The contested rescaling of economic governance in East Asia: a special issue

The special issue this article opens engages with an apparent conundrum that has often puzzled observers of East Asian politics—why, despite the region's considerable economic integration, multilateral economic governance institutions remain largely underdeveloped. The authors argue that this ‘regionalism problématique’ has led to the neglect of prior and more important questions pertaining to how patterns of economic governance, beyond the national scale, are emerging in East Asia and why. In this special issue, the contributors shift analytic focus onto social and political struggles over the scale and instruments of economic governance in East Asia. The contributions identify and explain the emergence of a wide variety of regional modes of economic governance often neglected by the scholarship or erroneously viewed as stepping stones towards ‘deeper’ multilateralism.     

A Tale of Two Fishing Boat Graveyards

Two survey and research projects by SCAPE, NAS, the North of Scotland Archaeological Society, Findhorn Heritage, and volunteers at Loch Fleet, East Sutherland and Findhorn Bay, Moray, have documented two early 20th‐century boat graveyards. These encompass the remains of the local herring fleets that were largely composed of the mighty Zulu herring drifters, once ubiquitous but now very rare in the archaeological record. Survey and research have shown how these sites tell the story of the decline of the local fisheries, illustrate the development of the national industry, and give insight into the responses of these fishing communities in this changing world.     

Diversifying Australia’s Indo-Pacific infrastructure diplomacy

Infrastructure is an emerging component of Australian diplomacy. In recent years, many infrastructure and connectivity (I&C) programs have been launched in the Indo-Pacific, designed to close the ‘infrastructure gaps’ that plague the region. Competition amongst these, particularly between US and Chinese offerings, has posed a dilemma for Australian foreign policy. Australia has struggled to articulate a policy on China’s Belt and Road Initiative that balances strategic concerns against economic opportunities; while enthusiastic engagement with US alternatives risks perceptions of ‘choosing’ sides between the region’s two main powers. Yet the contemporary marketplace for Indo-Pacific I&C is much broader, with programs recently launched by many governments and regional organisations. These presents an opportunity for Australia to diversify its infrastructure diplomacy, particularly through engagement with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, cooperation with Japan and new avenues for commercial diplomacy. By engaging with a wider range of I&C partners and institutions, Australia can better integrate itself with the emerging infrastructure systems of the Indo-Pacific.     

STRUCTURAL IMPERATIVES BEHIND RACIAL CHANGE IN BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

While it is agreed that capital made use of race to restructure for more profitable production, there have been few attempts to incorporate race within the general framework of historical materialist inquiry and class politics. This paper discusses the social construction of race in Birmingham, Alabama for the industrial, Fordist, and post-Fordist phases of U.S. capitalist development. No other industrial city in America would rely upon black labor so early in its industrial development as Birmingham, providing the opportunity to examine the social construction of race from an early stage of industrial capitalism. While southern periodizations of capitalist development correspond in some ways to those of the regulationists, they also diverge in other important ways, precisely because the southern road to capitalism was different, defining the path for the entry of blacks into capital-labor relations.