Liberal Government Research Articles

Killing Democracy: United States Imperialism, Civil War and Genocide in Guatemala 1954-1996

The United States in 1954, under the thin veil of fighting communism and defending “American” interests, led a coup d’etat in Guatemala to overthrow democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz. Arbenz and his immediate predecessor Juan Jose Arevalo initiated substantial social programs that brought needed and popular changes to a rising urban working class and rural peasants that for 133 years were ruled by paternal autocrats that in Latin America were called caudillos. Beginning in the twentieth century Guatemalan rulers encouraged foreign corporations, enticed with generous governmental inducements to plunder the nation and keep labor costs at rock bottom. By 1944 the Guatemalan people began to pushback against the caudillos who ruled for benefit of the oligarchy and US corporations. The US onslaught against the Arbenz government set the stage for US imperialist interventions throughout Latin America for the next 65 years. Indeed, for the US Central Intelligent Agency (CIA), the operations in Guatemala and Iran (1953), served as a blueprint for CIA led interventions around the globe. During the four decades subsequent the US-led destruction of the ambitious Guatemalan 1944 Revolution, Guatemala was once again beset with vicious and corrupt dictators. The dreams of the poor and working class of a liberal government in Guatemala were violently swept away and replaced by four decades of Civil War and governmental policies of scorched earth cruelty and genocide under the guidance, military training and acquiescence of the highest reaches of the US government. These horrors, that claimed more than 200,000 lives, 93 percent of the deaths at the hands of the Guatemalan military, culminated in the 1996 peace accord under the auspices of the United Nations. The peace accord ended a horrific and sustained wave of repression and slaughter and established a Commission on Historical Clarification to study the atrocities and their causes. This paper examines the US-backed overthrow of Guatemala’s democratically elected government at the behest of corporate profits and the decades of savagery that supported tyrants who unleashed unspeakable horrors against their own populations during the 36-year Guatemalan Civil War.

Attempts to Create a Military Court for the Australian Defence Force

The 2005 Senate Report recommended the establishment of a permanent Chapter III court with jurisdiction to deal with serious military service offences. The Liberal Government responded to the recommendations by refusing to establish a permanent Chapter III court. Instead it established the ‘Australian Military Court’ in reliance on the defence power in s 51(vi) of the Constitution. The legality of the establishment of this ‘court’ was later successfully challenged in the High Court of Australia in Lane v Morrison on the grounds it was a breach of Chapter III of the Constitution. In Lane, the High Court unanimously upheld the challenge and the Australian Military Court ceased to exist. The Government then urgently introduced interim remedial legislation to preserve the judgments of the Australian Military Court and reintroduced the military disciplinary structure which had previously existed under the DFDA. In 2010, and again after its re-election in 2012, the Government introduced bills into the Parliament to establish a permanent Chapter III ‘Military Court of Australia’. However, due to the proroguing of Parliament in 2013, and the election of a new Government, thereafter no steps were taken to consider such a bill. Currently, ADF disciplinary matters are dealt with under the old DFDA procedures, reintroduced as interim remedial legislation, which appears to have now become a permanent regime by default in failing to consider any alternative regime.

Sino-Canadian relations in the age of Justin Trudeau

ABSTRACT The ongoing Huawei dispute has led Canadian commentators to proclaim the death of Justin Trudeau’s China strategy. This paper takes a nuanced look at Sino-Canadian relations since 2015, arguing that Ottawa has not adopted a policy of unconstrained engagement, but rather has taken a harder line toward Beijing than traditionally appreciated. The paper proposes explanations for the Liberal government’s harder line: (1) domestic Canadian wariness toward China, (2) Xi’s more aggressive vision of Chinese foreign policy, and (3) Trump’s election and the consequent devolution in Sino-American relations. Finally, the paper suggests that in light of these factors, Canadian policymakers will need to reshape Ottawa’s China strategy.

Religion as Resistance: Negotiating Authority in Italian Libya

Religion as Resistance: Negotiating Authority in Italian Libya

The child’s right to genital integrity

People in liberal societies tend to feel a little uncomfortable talking about male genital cutting, but generally do not think it is morally abhorrent. But female genital cutting is widely considered to be morally repulsive. This common social intuition – that male genital cutting is benign, but female genital cutting is impermissibly harmful – is mirrored in the policies of real-world liberal governments and real-world international liberal institutions. The difference in attitudes towards these practices could be explained by investigation into the cultural biases of people in liberal societies, where social preference is given to practices conducted by majority and established minority group members over those practised by members of marginalised groups. In this article, I argue that the intuition cannot be defended from a liberal position committed to equal children’s rights. I defend children’s equal right to bodily integrity. I claim that in practice children’s right to bodily integrity is conditional on it serving their greater interests – which sometimes require adults to interfere with children’s bodies in ways that we would not interfere with adults’ bodies. But, I argue, this practical conditionality ought not to mean that the state treat male and female children differently. I make a case for the child’s inviolable right to genital integrity, based on the relationship between the child’s genital integrity and their sexual and genital autonomy in adulthood. I outline and respond to potential criticisms, namely that (i) male genital cutting has medical benefits that outweigh its harms and that (ii) female genital cutting is more socially harmful than male genital cutting.

G20 Governance for an Inclusive Liberal Order

The Group of Twenty (G20) was created first at the ministerial level and later upgraded to the summit level as a response to the global financial crises that first erupted from Asia in 1997, and then from the US in 2008 and Europe in 2010. These crises called into question the core principles and practices of the liberal order based on the economic, social and political openness that had been progressively internationally institutionalized since 1944. The G20 was designed with a dual distinctive foundational mission to promote financial stability and to make globalization work for all. It combined all established and emerging economies with high capability and connectivity, to operate as equals, to protect all within their borders and those beyond. It increasingly did so since its first summit in 2008. Its performance spiked at the summit in Hangzhou, China, on 3–4 September, 2016, and again at Hamburg, Germany, on 7–8 July, 2017. The latter coped with the new populist, protectionist US president and UK prime minister, whose countries had hosted the first three summits. G20-supported initiatives and agreements for full free trade have advanced since the first summit in 2008. No other center of global summit governance has emerged to guide an increasingly globalized world. The G20 has also steadily become an effective governor of global security. As the forces that propelled this rise will intensify, the Argentinian-hosted G20 summit on 30 November–1 December, 2018, promises to proceed along this path. It is guided by a country again afflicted by a financial crisis but now dedicated to following the core liberal order and making it work better for all. The real test will arrive in 2019, when Japan as host must co-operate with Korea and China, its neighbouring Asian powers and previous G20 hosts, to provide a new center of inclusive, progressive, liberal global governance that the world badly needs.

Review essay: Alternative histories of revolutionaries in modern South Asia: context, chronology, and archives

This review essay discusses two recent monographs on revolutionaries and political violence in South Asia, Kama Maclean’s A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (2015) and Durba Ghosh’s Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919-1947 (2017). Ghosh and Maclean’s books contribute to an expanding body of scholarly work on anticolonial politics in India, a rich historiography on liberalism in the British Empire, and studies of visual culture and oral histories in modern South Asia. Specifically, Maclean’s A Revolutionary History centers on the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA) in Punjab and Delhi in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Maclean reconfigures the political terrain of India’s independence struggle and illustrates the importance of revolutionary violence in nonviolent politics through unstudied visual sources and oral histories. In turn, Ghosh’s Gentlemanly Terrorists focuses on Bengal, particularly revolutionaries in the Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar from 1919 to 1947. Complicating the history of colonial constitutionalism as a gradual expansion of rights and representation, Ghosh demonstrates how constitutional reforms that aimed to promote liberal governance in India were tied to repressive emergency legislation. This review essay addresses how Gentlemanly Terrorists and A Revolutionary History contribute to ongoing efforts to rethink both the political chronology and the wider political landscape of interwar India by incorporating revolutionaries into the story of independence. It also considers how Maclean and Ghosh creatively utilize non-state archives and vernacular sources, in conjunction with colonial records, to follow the retelling of revolutionary histories in different media.

시장 자유주의 통치성으로서 정보통치성 : 스타트업 담론의 계보학적 분석

이 연구는 푸코의 통치성 연구의 관점에서 스타트업 담론을 시장 자유주의 통치성의 계보학 위에 있는 정보통치성으로 이해한다. 정보통치성은 새로운 시장 자유주의적 주체와 수행, 시장과 사회를 담론을 통해 구성한다. 구체적으로 정보통치성은 스타트업 담론을 통해 주체는 스타트업으로, 사회는 한계비용 제로 사회로, 시장은 파괴적 혁신 시장으로 구성한다. 스타트업의 수행은 크게 창업, 개발, 성장, 혁신의 단계로 이뤄진다. 이 연구에서는 정보통치성이 적용된 실제 사례로서 2017년 미국 산호세에서 열린 페이스북 개발자 컨퍼런스 F8 2017의 키노트 스피치를 분석할 것이다. 페이스북은 공동체를 코딩 가능한 형태인 연결성으로 정의하고, 이를 구성하는 지식을 인공지능으로, 구성된 현실을 가상현실/증강현실로 개념화한다. 이에 따라 연결성은 통신망을 파괴적 혁신하는 아퀼라와 입력 장치를 파괴적 혁신하는 뇌파 인터페이스로, 인공지능은 누구나 쉽게 개발할 수 있는 개발 언어인 카페2와 어디에서나 쓸 수 있는 모바일 AI로, VR/AR은 페이스북 스페이스와 글래스로 구현된다. 정보통치성은 산업통치성과 금융통치성에 이어, 세계를 구성하는 새로운 원리로 제시되는 한편 시장 자유주의 통치성에서 사회자유주의 통치성으로의 길을 열었다는 점에서 의의가 있다.

Buzzwords and fuzzwords: flattening intersectionality in Canadian aid

ABSTRACTIn 2017, the Canadian Liberal government introduced the Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP), which offers an “intersectional” lens by taking into consideration the diversity of women and girls. This article argues that “intersectional” conceptualized inconsistently in FIAP, and outlines the dissimilar understandings of intersectionality between GAC officials and civil society members. The lack of clarity around intersectionality is predictable given that this issue fuels debates and dialogues in the field of intersectionality theory. As intersectionality has traveled from activist circles to academia and beyond, the theory of intersectionality has often been reduced to a fuzzword and buzzword. Ultimately, this article argues that the impact of this theory on Canadian aid may be quite limited if intersectionality is not clearly and consistently conceptualized.

Valuing fresh waters

In an era increasingly focused on the question of how to value fresh water, this essay argues that questions of value cannot be parsed apart from the multiple ontologies that undergird those value judgments. Returning to Nelson's observation that water exists “in a metaphysical blindspot,” this essay describes what chastened metaphysics have to do with fresh waters' pluralities and depicts three apertures by which contemporary water discourses delineate fresh waters' values: economic theory and neoliberal market practice, paradigms of liberal governance, and cultural‐religious multiplicities. In the latter, fresh waters' life‐giving properties tend to be accorded central respect in ways that often exceed the ontological understandings and moral possibilities preferred by western liberal discourses in an era that has been decisively shaped by scientific, hydraulic/extractive modernity and rational planning. Parsing the ways that selected cultural‐religious formulations align with or challenge dominant governance paradigms, this essay argues that decolonial ways of proceeding are necessary if value discourse and ethical action are to be substantially oriented toward the inclusive, long‐term flourishing of human and other bodies of waters. The final section summarizes these claims and underscores necessary warnings.This article is categorized under:Human Water > Value of WaterHuman Water > Water as Imagined and RepresentedHuman Water > Methods

Hacia una cartografía del dispositivo democrático global

El texto parte de la sospecha de la existencia de un dispositivo democrático que funciona globalmente. Basándose en Michel Foucault, concibe al dispositivo como una red que conecta elementos heterogéneos y cuyo efecto es la producción de subjetividades. Así, haciendo un uso metodológico del mismo, vincula proposiciones éticas sobre la libertad, construcciones teóricas de las relaciones internacionales, prácticas políticas de Estados y organismos internacionales, y construcciones normativas (específicamente, la responsabilidad de proteger) que acompañan las intervenciones internacionales en el Sur global, para reflexionar sobre la producción de un sujeto democrático, predicado de un gobierno liberal global.

Theorizing Privacy in a Liberal Democracy: Canadian Jurisprudence, Anti-Terrorism, and Social Memory After 9/11

Abstract The creation of new search powers in the Canadian Anti-Terrorism Act post-9/11 to make citizens more transparent to state surveillance was less a new phenomenon than an extension of preexisting tendencies to make citizens transparent to the state, so the risks they pose can be efficiently managed. However, 9/11 brought about a shift in the ways in which the Supreme Court of Canada talked about terrorism; terrorism was no longer placed on a continuum of criminal activity but was elevated to a threat to Canadian values as a whole. I argue that, paradoxically, this shift reconnected the Court to earlier discourses about privacy as an essential element of democratic governance and reinvigorated narratives around the importance of the public-private boundary to democratic relationships by situating privacy within narratives informed by social memory. From this perspective, privacy can be conceptualized as a status claim: as citizens, we are entitled to privacy because privacy is the boundary that creates right relationships between citizens and between citizens and the state. This avoids pitting privacy as an individual right against societal interests in transparency because it more fully actualizes Priscilla Regan’s call to theorize the value of privacy as a public good central to liberal democratic governance. This conception also reconnects Alan Westin’s original understanding of privacy as an element of liberal democracy to the sociological research he drew on, enriching the liberal conception of privacy by locating it in the intersubjective communication of cultural actors living in community.

Knowledge in international relations: Susceptibilities to motivated reasoning among experts and non-experts

Motivated reasoning as a pervasive feature of human psychology poses challenges to the ideal of liberal democratic government, which relies on citizens’ rationality. Motivated reasoning is at least partially caused by a biased store of knowledge, a partial set of accumulated information that skews reasoning about important political issues. However, there is some evidence that specialized training in a given domain may reduce the effects of motivated reasoning within that domain. To test whether a similar phenomenon is evident in the field of international relations, a signal detection technique is used to measure knowledge of U.S. foreign policy among two samples, one of IR professors and one of laypersons. The results uncover significant differences between experts and nonexperts, indicating that training in IR helps to reduce biases in knowledge, potentially providing “knowledge constraints” on motivated reasoning. Nonetheless, some evidence of bias among IR professors remains, suggesting that knowledge constraints on motivated reasoning may not fully allay normative concerns of bias in the domain of international relations.

Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government. TonyBennett, FionaCameron, NéliaDias, BenDibly, RodneyHarrison, IraJacknis, and ConalMcCarthy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government. TonyBennett, FionaCameron, NéliaDias, BenDibly, RodneyHarrison, IraJacknis, and ConalMcCarthy. Durham, NC: D<scp>uke</scp> U<scp>niversity</scp> P<scp>ress</scp>, 2017.

Same-sex marriage beyond Charter dialogue: Charter cases and contestation within government

In this article, I argue that the dialogue debate has obscured a much richer story that can be told about Halpern v Canada, same-sex marriage, and the complex relationship between courts and legislatures. The federal government was deeply divided on same-sex marriage. Parliament, the Liberal government, the federal Cabinet, and the liberal caucus were all deeply divided. From the outside, it may have appeared as a ‘courts versus government’ battle, with the federal government defending the opposite-sex definition of marriage right up until the Ontario Court of Appeal struck it down as unconstitutional in Halpern. But a closer look shows that the federal government’s about-face after Halpern had been in the making for years, with supporters trying to use court decisions as well as changing public opinion to wedge open the marriage issue. The same-sex marriage case study can be retold as a story not of dialogue between courts and Parliament but, rather, as a contestation within government. I argue that this story – of conflict and contestation within government and the use of court decisions by proponents of same-sex marriage – can provide a richer account of the evolution of the federal government and the adoption of the Civil Marriage Act.

Carceral Kinship: Future Families of the Late Leviathan

AbstractThis essay examines the monstrous first as a figure haunting Western legal history, stripped of rights and often merging with the animal, and second, as a divergent sociality borne of emergencies, crises, and faultlines of late liberal governmentality. In particular I ask how the figure of the pathological and violent gang member structures debates about the US‐Mexico border crosser, and the limits of humanity before the law. The essay moves from a genealogy of the gang member in Honduras, to the refugee asylum seeker of 2018, to ask what forms of difference‐making, in the form of new monstrosities, might inform new notions of kinship and solidarity amid anthropocenic futures.

From the Heavens to the Markets: Governing Agricultural Drought under Chinese Fragmented Authoritarianism

The applicability of liberal governance models in authoritarian contexts has been widely debated. This study contributes to this debate by using a Foucauldian analytic of apparatuses of security to understand how Chinese state actors used the liberalization of agricultural markets to indirectly mitigate against the risk of droughts. Apparatuses of security, which rely on indirect governance through market and biopolitical mechanisms, were proposed by Foucault to explain the emergence of governmentality in liberal states. The Chinese state has been described as a system of fragmented authoritarianism, wherein state actors are isolated from and compete with one another. Food policy in the early People’s Republic of China extended this isolation to the point of encouraging local autarky at the county level. Around the year 2000, local officials in northwest China began promoting the replacement of subsistence agriculture with drought-resistant commercial agriculture as a means of mitigating against drought. This shifted the source of risk of food shortfalls from an environmental risk of drought to a state-mediated market risk and displaced the long-standing model of local autarky providing food security. By illustrating the dynamics of how Chinese state actors govern nature through market mechanisms, this study contributes to theorizations of how liberalization can function to govern nature in authoritarian contexts. Key Words: apparatuses of security, China, drought, governmentality, water–food security.

The Politics of Transnational Law

This chapter highlights several traits of institutional design that characterise the current discontent among states with liberal institutionalist governance. It discusses these traits with states’ critiques of transnationalism. The chapter analyses how states respond to such frustration by developing policies and practices designed to reclaim sovereign manoeuvrability by circumventing or creatively navigating these same international legal structures. This development draws on the very same transnational structures and modus operandi as foreseen by transnational law scholars. The chapter argues that in contrast to the predictions of transnational legal scholarship, this form of transnationalism is increasingly used as a managerial tool to limit the impact or development of more traditional and liberal forms of international law. The expansion and increased institutionalisation of international law itself seem to have created the structural premise for this type of politics of international law. In sum, international law has developed to a point where some states feel threatened by their own creation.

The Chinese Way Total Quality Management

: The story what I want to say is why China did not have a chance to become a world power in these five hundred years (1500-2000)? And after more than 30 years of reform and opening up, China has accumulated the momentum and finally broke out in recent years. Under the situation of political stability, China utilizes the TQM-like mode of planning process for the economic and social development, and from the PDCA Deming Cycle look at China's Five-Year Plan, the 9th Five-Year Plan, the 10th Five-Year Plan, the 11th Five-Year Plan, the 12th Five-Year Plan of China, and 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020). Then can be continuously carry out those plans, and promote medium-and-high-speed economic growth and move toward a medium and high-end standard so as to achieve the grand goal of building a well-to-do society in an all-round way by 2020. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued in October 2016, “Industrial Technology Innovation Capability Development Plan (2016-2020)”, this kind of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) or Policy Management of the mode of governance, deploy from the Central Committee of the 13th Five-Year Plan to the State Council’s development strategy, and then by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in charge of his own professional projects to provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions related professional unit. This kind of top-down promotion and implementation model is very difficult to implement in a liberal democracy government body. The Director General of the State Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine on “One Belt One Road Initiative” Press Conference, answered questions raised by Chinese and foreign reporters on issues related to “Quality Improvement”. When we discuss the issue of economic and social development of a country, with quality as its topic, it will get less controversy in ideology. The quality of the subject to the “essence of substance” requirements are precise and accurate; to the “process of business” focus on efficiency and effectiveness; to the “conduct oneself” emphasis on words and deeds should be consistent; to the “quality of life” pursue the balance of production, ecology, life; to the society “Datong (The Ideal World)” is our dream. Guided by the above quality issues, quality professionals may can be dedicated to that: “for satisfying the universal value of human material and spiritual needs, integrate the methodologies of essence of substance, process of business and psychology, for enhancing the quality of human life, to engage in quality related science research, technology development, and application promotion. There will be many projects to be carried out, especially the establishment of ‘The Chinese Way Total Quality Management’”

Homophobia and Homonationalism: LGBTQ Law Reform in Canada

This article explores the tensions and contradictions between the recognition of same-sex relationships and the development of legal prohibitions against discrimination on the one hand versus the ongoing symbolic and actual criminal regulation of gay sex on the other hand. I describe these tensions as they have unfolded over the last 40 years through the most recent attempts by the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, elected in 2015, to reform the criminal law, to expunge the record of past criminal convictions for same-sex behavior, and to apologize and compensate lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) communities for past discrimination. I argue that this bifurcated pattern of public policy change and legal reform demonstrates the persistence of political homophobia alongside of homonationalist celebration of queer normativity. By considering the federal government’s long-standing failure to reform criminal laws that encapsulate formal-legal inequality of LGBTQ people, the article highlights the persistence of homophobic public policy alongside homonationalist policy discourse and genuine progress in the legal recognition of queer rights. I conclude by considering the implications of this mix for theorizing homophobia and homonationalism in law and policy.