attempt could only highlight the ambiguity and contested nature of sovereignty and self-determination in the international system, and the ability of groups such as the Igbos to exploit their indeterminacy in an effort to achieve their aims.     

Informal sovereignties and multiple Muslim feminisms: Feminist geo-legality in Sri Lanka

This paper argues that Muslim feminisms emerge as spatially differentiated strategies and tactics to accommodate local varieties of Muslim “informal sovereignties”. These informal sovereignties are exercised by Muslim judges, scholars and lawyers regulating Muslim marriages and divorces, based on diverse readings of the Muslim Personal Law and situated in the context of different forms of violence, such as Islamophobia and ethno-religious communalism. Comparing two districts in Sri Lanka - Puttalam and Batticaloa - the paper shows how Muslim feminist activists navigate spatially diverse forms of informal sovereignties exercised by Muslim movements and institutions, in response to locally specific political, social and economic challenges that Muslims face in the aftermath of Sri Lanka's decades-long civil war. The struggles over implementing and reforming the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act (MMDA), the Muslim Personal Law in Sri Lanka, focus on Muslim women's bodies and spaces as main sites of politics. The paper thereby contributes to debates in feminist geo-legality and Muslim femininity by pointing to the need to understand the contextuality of Muslim Personal Law within Sri Lanka's varieties of lived Islam.     

The benefit-sharing principle: Implementing sovereignty bargains on water

A global water crisis is emerging that may challenge states' existing and future water availability. With countries already heavily reliant on international rivers, the issue of managing water scarcity in these basins is mounting. An already complex issue due to climatic change and the politics of access, the management of water resources is complicated further by sovereignty. In a context shaped by political boundaries and a concomitant territorial exclusivity, nation-states seek to guarantee their societies' water by exerting control through physical and institutional infrastructure. Yet, the basin's hydrological interdependency implies co-riparian countries remain vulnerable to each other's use of the shared river, suggesting ecological rather than just political limits to sovereignty. The continued vulnerability, as envisaged within the greening of sovereignty, suggests international cooperation is necessary. Explained as sovereignty bargains, in which states trade reduced autonomy for future benefits, international cooperation is, we suggest, bi-directional and can stem from or create international institutions. We examine an instance of international cooperation that exemplifies an alternative approach to international river management. The benefit-sharing principle focuses on allocating the outputs from water use, rather than the water itself; and was used by the Senegal basin riparians to access key services such as electricity despite a context of poverty, climatic change and intra-basin politics. What emerges is a strong narrative of cooperation sustained, over decades, by the states' willingness to engage in sovereignty bargains.     

Putin,national self-determination and political independence in the twenty-first century

This contribution focuses on the right of nations to self-determination after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It suggests that sovereignty and territorial integrity are not as secure as once thought. A number of articles and statements issued by Vladimir Putin are analysed to identify nationalist themes which he uses to reject Ukraine's right to exist outside the Russian state. Key themes include a primordial account of national origins, the conflation of state and nation, and a refusal to recognise a right to self-determination of territories that had once been part of Russia. Putin's nationalism draws on imperial nationalism, state nationalism, revanchism and majoritarianism to underwrite his claims. Such views are widespread among established states, contributing to the instability of the contemporary world. It is argued that a reconfiguration of the relationship between state and nation is long overdue, as is the inflexible nature of territorial integrity.     

Political Philosophy and the Problems of International Order: Machiavelli,Kant, and Aristotle

Although international order is a consistent concern for both statesmen and citizens, it has received only rare attention from political theorists. In this essay I evaluate the contemporary international order in light of political thought, specifically with reference to Machiavelli, Kant, and Aristotle. Contemporary international order and its historical roots in the Peace of Augsburg find theoretical expression in the writings of Machiavelli, especially insofar as he advocates for overturning classical political thought. By rejecting classical political thought and the notion of natural right, along with Christian doctrine, Machiavelli set the stage for the political absolutism that underlies the concept of state sovereignty, as it was expressed at Augsburg. Kant, in rejecting Machiavelli's political absolutism, prepared the ground for international human rights. In doing so he provided theoretic ground for the authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But while human rights may provide a welcome balance to state sovereignty, they undermine international order insofar as international order relies on state sovereignty. I suggest that the current theoretical and legal inconsistencies that come about from making room for both state sovereignty and human rights may have their origins in modern political theory's rejection of Aristotelian political thought.