CIAO DATE: 05/2011
Volume: 14, Issue: 1
January 2011
The state as citizen: state personhood and ideology
Jorg Kustermans
An important debate in International Relations and International Law is whether states are persons. In this article, it is argued that they are. That is, they are real persons-as-status. Furthermore, state personhood is argued to be an ideological category, marked by ideological variety. Roughly, one can tell apart liberal and republican conceptions of state citizenship. In a case study, the conceptual toolkit of state citizenship is put to work to assess the liberal credentials of modern international society. While modern international society rests on firm liberal principles, expressed most clearly in the Charter of the UN, important republican elements can be discerned, not in the least in the constitution of NATO.
Gender and race in the European security strategy: Europe as a 'force for good'
Maria Stern
Taking Robert Kagan's imagery of US-Mars and Europe-Venus as a point of departure, this article probes into how the naturalised reproduction of Europe in the text of the European Security Strategy (ESS) discursively occurs through intermeshing gendered and racialised discourses. The article therefore offers a narrative that has been largely silenced in conversations about the EU as a global security actor. By paying attention to embedded ‘sticky' gendered and racialised signs in the text of the ESS, the article argues that the delineations drawn to secure Europe in the text of the ESS also engender ‘Europe' as multiply masculine by dividing the world into sharp spatio-temporal distinctions. Echoing Europe's colonial past, the ESS represents its ‘Others' as both feminised and subordinate. In this sense, the article argues that the European project of security-development as written in the ESS is both civilising (normative) and violently exclusionary - in contradistinction to many contemporary depictions of Europe as a normative power and a harbour of tolerance. The gendered and colonial grammar of these spatial and temporal distinctions work to naturalise a certain (re)production of ‘Europe', yet haunt the secure Europe and the better world promised in the strategy.
Race for the money: international financial centres in Asia
Darryl S L Jarvis
Asia's emergence as a key player in the global economy is witnessing intense competition within the region to become Asia's next great international financial centre (IFC). Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai, among others, are vying for primacy, attempting to attract dense clusters of financial services firms and reap the lucrative rewards associated with this. This paper explores this emerging competition. It does so from the perspective of attempting to map the parameters necessary to become an IFC, particularly the institutional, political and spatial contexts that facilitate the concentration of international financial services. Why and how financial clustering occurs and the factors that determine the location of financial centres is an important public policy concern, both for established centres eager to maintain their competitive position as well as emerging economies keen to identify the policy levers necessary to support financial sector growth. To that end, the paper explores the experiences and strategies of three of Asia's current contenders: Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore. It analyses the policy architecture, financial sector strategies, institutional mechanisms and spatial geographies undergirding financial sector growth, and the constraints, obstacles and challenges each face in developing and or consolidating their IFC.
Development issues in Africa: challenges, concepts, opportunities (PDF)
Antje Vetterlein
The idea for this Forum emerged during the fourth GARNET Capacity Building Workshop in Cape Town, South Africa, in November 2008, convened by The Evian Group at IMD, an international coalition of corporate, government and opinion leaders, based in Switzerland, in association with Mthente, a South African research-driven consulting firm. The workshop, entitled The Challenges of Youth in the 21st Century: Africa — Creating Opportunities through Entrepreneurship and Education, brought together about 60 participants and experts on the topic, representing civil society, government and business as well as academia to engage in a lively dialogue on the pressing issue of development on the African continent and the role education and entrepreneurship plays in this respect
The state of development in Africa: concepts, challenges and opportunities
Mills Soko, Jean-Pierre Lehmann
Africa's marginalisation and development challenges are extensively documented. Africa's underdevelopment is a product of the interplay of external and domestic factors including slavery and colonialism, economic mismanagement, ill-conceived structural adjustment policies, inter-state and intra-state conflicts, failed regionalism, unfair trade terms, foreign debt, aid dependence, poor governance, weak states, and institutional decay.
Empowering tomorrow's African entrepreneurs and managers: the Global Business School Network
Guy Pfeffermann, Nora Brown
The essay introduces an innovative low-cost knowledge-based approach to development cooperation: the Global Business School Network (GBSN). Since 2003 GBSN has been addressing a cross-cutting development issue which has been neglected or altogether ignored by Official Development Assistance institutions as well as private philanthropic funders: the extreme scarcity of well-trained local leaders and managers — ‘problem-solvers’ — in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as well as other low-income areas of the world.
Youth unemployment in South Africa: challenges, concepts and opportunities
Cecil Mlatsheni, Murray Leibbrandt
In investigating the reach of the idea of social exclusion, it is useful to examine the specific role of economic events of the kind that may be particularly associated with the development of an excluded population. An especially apt example is the important phenomenon of long-term unemployment. (T)he extraordinary prevalence of unemployment and worklessness is perhaps the single most important contributor to the persistence of social exclusion in a large and momentous scale. (Sen 2000: 18)
Corporate social responsibility: an oversocialised view of multinational corporations in Africa?
John Agbonifo
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a buzzword in business schools, politics, NGO circles and the business community. Violent companies of yesterday, employing mistrust and malfeasance in their dealings with host communities, have become the vanguard of CSR.
Sexual and gender-based violence in Liberia and the case for a comprehensive approach to the rule of law
Niels Nagelhus Schia, Benjamin de Carvalho
Since the end of the conflict in Liberia, one of the main priorities of the UN Mission (UNMIL), UN agencies, NGOs and INGOs has been to address the very high level of sexual violence against women and children, often known through the ‘SGBV’ acronym (Sexual and Gender-Based Violence).This focus has led to a number of initiatives from the international community, including a joint UN and Government of Liberia national strategy on the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (Government of Liberia 2009); the creation of a ministry for gender issues; and a number of campaigns aimed at engendering awareness of the problem.
Negotiating regions=fostering welfare: the Economic Partnership Agreements as new model of development?
Ulrike E Lorenz
Despite the melodious intentions to make poverty history in the 21st century, the quest for promising concepts proves to be far less harmonious. Hopes were high that a globalised world would imply the smooth diffusion of such positively valued ‘assets’ as wealth and knowledge through a just system.