The Movement, modernity and new International Relations writing in South Africa

Books reviewed in this article:
Korwa Gombe Adar and Rok Ajulu, Globalization and emerging trends in African states' foreign policymaking processes: a comparative perspective of Southern Africa.
Patrick Bond, Against global apartheid: South Africa meets the World Bank, IMF and international finance.
Greg Mills, The wired world: South Africa, foreign policy and globalization.
Philip Nel, Ian Taylor and Janis van der Westhuizen, South Africa's multilateral diplomacy and global change: the limits of reformism.
Ian Taylor, Stuck in middle GEAR: South Africa's post–apartheid foreign relations.     

Citizenship and Belonging in the Rural Fringe: A Case Study of a Hindu Temple in Sydney,Australia

Despite Australian multicultural policy that asserts the right of all citizens to maintain and practice their religion, formal citizenship has not guaranteed the welcome or belonging of migrant religious groups at the neighbourhood scale. This is most starkly reflected in contests over the inclusion of minority religious spaces in the Australian landscape, which increasingly take place in the rural–urban fringe of metropolitan areas. This work examines the controversy over a proposed Hindu temple in metropolitan Sydney and reveals insights into the way that rural–urban fringe space is imagined, understood and experienced by land use planners, residents and temple members. Critical discourse analysis of policy documentation along with interviews reveals that land use planners circumscribe belonging in the landscape through the use of zoning ordinances and design controls, local residents mark the boundaries of white privilege through narratives of heritage and cultural difference and temple members claim rights to citizenship based on assertions of sameness.     

Between Large-N and Small-N Analyses: Historical Comparison of Thirty Insurgency Case Studies

Abstract

The authors study the 30 insurgencies occurring between 1978 and 2008 using four methods crossing the qualitative/quantitative divide. The four approaches are narrative, bivariate comparison, comparative qualitative analysis, and K-medoids clustering. The quantification of qualitative data allows the authors to compare more cases than they could “hold in their heads” under a traditional small-n qualitative approach, improving the quality of the overall narrative and helping to ensure that the quantitative analyses respected the nuance of the detailed case histories. Structured data-mining reduces the dimensionality of possible explanatory factors relative to the available observations to expose patterns in the data in ways more common in large-n studies. The four analytic approaches produced similar and mutually supporting findings, leading to robust conclusions.