Columbia International Affairs Online

CIAO DATE: 2/08

Journal of International Relations and Development

Volume 7, Number 3, October 2004

Articles

• Foreign aid for a post-euphoric Eastern Europe: the limitations of western assistance in developing civil society

  Tanya Narozhna

  This article raises three considerations with respect to attempts by Western governments and donor institutions to foster democracy and produce an 'instant' civil society in the post-socialist world. First, there is the divergent intellectual/academic discussion in both the East and West about the meaning of civil society. It is contended that the lack of a substantive consensus on this issue has directly affected donor practices to promote democracy and strengthen civil society in Eastern Europe. The second consideration refers to donors' inconsistent support of civil society (however defined), which has exposed 'aid' as lacking any long-term strategy. The third consideration revolves around the issue of how Western assistance practices with regard to civil society have shaped a democratic faade for the oligarchic regime in one post-Soviet state Ukraine, and have contributed to the emergence of new types of grant-oriented civic activists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), known as grantoids (grant-eaters). It is argued that the different points of departure in conceptualizing civil society in the East and in the West create an opposing set of references and a series of practical problems.

• Three theses on 'governance' and the political

  Sergei Prozorov

  The article approaches the current proliferation of discourse on 'governance' from the perspective of the Foucauldian problematic of governmentality and seeks to problematize contemporary neoliberal governance as a self-immanent 'diagram' of government that effaces the political conditions of its emergence. Proceeding from the thesis that the 'problems' requiring governmental interventions are internal to the discourse of governmentality, I reconstruct the contemporary diagram of disseminated, participatory and 'bottom-up' liberal governance as characterized by the displacement of the state-society distinction and the consequent expansion of 'quantitatively total' governmental practices. Finally, I attempt to reaffirm the relevance of a Schmittian political ontology, particularly the conception of sovereignty as a constitutive decision on exception, as an instrument of political criticism that eschews the elaboration of alternatives to contemporary governance and instead focuses on the restoration of political force to the governmental diagram. The article thus argues for the advantages of supplementing the Foucauldian project of analytics of government with a Schmittian reaffirmation of sovereignty in the critique of contemporary governance.

• A Foucaultian view on spill-over: freedom and security in the EU

  Jef Huysmans

  How do we interpret the nature and reach of the spill-over of the internal market into an internal security field? How do we account for the construction of a European modality of government that regulates free movement through the administration of its dangers? In this article, I propose a Foucaultian conceptual framework that emphasizes the constitutive role of technologies of government. It directs attention to how the development and application of technological devices -- such as European visa and databases -- professional knowledge and skills, and technocratic routines structure the relation between freedom and security. This framework shifts attention from the focus on agenda-setting to policy implementation, but it does not conceptualize the latter as simply implementation of a political decision but as decisions and processes that are themselves constitutive of modalities of government. The conceptual arguments are developed with special reference to the 'securitization' of the free movement of persons, and more specifically migration and asylum.

• The essence of constructivism

  Vincent Pouliot

  The relationship between constructivism and postmodernism is complex and ambivalent. The two books reviewed in this essay present contrasting visions on the matter. While the postmodernist critique reveals some contradictions in the way constructivists partake in the 'politics of reality', a linguistic perspective on global politics makes the case for the continuing complementarity of the two main postpositivist approaches in IR, constructivism and poststructuralism. Attempting to find an inclusive way out to address the postmodernist critique, this review essay argues that social facts are the essence of constructivism. Not only do social facts constitute an ontological common ground for constructivists, but they also provide them with precious 'foundations of reality'. On the basis of the distinction between the act and the observation of essentialisation, the essay develops a postfoundationalist position that makes it possible to grasp the essence of constructivism without partaking in the 'politics of reality'.

Book Review

• Attitudes Towards Europe: Language in the Unification Process

  Lucie Konigova

  Ashgate, Aldershot, 2001, 233pp.
  ISBN: 0 7546 1431 X.
  Andreas Musolff, Colin Good, Petra Points and Ruth Wittlinger (eds)

• Multilevel Networks in European Foreign Policy

  Jan Karlas

  Ashgate, Aldershot, 2003, 193pp.
  ISBN: 0 7546 0941 3.
  Elke Krahman

• Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal, and Political Dilemmas

  Veronika Blkov

  Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, 350pp.
  ISBN 0 521 52928 X.
  Jeff L. Holzgrefe and Robert O. Keohane (eds.)

• The Treatment and Taxation of Foreign Investment under International Law: Towards International Disciplines

  Jana Kubicov

  Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2000, 242pp.
  ISBN: 1 929446 08 X.
  Fiona C. Beveridge