Interests Of Elites Research Articles

Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise

Among the many promises of Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign was a thorough reform of U.S. healthcare. The radical inefficiency of the existing system was obvious: although per-capita healthcare costs were about twice as high as in other industrialized countries, at least forty-six million people still lacked health insurance and forty-five thousand died each year as a result. 1 The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) will not solve these problems. The reform does contain some positive elements, most notably its subsidies to lowincome individuals, the extension of children’s insurance to age twenty-six (assuming their parents are already insured), and the ban on insurance companies denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions. But these improvements are embedded in a structure that preserves and consolidates a fundamentally flawed system administered by private insurance corporations and populated by virtually unregulated for-profit providers. The crux of the reform is the “individual mandate” requiring everyone to purchase insurance from private companies or pay a fine, a model that is far removed from a system of genuine universal healthcare in which progressive taxation funds a government-administered, single-payer insurance plan. This latter option, often called “Medicare for All,” was never even considered by Congress or the administration, despite being far more efficient and humane than the alternatives. 2 Even a non-compulsory government-run insurance program (the “public option”) was never seriously entertained in the Senate. Here we analyze the healthcare reform as an illustration of the embeddedness of large corporations in U.S. policymaking. The affected industries were centrally involved in the process from the start, guaranteeing that their interests would receive priority, while public opinion and human rights considerations mattered little. The creation of Obamacare offers a lens through which to understand how and why the government embraces the class interests of the corporate elite. 3 Yet the state is not just an instrument of domination; it is also a site of struggle. After reviewing the reform process, we offer some strategic propositions for the Medicare for All movement.

Governing ethnicity after genocide: ethnic amnesia in Rwanda versus ethnic power-sharing in Burundi

A remarkable process of ethnic engineering has been taking place in neighbouring Burundi and Rwanda. After a failed democratization attempt in the early 1990s, both countries experienced an extremely violent transition process. Despite the many similarities between the two countries, they have adopted radically different approaches to address long-standing ethnic divisions. While Rwanda has opted for a policy based on ethnic amnesia and an integrationist policy centred around civic identity, Burundi has institutionalized its societal segmentation through ethnic power-sharing along the lines of Lijphart's consociational model. This comparative analysis explains the differences from two perspectives. On the one hand, in line with historical antecedents, ethnicity is engineered in a way that serves political elite interests. On the other hand, path dependency, in particular the modality of political transition in both countries, explains the notably divergent policies on ethnicity.

European Integration: From Nation‐States to Member StatesBickerton, Chris J.Oxford, Oxford University Press (2012), 240 p., ISBN 978‐0‐19‐960625‐2

European Integration: From Nation‐States to Member StatesBickerton, Chris J.Oxford, Oxford University Press (2012), 240 p., ISBN 978‐0‐19‐960625‐2

BRICS

Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) have received considerable analysis as a group attempting to present an alternative to West-driven institutions and hegemony. While its formation is a positive development for the South, it requires to reach out to civil society. BRICS, minus a robust civil society involvement, will only result in entrenching viewpoints that see the BRICS as representing narrow business interests of a southern elite, with little concern for the gamut of socio-economic problems confronting the people of Southern nations.

Take Off the [Color] Blinders: How Ignoring the Hague Conventionns Subsidiary Principle Furthers Structural Racism Against Black American Children

The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, to which the United States subscribes, was established to stem the tide of corruption in international adoption. It sets adoption practice standards for member countries and, through its subsidiarity principle, provides for international adoption as a child’s best interest only when intra-country adoption is not available. However, the United States currently allows its citizens to adopt from countries that refuse to adhere to the Hague Convention, creating a two-system approach to international adoption, and intra-country adoption avenues are not being exhausted prior to U.S. international adoptions. The United States is currently the largest “receiving country” in international adoption, but even as the globalization of the adoption industry has led to a more culturally diverse American population, the United States is certainly not colorblind in its approach to adoption. Despite adherence to post-racial thought, the children aging out of foster care unadopted are disproportionately black, and race still negatively influences industry standards. What is more, the United States has become known as a “sending country,” as it ships many of its black and biracial foster care children abroad to find homes, leading some to call the practice of international adoption “covert racism.” This Article suggests, just as Derrick Bell’s Interest Convergence Theory argued that colorblindness was co-opted through Brown v. Board of Education to serve the interests of white elites, that the best interests of the child standard has been co-opted in adoption merely to satisfy predominantly white demands for children. The Children in Families First Act has even been introduced to circumvent the Hague’s subsidiarity principle and to provide more children for international adoption. However, the Article concludes that the United States should not allow international adoptions – whether to or from the United States – until all domestic placement efforts have been exhausted, in line with the Hague’s subsidiarity principle. The Article ultimately calls for abolishment of the current U.S. two-system approach to international adoption that circumvents Hague protocols and protections and contributes to the structural racism against black American children.

Puncak Andalas: Functional Regions, Territorial Coalitions, and the Unlikely Story of One Would-be Province

Indonesia's decentralization has included a significant remapping of the geography of politics and administration via the creation of new administrative units (pemekaran). Although the stated goals of creating new regions are to improve efficiency in service provision and to increase participation in government, many new regions have been driven by elite interests. This essay examines a crucial factor contributing to the success or failure of campaigns to create new regions (regional identity) and discusses a unique case in which a coalition of regional elites from several provinces on Sumatra have come together to support the creation of a new province, to be known as Puncak Andalas.

Local Elites and Public Space Sustainability: The Local Elite Roles in the Presence and Usage of Public Space in Malang Raya, Indonesia

Public space has become a major concern in urban area development due to its close relation with human security issues such as socio economic, health, and environmental security. In the development of urban area in Indonesia, decentralization system giving greater authority and power to the local government has increased the dynamics of local political constellation. Consequently, the presence and usage of public space in urban area cannot be separated from the interest of local political elites. This study investigated the roles of local political elites in the presence and usage of public space in urban area in Indonesia‘s decentralization era. The focused areas were Malang Municipality, Batu Municipality and Malang Regency that commonly known in Indonesia as the Metropolitan Malang Raya. The result of this study revealed that local political business elites frequently influenced economical and political decisions to steer a public space utilization in order to defend and expand their wealth and power. In this case, lobbying and negotiation among elites had big influences. Moreover, the access to the local mass base such as the Aremania soccer fans society seems to be significant to their strategies. The results of this study revealed that the utilization of public spaces as a part of human security fulfillment is often defeated by business and political interests.

Polityki miejskie

Urban policies
 The main subject of this article is the changing status of cities in the contemporary world, and the consequent necessity of creating and implementing coherent urban policies. The authors analyse the changing economical, political and socio-cultural contexts in macro dimension, which opens new development possibilities for contemporary cities. The authors pay particular attention to the case of Poland, emphasizing the consequences of omissions in the formation of coherent urban policies. In the scenario where there are no such policies, Polish cities become vulnerable to the inconsiderate exploitation of the global capital, as well as to the dominance of short‑term interests of the local political elites undercutting their subjectivity, and thus block the process of the modernization of Poland.

Traders, Markets, and the State in Vietnam: Anthropological Perspectives

In the past two decades, marketplaces as sites of multifarious economic, social, and cultural exchanges have attracted renewed interest of economic anthropologists. The collapse of communism, forexample, unleashed a tidal wave of small-scale cross- border shuttle traders and contributed to the mushrooming of so-called post-so- cialist bazaars that have since been subjected to various forms of state regulation. In some parts of the world, traditional marketplaces are being promoted (and even recreated) to satisfy Western tourists' desire for an authentic oriental bazaar experi- ence. Elsewhere, or in different contexts, they are seen as indicators of a backward economy that need to be replaced by modern supermarkets and shopping malls. On the contrary, planners in the West now foster the development of community mar- kets in order to enhance public life and improve community relations. In short, mar- ketplaces, bazaars, and other sites of small-scale trading - sites of the so-called in- formal economy - hold plenty in store for anthropologists to explore and investigate.Established in 2011, the Max Planck Institute (MPI) research group Traders, Mar- kets, and the State in Vietnam investigates local markets and other sites of small retail trade in the seemingly paradoxical context of Vietnam's continuing socialist orienta- tion, on the one hand, and contemporary neoliberal economic and social transforma- tions, on the other. The group currently consists of Kirsten W. Endres as head of the group, two PhD students (Lisa Barthelmes and Esther Horat), and, since April 2013, Caroline Grillot as postdoctoral researcher (replacing Christine Bonnin who took up new assignments in January 2013). Besides holding regular informal meetings, the group organizes and participates in workshops and conference panels in order to place its findings in broader comparative contexts and to contribute to theoretical conceptualizations of the relationship between neoliberal reforms, economic restruc- turing, and changing state-society dynamics.Market Development Policies in Vietnam TodayFerdinand Braudel's (1982/2002) monumental study on European civilization and capi- talism in the fifteenth to eighteenth century is a poignant reminder that public mar- kets have, in different historic times and places, commonly been sites of intense policing and regulation. Along with the growth of markets, complex contestations emerged over important issues such as the institutionalization and control of mar- ketplaces, the levying of taxes, the use of public space, as well as, more generally, over changes in production and exchange relations.Vietnam is no exception in this regard. The 'appropriate' development of tradi- tional marketplaces has been on the Vietnamese government's agenda since the early 2000s. New policies were issued in the areas of distribution network planning, general public market regulations and management issues, and the privatization of market construction, renovation, and upgrading. In the capital of Hanoi, in particu- lar, a number of long-standing public retail markets have been demolished and re- built as multi-story trade centers by private sector contractors (Barthelmes, 2013). As a result, many small-scale market vendors, after years of struggling for economic survival in temporary markets awaiting relocation, now suffer the consequences of higher monthly fees, inadequate spatial conditions, and the loss of customers. In addition, since the mid-1990s, other 'disorderly' forms of commercial activity, such as street vending and hawking, have repeatedly been banned in government efforts to bring order to city streets and discipline citizens into becoming 'modern' urban subjects. Yet the state's modernizing mission represents only one side of the coin. Equally important in explaining the elimination of traditional public markets is the current climate of wealth accumulation in Vietnam that takes place at the higher levels of an 'unholy' confluence between clientelistic mechanisms of political power and capitalist opportunities to profit - opportunities that serve the interests of a powerful politico-economic elite by absorbing its over-accumulated capital (Harvey, 2003). …

Politik Etnisitas dalam Pemekaran Daerah

This paper deals with the regional partition which do not always take place due to the considerations as commonly stated in official explanations, and also it does not like the outcome of the scientific analysis on the interests of local elites in efforts to devide regions for seizing local power in the new regions. In addition, this paper also shows that ethnic politics is often interwined with the region partitions. The local elite politically quite often to put forward ethnicity and identity loyalties as a political resources for demanding the regional division. Ethnic identity and the usage of collective ethnic identity as a never lasting prime mover. These can be politically seen from ethnic Pakpak behaviors in encountering ethnic Batak Toba in their own territory regarding the establishment of Great Pakpak province. Key-words: Pakpak, politics of ethnicity, ethnic identity, regional partition  

Following Washington’s lead

By examining the Dutch press’s reporting on the run-up to the war in Iraq this paper provides evidence that Dutch foreign news is structurally biased in favor of the interests of political and economic elites. Despite a priori plausibility and already existing supporting evidence, this observation is rarely made in the scholarship, in part because the Dutch field of communication scholarship lacks a coherent political-economic perspective. This paper then presents empirical evidence for the relevance of the Anglo-American tradition of political economy to the study of the media in a continental European country.

From PIIGS and the Drive Towards Austerity: The Discursive Construction of the Eurozone Crisis & Its Impact on European Welfare States

The financial crisis of 2007-09 soon morphed into a crisis of public debt. This paper argues that the way the Eurozone crisis was discursively constructed led to a large scale entrenchment of European welfare states. First of all, how the crisis was constructed did not reflect its actual causes but mirrored the domestic interests of certain political and economic elites in European countries, especially Germany. Therefore, the political and medial discourse that emerged portrayed the crisis as one of lazy Southern Europeans now punished for their profligate lives. I call this discourse the stories. In a second step, the spectre of public debt and the PIIGS experience (especially the Greek catastrophe) urged governments to pursue, but also enabled them to justify, fiscally sound policies and structural adjustments - resulting in a towards austerity. In order to prevent a Greek tragedy, the only crisis solution was for states to cut back public spending. These developments have important implications for the European project. First, through constituting political subjectivities in the stories - them and us (North and South) - resistance against austerity measures and structural adjustments was delegitimised. Second, the drive towards austerity led to a scaling back of state expenditures and, thus, to a further retrenchment of European welfare states. Thereby, the welfare state, the defining feature of European capitalisms, which had always represented a contrast to Anglo-Saxon free market capitalism, was diminished. The paper concludes that without addressing the actual causes of the crisis as part of its solution the Eurozone crisis will continue and even intensify.

How has Decentralized Democracy Impacted on the Socioeconomic Well-Being of Workers and the General Public in Indonesia

How has Decentralized Democracy Impacted on the Socioeconomic Well-Being of Workers and the General Public in Indonesia

Costly democracy: peacebuilding and democratization after war

Peacebuilding is an interactive process that involves collaboration between peacebuilders and the victorious elites of a postwar society. While one of the most prominent assumptions of the peacebuilding literature asserts that the interests of domestic elites and peacebuilders coincide, Costly Democracy contends that they rarely align. It reveals that, while domestic elites in postwar societies may desire the resources that peacebuilders can bring, they are often less eager to adopt democracy, believing that democratic reforms may endanger their substantive interests. The book offers comparative analyses of recent cases of peacebuilding to deepen understanding of postwar democratization and better explain why peacebuilding missions often bring peace-but seldom democracy-to war-torn countries.

Malaysian investors in the Indonesian oil palm plantation sector: home state facilitation and transboundary haze

This paper analyses the regionalization of Malaysian oil palm plantation firms into Indonesia. These firms have been implicated in starting fires to clear land for planting, which has resulted in transboundary haze. This paper argues that these Malaysian investors have been able to burn with impunity, despite the dire consequences of haze on their home country, because of the close patronage relationships and vested interests of the Malaysian government elites in these companies. Because of this, the home government is inclined to protect and defend the actions of these firms in Indonesia against such allegations, while the Malaysian public continues to suffer the haze.

Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City by Aseel Sawalha (review)

Aseel Sawalha, Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010.190 pp.The ethnographic literature on contemporary cities of the Arab world, though steadily growing, is still a field in search of more perceptive contributions. Aseel Sawalha's impressive Reconstructing Beirut not only contributes to the field of urban studies in the region but is also a stellar illustration of just how perceptive a distinctly ethnographic approach to life and urban politics can be. This is not simply because of the book's deeply probing and richly textured accounts of memory, stead- fastness, and survival in a Beirut re-emerging from 16 years of civil war. The author also provides-following de Certeau and other urban theorists interested in everyday life-ample insight into how ordinary practitioners of the city respond to the panoptic vision and profit-driven policies of ur- ban planners and their allies among governmental and business elites (10). These survival strategies and acts of resistance are, as Sawalha skillfully demonstrates, linked in crucial ways to how poor and vulnerable popula- tions in postwar Beirut regard and imagine particular locales in the forma- tion of urban identities and loyalties (11).The complex intersections of place and memory are crucial in link- ing past and present in Beirut (as well as unraveling somewhat the past- present binary opposition). Sawalha's work does just that as she connects the city's eras of pre-war, war, and postwar. One important contribution of Reconstructing Beirut is its implicit, and at times explicit, challenge to these categories as distinct and separate ones. If war is crucially about violence, fear, displacement, and historical erasure, then the conditions the author describes in so-called peacetime are perhaps not so distant from the ravages of war. This study compels the reader to confront these reali- ties, in Beirut and other urban contexts.Sawalha also accomplishes what too many accounts of life in the fail to do. Namely, she skillfully connects events, memories, and conflicts at the level of one Beirut neighborhood - 'Ayn el-Mreisse-to broader state, regional, and global dynamics in an informed and politically committed way. Critiquing the cynical and profit-driven political programs of the re- construction company, Solidere, is essential to telling the story of postwar Lebanon. But it is quite another thing to actually analyze how this corpora- tion and the elite interests it has served are imbricated in broader webs of privilege, inequality, and economic power.The first part of the book delves into the politics of the past and what Sawalha refers to as spatial memories in and of Beirut. The author pro- vides the necessary historical context for helping the reader to see how the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1991) and its aftermath set the stage for a vast reconfiguration of urban space. Though the militias who battled throughout the war have been the subject of some serious study, few scholarly works (and fewer ethnographies) have delved into the complexities of everyday life during this period. Sawalha provides the reader with fascinating details related to the lives of families and individuals displaced during the course of the war. Anyone who has conducted research in a not their own will appreciate how skillful and sensitive this ethnographer was in approaching those she writes about in humane and respectful ways. This book is not only superbly researched and well-written but pursued in an ethical and reflexive manner not seen enough in projects of this sort.Throughout the book, Sawalha documents various battles among non- elite communities in Beirut to prevent their displacement by Solidere and other associated private and public forces. …

Petro-Piracy: Oil and Troubled Waters

West Africa piracy is the most profitable in the world. Well-organized gangs steal refined oil in contrast to Somali pirates who hold crews and ships for ransom. Like piracy elsewhere, the origins and potential solutions to West African piracy are found ashore—largely in Nigeria. This article argues that oil states in the developing world are shielded from the domestic and international pressures that can bring down their non-oil neighbors. The current international system which makes international recognition, not internal legitimacy or functionality, the key to state authority works to their benefit. It encourages those parts which are valuable to industrialized powers—and to the domestic elites who facilitate and benefit from international legitimization—to function well enough for resource extraction to continue. The security of the state generally matters less than the security of key enclaves— including ships and offshore platforms—which support elite interests.

Whatever can go wrong will: situational complexity and public order policing

Police response to public protest in the USA has been seen as stemming from both threats to the interests of political and financial elite as well as threats to the maintenance of public order. Indeed, many of the same features of protest events are used as indicators of both types of threat, leading to substantial uncertainty regarding the interpretation of threat at public gatherings. In this study, we draw on over 16,000 protest events identified from daily issues of the New York Times (NYT) from 1960 to 1995 to develop a more complete picture of public order policing. In doing so, we identify several dimensions of protest events that lead to more complicated and complex interactions between protestors and police. These features, including a diverse tactical repertoire, diverse protesting groups and event size, create crowd management difficulties that contribute to an overall more aggressive police response. Tactical diversity is an especially strong predictor of police action, while protest event size is found to interact with threatening protestor behaviours that largely necessitate a police response. We conclude by placing these findings firmly within a public order management approach to protest policing, thereby clearing up some of the ambiguities in existing protest policing research.

Fighting the Hellhounds: Pro-democracy Activists and Party Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia

In the literature on post-Suharto Indonesia, an increasingly dominant stream has portrayed the political system as being hijacked by predatory elite interests associated with the fallen New Order regime. While such characterisations describe important elements of the post-1998 polity, they do not tell the full story. At the same time that patronage-driven career politicians have staked their claims in the newly democratic state, a large number of civil society activists also started to play an active role in formal politics. This article illustrates how human rights advocates, women activists and labour leaders have tried to promote their causes not from the margins of civil society, but from within the power centre of political institutions. To be sure, some activists-turned-politicians have failed in this effort, but others have initiated key pieces of legislation that led to ground-breaking reforms. In comparative terms, the article demonstrates that Indonesian activists have created an effective political niche for themselves, avoiding both the patterns of state co-optation so prevalent in South Korea and the anti-system attitudes of activist politicians in Malaysia.

Alcohol and inequity in the process of development: Contributions from ethnographic research

Schmidt, L. A. & Room, R. (2012). Alcohol and inequity in the process of development: Contributions from ethnographic research. International Journal of Alcohol and Drug Research, 1(1), 41-55. doi: 10.7895/ijadr.v1i1.38 (http://dx.doi.org/10.7895/ijadr.v1i1.38) Drawing on 33 ethnographic studies of drinking in low- and middle-income countries around the world, this paper describes common themes pertaining to economic development, alcohol consumption and related harms. Three crosscutting themes emerged that shed light on why alcohol consumption and problems tend to increase during periods of economic development. First, from the perspective of the global alcohol industry, developing countries often become viewed as emerging consumer markets. Commercially produced alcohol tends to gain a higher status than traditional locally produced beverages, replacing them as resources allow. Drinking and beverage choices thus both symbolize new social divisions and help create them. Second, economic relations change whereby women’s interests often lose ground as men’s drinking increases. Commercialization of production may mean that women lose control over what was traditionally a home-produced supply. Resources that once stayed in the family or community may be exported as commercial profits. Third, alcohol often becomes both a source and symbol of political tensions and class divisions. Governments may become dependent on commercial alcohol revenues and willing to tolerate high levels of alcohol-related harm. In response, social and cultural movements, often promulgated by women, spontaneously emerge from within developing societies to counterbalance elite interests in the alcohol trade and push against external market forces.