This article uses two CGE macro-micro models to analyse the distributional impact of the food crisis and policy responses in two neighbouring African countries, both of which are strongly dependent on agriculture. The approach captures structural differences at both the macro and micro level for household income and expenditure structures, and the results reveal differences for poverty impact a…
This article uses a transactions approach to examine the ability of governments to develop and sustain negotiated solutions to major economic challenges. Where actors are embedded in long-term, repeated interaction, have long time horizons, and invest in monitoring and enforcement technologies, effective political exchange is more likely. In good transactions environments, policy bargains will …
Why, when faced with similar conditions of weakening central control, do some institutions of state security fragment into autonomous agents of organized violence whereas others cohere around coercive rent seeking without challenging the central government? Focusing on Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, this article explains these divergent state security outcomes as a consequence of resource concentra…
The “party paradox” thesis claims that in the context of the legal corporate governance reforms of the 1990s, which aimed at adjusting national corporate governance systems to the “finance capitalism” of the Anglo-American type, center-left parties promoted proshareholder corporate governance reforms, whereas center-right parties opposed such reforms. Based on case studies of Switzerland, Swede…
What political institutions improve property rights? Building on the work of North and Weingast, this article argues that institutional checks on policy-making discretion (“veto players”) improve the property rights of investors regarding the value of the domestic currency. Veto players constrain the ability of policy makers to opportunistically pursue policy that may lead to a depreciated dome…
In his influential edited volume Slavery, bondage and dependency in Southeast Asia, Anthony Reid suggests that long-term slave-based systems of production were absent from agriculture in Southeast Asia, and had an ambiguous presence at best in other areas of economic activity. The argument he presents suggests that indigenous slavery in the region merged into a ‘kind of serfdom or household mem…
This study of Timor and the surrounding islands between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries provides evidence that, after the demise of the Portuguese Estado da India, an ‘informal’ or ‘shadow’ empire persisted but in uniquely localised ways. It describes the emergence of the ‘black Portuguese’ community known in Timor and the Solor archipelago as the Topasses. Their singular identity was ba…
This paper deals with the consequences of the increasing commercialisation of the rice industry in west Indramayu from the mid-1880s to the late 1930s. Instead of prosperity as a result of growing rice for sale in a free market, local peasants found their survival being threatened by traders who had them bound to a vicious cycle of debts and who acquired much of the rice they produced. The rice…
Much research has sought to understand why mixed communities in Indonesia have been torn apart by violent conflict. By contrast, little is known about how people live together successfully in the mixed, low-conflict communities that exist in abundance throughout the Indonesian archipelago. This paper explores the inter-communal relations in the multiethnic, Christian-Muslim coastal village of O…
This paper reads the debates of the Straits Settlements Legislative Council to trace the political contentions over policies affecting the Chinese community in Malaya. These contentions brought the Straits Chinese unofficials to engage the racial ambivalence of British rule in Malaya, in which the Straits Chinese was located as both a liberal subject and an object of colonial difference. Contra…
This paper is a reflection on a number of theatre performances held in Singapore, each of which probed problematic or traumatic historical events occurring either in Singapore itself or in other parts of Southeast Asia. These avant-garde performances were inspired by or built around actual testimonies of individuals in ways which, for this author, suggest a striking fluidity in the boundaries b…
Much analysis of Asian regional relations and institutions is written in an historical and cultural vacuum. The impression is often given that security or economic arrangements are comparable with physical structures — creations of engineers rather than social scientists (or even architects). The writings of Amitav Acharya, now Professor of International Affairs at American University in Washin…
Participation has been of ongoing interest in the field of action research and the New Health Promotion movement, but it is not without tensions and problems. This article presents the challenge of containing the conflicting demands of personal empowerment, practical advancement and theory building in a community-based participatory action research project ‘Aspiring to Healthy Living in The Net…
An action research approach was applied to develop a community pharmacy team into a research aware practice. A pharmacy team consisting of a pharmacist and medicine counter assistants carried out this project. They started by reflecting on their own practice and in doing so examined the reliability of the evidence base they used to give advice to customers regarding the sale of medicines. The t…
Participatory action research (PAR) is a methodological stance that researchers can find both inspiring and daunting. Community-based PAR offers a platform by which social scientists can contribute to the democratization of knowledge and its production, but also requires that they go beyond conventional roles and procedures to interact with community co-researchers in ways that may leave univer…
Based on a case study of a participatory photography project with a Salvadoran adult literacy program, this article explores some of the challenges and risks that arise when people use cameras to document their lives. The article examines the unanticipated problems the author and participants encountered (i.e. suspicion, timidity, and ridicule), and elucidates how historical and sociocultural f…
Using an example from the health-care sector, we illustrate consequences of implementing knowledge-based decision making relating to the exercise of political control. The Swedish Pharmaceutical Benefits Board decides the subsidization status of prescription pharmaceuticals. Building on a study of the agency's work, we explore the effects of institutional arrangements stemming from rationalisti…
The global neoliberal economic and political order impregnated the emergence of democracy in South Africa. One of the hallmarks of this order is that the capacity of the state to transform society is constrained, particularly in the rural hinterlands. The incapacity of the state to extend its grip, both economically and politically, has provided traditional leaders with an opportunity to both r…
Power-sharing agreements have been widely used in Africa as paths out of civil war. However, the research focus on conflict mitigation provides an inadequate guide to recent cases such as Kenya and Zimbabwe. When used in response to flawed elections, pacts guaranteeing political inclusion adversely affect government performance and democratization. Political inclusion in these cases undermines …
Studies of transgovernmental activities have enhanced our understanding of changing global politics, but their claims have not been fully investigated with respect to the security realm. Therefore, this article first acknowledges a gap between the practices and capacities of nonstate entities creating transnational threats and those of state-based agents of response. States' ability to respond …