Political Frontiers Research Articles

Game Theory and the Politics of the Global Commons

I assume that politicians maximize domestic political support subject to a political feasibility constraint set by the relationship between environmental quality and some politically desirable economic performance indicator. Because pollution flows across national frontiers, the political feasibility frontier depends on other nations' environmental policies. Depending on the nature of domestic political pressures and the environmental spillovers between the countries, various game structures are possible. Knowledge of the structure of the game is helpful when addressing policy issues and the question of how to design international institutions in order to overcome international environmental collective action problems.

Breakpoints: how managers exploit radical business change

Many companies have fallen, not because they ignored their customers or lacked superior management skills, but because business conditions shifted beneath them. In an environment of fluctuating markets, proliferating technologies, and changing political frontiers, the management challenge is to cope with breakpoints, or sudden shifts in the rules of the game. Paul Strebel provides a framework for dealing with radical business change. Strebel shows that breakpoints may be as enterprising as Drexel Burnham Lambert's promotion of the junk bond market - or as dramatic as its collapse. They may result from changes in industry conditions such as the emergence of new technologies or price wars. When business conditions shift, the formula for success inevitably changes. This book presents a way of managing different types of radical business change. Strebel describes a simple framework that allows managers to adapt to diverse conditions, especially those that lead to breakpoints. He suggests how to develop radical change scenarios that will help managers better anticipate or catch up with discontinuities. Further, Strebel reveals what managers must do to create competitive discontinuities - and become true market leaders.

Ancient Remains in Caria: the Watchtower at Arpas

Caria south of the Maeander (Büyük Menderes) river has fascinated travellers since antiquity. Mountainous in character and moderately populated today, the region served as a political and cultural frontier between the Greek mainland and the more ancient centres of civilization in the Near East. After a century of exploration, a wealth of data now illuminates the historic past of ancient Caria (von Diest 1909, Ramsay 1890, Paton and Meyers 1896, Winter 1887, Chamonard 1895, Fowler 1906, Hicks, 1892, Humann and Dörpfeld 1893, Miller 1916, Paton 1900, and Weber, 1904). Although informative, such scholarship has also had a negative impact. All too often, the view taken in the published literature is that previously identified sites offer little additional information. Scholars have tended to accept this view and the “authoritative research” of others without further examination of the region or its rich physical remains.

The Re-Imagination of the Middle East: Political and Academic Frontiers (1991 Presidential Address)

The world is now undergoing a transformation as profound as that experienced with the rise of the territorial state system after the religious wars of Europe’s feudal period. Modern technology in defense and communications and “emerging trans-state patterns of commerce, politics, and cultural life” are rendering traditional notions of “frontier” obsolete. Dispersed transnational communities—Sikhs in Canada, Muslims in Britain, Germany, France, and the U.S.—sectarian and ethnic militias sustained by emigré and foreign funds, and transnational banking, commercial, religious, and intellectual links often opaque to state authorities may not threaten the existence of the nation-state everywhere, but they serve as a poignant reminder that nation-states are not the only significant political actors in the late twentieth century.

NEIGHBOURHOOD CULTURES: SOME ASPECTS OF DIFFICULT HISTORICAL NEIGHBOURHOODS

According to the semiotic approach to culture adopted by the author, the nation should be distinguished not only from the state and society but from national culture as well, even though the nation is a community of shared values and symbols. The symbolic culture encoded in enduring means of communication can transgress political and national frontiers. Its elements may be evaluated in part irrespective of the relations and attitudes to the national source of their origin. The neighbourhood of nations gives rise to numerous conflicts of interest. The history of Germany and Poland serves as an example of this. However, even violent practical conflicts do not preclude the transmission of the symbolic culture beyond national frontiers. This is illustrated by the example of the attitudes of Polish intellectuals toward German culture during the last war. Results of opinion polls are also discussed. The author concludes that a symbolic culture cannot resolve practical conflicts of interests nor remove fears originating in such conflicts, but its influence can prevent the totalisation of conflicts and open a way to mutual understanding.

The interest rate neutrality of fiscal deficits: testing for Ricardian equivalence and capital inflow

This paper examines the extent to which the Ricardian equivalence theorem as restated by Barro (1974) and the capital inflow hypothesis of Dwyer (1985) provide valid explanations of the observed interest rate neutrality of fiscal policy in open economies. A theoretical open-economy macromodel is specified and subsequently tested on a multi-country dataset which spans the recent period of floating exchange rates. On balance, the empirical results favour the capital inflow hypothesis which emphasizes the importance of international financial integration in facilitating the financing of public deficits by the savings of agents who reside across political frontiers.

Economics and Antitrust Policy

Introduction by Robert J. Larner and James W. Meehan, Jr. Unmasking Monopoly: Four Types of Economic Evidence by Kenneth G. Elzinga Strategic Business Behavior and Antitrust by Charles A. Holt and David T. Scheffman Merger Policy in the 1970s and 1980s by F.M. Scherer The Revolution in Antitrust Analysis of Vertical Relationships: How Did We Get From There to Here? by Lawrence J. White Vertical Price Restraints: Per se or Rule of Reasons? by Robert J. Larner Antitrust Law and Economics at the Political Frontier by Donald I. Baker Antitrust Law and Policy: Rule of Law or Economic Assumptions? by Timothy J. Waters The Structural School, Its Critics, and Its Progeny: An Assessment by James W. Meehan, Jr., and Robert J. Larner Postscript: In Memory of H. Michael Mann by Robert J. Larner and James W. Meehan, Jr. Bibliography of the Works of H. Michael Mann Index

Human settlement and colonization in the Sundarbans, 1200?1750

The Sundarban forest in southern Bengal was for many centuries a frontier zone—an economic frontier for communities of wet rice farmers who brought with them technologies and forms of social organization from points further to the west; a political frontier for large centralized states expanding from North India; and a cultural frontier for the worldwide community of Muslims. This paper investigates the forces that, between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, lay behind the transformation of Bengal's natural forest into rice paddy, a transformation that was accompanied by conversion to Islam, state formation, and the evolution of new land tenures.

The politics of left-wing violence in Italy, 1969-85

Italian Terrorism as translation the trajectory of armed struggle violence in a local context - the factory maintaining the political frontier the construction of judicial accounts the staging of political trials Cui prodest.

Floods in Bangladesh: A question of disciplining the rivers

Bangladesh has been experiencing floods more frequently than ever before. Since 1947, she has been hit by extremely devastating floods in 1954, 1955, 1956, 1962, 1963, 1966, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1974, 1976, 1984, 1987, and 1988. Each year's highest flood record and damage costs have been broken by that of the subsequent year. All means of communication become paralysed. People lose food grains, domestic animals, homesteads, and lives. They remain marooned without food and drinking water until relief arrives. Despite huge spending on flood control, the intensity of the floods has been increasing. Therefore, speculation is naturally rife about the causes. The aim of this paper is to identify the factors which contribute to these devastating floods, and then to recommend an appropriate strategy for effective flood control. The geography, geology, and hydrology of Bangladesh are briefly discussed. The whole of the country is a huge river basin criss-crossed by as many as seven hundred rivers, tributaries, and distributaries, having a total length of 22 155 km. The river-beds are rendered shallow by heavy deposits of alluvial earth each year and tend easily to cause inundations. The quantum of silt carried by the river systems into Bangladesh is estimated to be 2.4 × 109 tonnes/yr. ‘Disciplining’ the rivers means keeping the rivers navigable all year round, removing excessive deposits of silt where they threaten to block a channel, preventing widening by erosion, contracting the width where the river is excessively wide, and last but not least, preventing construction whose eventual impact might prove harmful. Natural disasters do not respect political frontiers, nothing can stop them, but their adverse impact could be minimised. The author emphasises the need for employing the abundant cheap manpower, local materials, and indigenous technology for flood control projects.

Book Reviews : Prescott, J.R.V. 1987: Political frontiers and boundaries. London: Allen and Unwin. xv + 315 pp. £30.00 cloth

Book Reviews : Prescott, J.R.V. 1987: Political frontiers and boundaries. London: Allen and Unwin. xv + 315 pp. £30.00 cloth

Political Frontiers and Boundaries

Political Frontiers and Boundaries

Review: Political Frontiers and Boundaries

Review: Political Frontiers and Boundaries

Political Frontiers and Boundaries

Political Frontiers and Boundaries

Political Frontiers and Boundaries

Political Frontiers and Boundaries

Political frontiers and boundaries

Political frontiers and boundaries

The Colonial Legacy in Southeast Asia: Maritime Boundary Problems

The evolution of Southeast Asian land boundaries did not follow the classical model of an international boundary emerging only after a political frontier had been whittled away by encroachments from either side. This could only happen where there was a long period of historical, continuous, indigenous political power. In Southeast Asia, as is well known, the intervention by European colonial powers created a political discontinuity in the evolution of boundaries from frontiers. All the states were carved out from indigenous kingdoms which had been subdued by the European powers. Hence, it was not a matter of selecting a precise boundary to replace an indefinite frontier. Rather, it was political decisions made in European capitals that decided where a boundary should lie. Such land boundaries imposed by the colonial powers were often imprecise as they were badly delimited. Some cut through areas of ethnic homogeneity, while others used vague or changeable physiographic features. It is therefore not sur prising that there have been boundary disputes between states today. Boundaries have, in fact, become an important theme in the politics of Southeast Asia.1 Such colonial decisions have also made their mark in the maritime boundaries of Southeast Asia. Despite the fact that the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea has provided the necessary guidelines for the delimitation of the various sea boundaries, the historical legacies of the colonial powers, in the form of maritime boundary treaties or protocols, have made such delimitation difficult. In many cases, they have given rise to problems and boundary disputes. This is the historical legacy that will be discussed in this paper, a legacy that has stalled or delayed the acceptance of agreed maritime boundaries based on the 1982 Convention.2 Two specific examples, one on Singapore and the other on the Philippines are used to illustrate some of the problems.

The Quality of Work Life Issue: The Corporation as the Next Political Frontier

In the West, society has been on an inexorable journey from autocracy to democracy. Though there have been dark ages and various regressions there seems to have been a fairly consistent move toward granting rights and entitlements to individuals which were once denied them or solely retained by a governing élite. The struggle for man's individual freedom to create the kind of life he so desires first freed him from the authority of bandits and feudal lords, then the authority of established churches, then from assorted tyrants, then from a secular governing elite. Now the struggle has shifted to the corporation where labour unions and others have been struggling to establish workers' rights and entitlements vis‐à‐vis the organisation. The owners and managers have become the latest in a long line of dominant ruling forces which retain vestiges of the feudal master's powers over the individuals in their realms — modern organisations.

Reflections on the ‘new’ economic nationalism

What is the student of politics to make of the revival of protectionism and the new mood of economic nationalism of which it is widely held to be a symptom? It is reasonably clear why nationalism raises problems for economists: for orthodox Marxists it entrenches false consciousness and delays the final crisis of capitalism; for liberals it frustrates the optimal allocation of resources by substituting group sentiment for the rational pursuit of individual self-interest and by endowing political frontiers with an economic significance to which their economic theory is opposed. But it is not self-evident that the assumptions on which the great neo-classical systems are built are the most helpful for understanding the phenomenon of economic nationalism or for evaluating the nature of the problem which it poses for international society. Since Marx himself was profoundly uninterested in the great debate between free trade and protection, while contemporary Marxist-Leninist governments all pursue economic policies which are unambiguously nationalist, I shall confine myself to the debate within the liberal tradition.

Frontiers in Medieval French History

throughout the middle Ages, warriors and lawyers ceaselessly contended over who had the right to form governments in disputed borderlands.1 Our very concept of frontier is an outgrowth of the medieval struggle to create judicial boundaries. But it does not follow that the frontiers of the ninth century had the same definition as their modern counterparts; indeed, a search for linear boundaries of the type existing in the modern world is bound to end in failure. Yet no state, however rudimentary its organization, neglects to mark out its territory by either a line or a zone of separation.2 In Medieval Europe, the question of limits, which arose with the partition of the Carolingian empire, became acute in the late thirteenth century when the rise of French royal bailiwicks and the disintegration of the imperial German frontier called into question the old definitions. Before examining the development of political and administrative frontiers, therefore, it is necessary to inquire into the nature of medieval boundaries, for the two terms, so often confused in modern parlance, are by no means synonymous. The root meaning of 'frontier' is that which is 'in front,' especially that part of a country which is ahead of the hinterland. On the other hand, a boundary is the limit and enclosure of a political unit, and implies the modern concept of the state as a sovereign entity.3 This study contends that as marches and borderlands became more clearly defined and closely connected with core areas, their hitherto undefined frontiers became their precise boundaries. Sadly, Dr. Schlesser died in February 1983.