Asia‐Pacific security regimes: Conditions and constraints

Security regimes constitute an important test of the ‘liberal’ school of thought in contemporary international relations. In the Asia‐Pacific, interest is growing over how they may contribute to that region's future order and stability. It is argued here, however, that Asia‐Pacific security regimes cannot succeed unless ‘realist’ power‐balancing strategies are first applied, affording time for patterns of structural leadership to shape enduring security norms and institutions. The ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) is arguably the region's first potential post‐cold war security regime. Its fate, or that of its successor security regimes in the Asia‐Pacific, depends upon satisfying four critical conditions for regime building and upon winning the acceptance of China and the United States, the region's two key ‘structural leaders’. While the ARF does not at present seem close to satisfying these criteria, it may help to provide the breathing space necessary for a successful transition from a competitive cold war environment to a more cooperative climate in the Asia‐Pacific.     

Knopfelmacher's essays

Frank Knopfelmacher: Intellectuals and Politics, Nelson's Australian Paperbacks, Melbourne, 1968, vii + 156 pp., $2.95.     

Access Orders and the ‘New’ New Institutional Economics of Development

This article examines the Access Order theories of development that have emerged as the latest reformulation of New Institutional Economics by Douglass North and his associates. These scholars claim that Access Order theory represents a radical break from previous models of institutional change in developing countries. They argue that at the heart of development is the problem of controlling organized violence. Two distinct social orders, the Limited Access Order and the Open Access Order, have emerged as solutions to the problem of endemic violence. This article traces the evolution of these new ideas within North's institutional theory and examines how violence is treated within the new framework. The article evaluates the underlying economic model on which the theory is based and argues that the conceptual device of the Open Access Order preserves key features of the neoclassical approach within North's work. The article contrasts the Access Order approach with the political settlements framework. To conclude, the article argues that the Access Order approach serves to strip the progressive potential out of development by ignoring how controlling violence may affect human capabilities, rights and freedom.     

Neo‐Colonialism in South–South Relations? The Case of China and North Korea

The past decade has seen the rapid expansion of economic ties between China and North Korea, leading to questions of whether this emerging relationship resembles neo‐colonialism or a more positive form of South–South cooperation. This article argues that China's engagement is driven in the first instance by strategic considerations, namely the maintenance of the geopolitical status quo on the Korean peninsula. However, North Korea has also become increasingly important in terms of Beijing's aims of revitalizing its north‐eastern region, and as such, economic relations are becoming increasingly market‐led. Although this mode of engagement bears similarities with China's engagement elsewhere in the developing world, North Korea's catastrophic economic decline in the 1990s largely preceded the more recent revival of relations with China. We argue therefore that bilateral relations between the two countries cannot usefully be regarded as ‘neo‐colonial’ since North Korea is receiving much needed trade and investment from China within the context of broader international isolation. As such, we suggest that more attention needs to be paid to how geopolitical specificities influence the manner in which South–South cooperation shapes the possibilities of development, and that the dichotomous terrain of the existing debate between optimistic and pessimistic viewpoints is unhelpful.     

Domestic abuse and the public/private divide in the British military

Divisions between the social spheres of public and private are always fluid, mutually constitutive, and politically and socially formulated. Within the British military, such divisions are further framed through the needs of operational effectiveness. In the pursuit of operational effectiveness the public/private divide functions at times as porous, in large part through the military's provision of services such as housing, welfare and policing to personnel and their families and through the notion of a close-knit military community, and at others as firm, bolstering operational effectiveness through recourse to militarised ideas of the private sphere as the fixed space of hearth, home and femininity which is to be protected by military force. This article employs narratives of domestic abuse as a window through which to analyse enactments of the public/private divide in the British military. The analysis draws upon interview participants' experiences of abuse and of help-seeking to illustrate the complex and fluid ways in which the prioritisation of operational effectiveness frames and delimits the public and the private within the contemporary British military in relation to domestic abuse. The impacts of this upon victim-survivors' help-seeking experiences are discussed.     

Organisational geographies of corporate responsibility: a UK-US comparison of retailers' ethical trading initiatives

Ethical trade, involving corporate codes of conduct for sitesof production, has become a key means through which labour inretailers’ global supply chains is regulated. Yet, thereis evidence to suggest that retail corporations vary markedlyin their approaches to ethical trade and that such variationis shaped, in part, by the national-institutional contexts inwhich retailers are based. This article explores this insightby evaluating the distinct roles played by multi-stakeholderinitiatives for ethical trade in the UK and USA. While the UK'score multi-stakeholder initiative, the Ethical Trading Initiative(ETI), encompasses retailers from a variety of sectors and takesa developmental and continuous learning approach to ethicaltrade, the US multi-stakeholder initiatives are focussed moreon corporate accountability based on compliance monitoring exclusivelyin the clothing sector. Given recent organisational attemptsto foster transnational dialogue between multi-stakeholder initiatives,though, we argue that the precise ways in which national-institutionalcontexts shape retailers’ ethical trading approaches arefluid and mutable. We contribute to the literature on the governanceof global supply chains, retailer power and corporate responsibilityby emphasising the political significance of national-institutionalenvironments. However, in line with notions of relational economicgeography, we understand these national-institutional environmentsas active and dynamic contexts, and accentuate the coalitionalways in which nationally based organisations evolve in theirhome countries and go on to shape broader transnational agendasfor ethical trade.     

Creating Civil Society? The Emergence of NGOs in Vietnam

Based on recent research in Hanoi, this article examines the emergence of NGOs in Vietnam, and relates their development to the civil society discourse which is used by elements of the international donor community to predict the growth of pluralism and democracy. After examining the social and political environment of post-reform Vietnam, it does not appear evident that these organizations fit into any definition of civil society which stresses independence from the state and opposition to state ideology.     

Market Rules and Spatial Outcomes: Insights from the Corporate Restructuring of U.S. Food Retailing

In this paper a study of the corporate restructuring of the U.S. food retail industry, during and following the period of regulatory relaxation and high-leverage capital transformations of the 1980s, is used to interrogate the complex relationships between market regulation, investment regimes, corporate strategies, and spatial outcomes. It is shown that changes in the “rules” governing investment and competition in the United States in the 1980s triggered countervailing spatial processes in the food retail industry. Those processes took more than a decade to work themselves through, but by the late 1990s a radically altered corporate landscape was beginning to emerge. In particular, consolidation of the industry had finally gained momentum–creating an industry whose leading firms are likely by 2002 to have a market share double the level of the early 1990s. The paper concludes by considering the insights which a consideration of corporate restructuring and regulation in this U.S. industry offers for some important areas of conceptual debate in economic geography. In particular, it is argued that industries in which capital structure transformations of the firm must be confronted and treated as a central issue have an intrinsic, but until recently neglected, importance in theoretical debate in the discipline.     

Cities and the Geographies of "Actually Existing Neoliberalism"

This essay elaborates a critical geographical perspective on neoliberalism that emphasizes (a) the path–dependent character of neoliberal reform projects and (b) the strategic role of cities in the contemporary remaking of political–economic space. We begin by presenting the methodological foundations for an approach to the geographies of what we term “actually existing neoliberalism.” In contrast to neoliberal ideology, in which market forces are assumed to operate according to immutable laws no matter where they are “unleashed,” we emphasize the contextual embeddedness of neoliberal restructuring projects insofar as they have been produced within national, regional, and local contexts defined by the legacies of inherited institutional frameworks, policy regimes, regulatory practices, and political struggles. An adequate understanding of actually existing neoliberalism must therefore explore the path–dependent, contextually specific interactions between inherited regulatory landscapes and emergent neoliberal, market–oriented restructuring projects at a broad range of geographical scales. These considerations lead to a conceptualization of contemporary neoliberalization processes as catalysts and expressions of an ongoing creative destruction of political–economic space at multiple geographical scales. While the neoliberal restructuring projects of the last two decades have not established a coherent basis for sustainable capitalist growth, it can be argued that they have nonetheless profoundly reworked the institutional infrastructures upon which Fordist–Keynesian capitalism was grounded. The concept of creative destruction is presented as a useful means for describing the geographically uneven, socially regressive, and politically volatile trajectories of institutional/spatial change that have been crystallizing under these conditions. The essay concludes by discussing the role of urban spaces within the contradictory and chronically unstable geographies of actually existing neoliberalism. Throughout the advanced capitalist world, we suggest, cities have become strategically crucial geographical arenas in which a variety of neoliberal initiatives—along with closely intertwined strategies of crisis displacement and crisis management—have been articulated.