Shadow Of Power Research Articles

In the Shadow of Power: Ethics and Material Interest in Ukrainian Political Reporting

Cet article examine la relation entre l’économie politique et l’éthique du journalisme d’actualités en Ukraine, après la révolution de Maidan et avant l’invasion russe. J’explique pourquoi les journalistes, selon qu’ils travaillaient pour des médias indépendants ou pour les médias officiels, évaluent leur proximité vis-à-vis du pouvoir politique et économique en termes radicalement différents du point de vue de l’éthique. Dans les deux cas, le problème éthique principal des journalistes réside dans la subordination de leur travail aux intérêts matériels de leurs puissants mécènes. Toutefois, les journalistes indépendants et les journalistes officiels interprètent ces intérêts différemment : les premiers comme un dangereux poison, les seconds comme une inévitable contrainte. Ainsi, différentes formes d’éthique prennent corps au sein de la profession. Parmi les employés des médias indépendants, se développe une éthique des valeurs, qui met en avant l’adhésion volontaire et désintéressée à des idéaux purs, détachés de toute obligation ou gratification matérielle. Parmi ceux qui travaillent pour des annonceurs officiels appartenant aux oligarques, en revanche, c’est une éthique du pragmatisme qui a cours, mettant l’accent sur le compromis pratique entre des intérêts puissants et des idéaux professionnels élevés. J’avance ici que le « pragmatisme » se déploie parmi ceux qui ne peuvent pas s’émanciper des rapports de domination sous la contrainte desquels ils travaillent, et qui cherchent à les utiliser à leurs propres fins en acceptant les gratifications auxquelles leur complicité leur donne accès. Par contraste, les « valeurs » pures jouent un rôle cardinal pour la minorité de journalistes qui trouvent les moyens viables de rejeter ces rapports de domination, mais qui ne s’en trouvent pas moins, de ce fait, dans une position précaire au sein de leur profession. À travers ces deux formes d’éthique, les journalistes négocient des positions structurelles différentes dans l’économie médiatique de l’Ukraine. En faisant usage des ressources à leur disposition, mais sans s’y limiter néanmoins, ils œuvrent ainsi chacun au bien social et s’efforcent d’accommoder au mieux leur autonomie des déterminismes sociaux.

The shadow of power

The shadow of power

Give and Take: Developmental Foreign Aid and the Pharmaceutical Industry in East Africa by Nitsan Chorev

Reviewed by: Give and Take: Developmental Foreign Aid and the Pharmaceutical Industry in East Africa by Nitsan Chorev Jennifer Tappan Nitsan Chorev. Give and Take: Developmental Foreign Aid and the Pharmaceutical Industry in East Africa. Princeton Studies in Global and Comparative Sociology. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2019. xii + 305 pp. Ill. $29.95 (978-0-691-19784-5) Nitsan Chorev’s Give and Take is an in-depth and well-researched comparative historical analysis of the kind of foreign aid that facilitated the development and growth of the pharmaceutical industry in East Africa. The study is framed as a contribution to debates over foreign aid and its efficacy. Shifting from a focus on quantity and statistical evaluations of success and failure, Give and Take instead [End Page 605] considers what kind of aid proves to be what Chorev terms “developmental.” Through an examination of the pharmaceutical sector, Chorev identifies the kind of assistance, which has the capacity to be developmental, as aid that specifically creates markets, provides monitoring as well as the mentoring needed to meet quality standards and market demand. One of the strengths of the analysis is the close attention to the specific economic, social, and political contexts, and local conditions. The value of education and global networks was, for example, featured throughout. Nor did the author ignore the importance of power. Rather, Chorev argues that the evidence from the pharmaceutical industries in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda illustrate just how crucial it is for aid recipients to actively negotiate, albeit from within the “shadows of power” (p. 10). The question of power is further implicated in the final discussion of why foreign aid must work with, rather than bypass, the state. The introductory chapter is followed by an examination of the shift toward generic drugs in East Africa and the Global South, focusing specifically on the rise of Indian pharmaceuticals in East Africa and multinational pharmaceutical companies’ unsuccessful attempts to maintain their market dominance. The rest of the book is divided into six chapters (followed by a conclusion), which document and compare the emergence and upgrading of pharmaceutical companies in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, respectively. The first set of chapters examine the period from the 1970s/1980s through the 1990s, and the second set focus on the initial decades of the twenty-first century—when global activism led to lowered costs and increased funding. Numerous insights emerge from Chorev’s close analysis of data collected from an array of sources, including interviews conducted in all three countries. The central findings support the argument that developmental aid was instrumental in both the emergence and growth of pharmaceutical industries in East Africa. The comparative analysis illustrates how distinctions between Kenya and Tanzania (particularly in the earlier period) led to very different outcomes and how those patterns continued to play out in more recent decades. For example, the decision to purchase locally manufactured drugs for “rations kits” in Kenya, but not in Tanzania or Uganda, was instrumental in the growth of the Kenyan industry and equally detrimental to the fledgling Tanzanian and virtually nonexistent Ugandan pharmaceutical sectors. Moreover, Chorev shows how this creation of a market, which expands significantly in the wake of HIV/AIDS, was only part of the equation. By monitoring to ensure quality standards, aid agencies helped to upgrade the industry, particularly in the context of limited state regulatory capacity. Mentorship and technology transfer were equally crucial for the companies that were able to expand and improve their production thereby increasing their market share and, in a few cases, reaching the highest international quality standards. My critiques are few and are offered with the caveat that I approach the text as a historian, not a sociologist. Although, the organization of the text features the specific trajectory of individual pharmaceutical companies, dividing the comparative case studies across two sets of individual chapters led to some redundancy [End Page 606] and diminished the force of the narrative. Specific facets of the pharmaceutical sector make it a more unique case than the author contends, potentially limiting the general applicability of the findings. The terminology monitoring and mentoring are unfortunate given the colonial history of development in Africa. Finally, the...

Fully-automated liberalism? Blockchain technology and international cooperation in an anarchic world

AbstractA recent wave of scholarship attests that the liberal world order is under threat. Although there is disagreement about the underlying reasons for this diagnosis, there are few attempts to further our understanding of how the liberal order can be reinvigorated. This paper probes the potential of blockchain technology to promote international cooperation. Blockchain technology is a data structure that enables global governance stakeholders to establish decentralized governance systems which provide high-powered incentives for enhanced cooperation. By outlining the contours of a blockchain-based global governance system for climate policy, the paper illustrates that blockchain technology holds theoretical promise to foster cooperation in three ways: leveraging new sources of information through blockchain-based prediction markets; allaying coordinating problems through reducing the cost of transactions for side payments; and allowing states and other global governance actors to make more credible commitments given guaranteed execution of blockchain-enabled smart contracts. By empowering local knowledge holders and non-state actors that traditionally lacked the means to coordinate efforts to influence global politics, blockchain technology also promises to advance an international order based on liberal values. In actuality, however, emerging blockchain-based global governance systems will fall short of the libertarian ideal of ‘fully-automated liberalism’ as their design and operation will remain under the shadow of power.

Trade in the shadow of power: Japanese industrial exports in the interwar years

AbstractDuring the interwar years, Japanese industrialization accelerated alongside the expansion of industrial exports to regional markets. Trade blocs in the interwar years were used as an instrument of imperial power to foster exports and as a substitute for productivity to encourage industrial production. The historiography on Japanese industrialization in the interwar years describes heavy industries’ interests in obtaining access to wider markets to increase economies of scale and reduce unit costs. However, this literature provides no quantitative evidence that proves the success of those mechanisms in expanding exports. In this article we scrutinize how Japan—a relatively poor country—used colonial as well as informal power interventions to expand regional markets for its exports, especially for the most intensive human capital sector of the industrializing economy. Our results show that Japanese exports in 1938 would have been around one‐third smaller had no empire ever existed, which indicates an outstanding effect of empire in the international context.

In the shadows of power: the infrastructural violence of thermal power generation in Ghana's coastal commodity frontier

This research adopts Jason Moore's concept of the commodity frontier, which portrays the socio-ecological impacts of capitalist expansion, to analyze the spread of Independent Power Provision in Sub-Saharan Africa. This form of power provision has thus far been under-theorized, especially its impacts on local communities, which must be addressed considering its contemporary popularity in the region. The article uses the concept of 'infrastructural violence' as an analytical lens, drawing upon its language and theories that describe the ways in which physical infrastructures often deemed benign can inflict violence on specific regions and social groups. Using a case study of the Takoradi Thermal Power Station in the Western Region of Ghana, the ethnographic research depicts the subtle yet highly deleterious forms of violence that occur within Aboadze, the small-scale fishing community the power station is embedded in, reducing access to vital resources including food, water and land, as well as the various exclusions that impact the livelihoods of a community already suffering from marginalization and poverty.Keywords: Commodity frontiers, infrastructural violence, power station, Sub-Saharan Africa, Ghana

Political Groups, Coordination Costs, and Credible Communication in the Shadow of Power

Political Groups, Coordination Costs, and Credible Communication in the Shadow of Power

Caring potentials in the shadows of power, correction, and discipline—Forensic psychiatric care in the light of the work of Michel Foucault

The aim of this article is to shed light on contemporary forensic psychiatric care through a philosophical examination of the empirical results from two lifeworld phenomenological studies from the perspective of patients and carers, by using the French philosopher Michel Foucault's historical–philosophical work. Both empirical studies were conducted in a forensic psychiatric setting. The essential results of the two empirical studies were reexamined in a phenomenological meaning analysis to form a new general structure in accordance with the methodological principles of Reflective Lifeworld Research. This general structure shows how the caring on the forensic psychiatric wards appears to be contradictory, in that it is characterized by an unreflective (non-)caring attitude and contributes to an inconsistent and insecure existence. The caring appears to have a corrective approach and thus lacks a clear caring structure, a basic caring approach that patients in forensic psychiatric services have a great need of. To gain a greater understanding of forensic psychiatric caring, the new empirical results were further examined in the light of Foucault's historical–philosophical work. The philosophical examination is presented in terms of the three meaning constituents: Caring as correction and discipline, The existence of power, and Structures and culture in care. The philosophical examination illustrates new meaning nuances of the corrective and disciplinary nature of forensic psychiatric care, its power, and how this is materialized in caring, and what this does to the patients. The examination reveals embedded difficulties in forensic psychiatric care and highlights a need to revisit the aim of such care.

Letting Things Go

Obama's restraint in the use of force has good precedent. He should be judged by the substance and not the shadow of power.

In the shadow of power: civil–military relations and the Tunisian popular uprising

This study examines the relative unknown strategic decisions inside the ‘black box’ of Ben Ali's authoritarian regime under stress, and questions the broader narrative claiming that the fall of his regime was mainly the result of the mass uprising. Making use of new primary and secondary material, the author argues that the demise of the autocratic ruler was caused by the failure of the regime's controlling strategies due to the defunct communication among key security figures that represented its coercive apparatus: military, ministries of Defense and Interior, and different domestic security organisations. Indeed, the dysfunctional intra-regime dynamics were responsible for the outcome of the popular uprising, not the number of the demonstrators across the country. In this regard, Ben Ali's departure was the unintended outcome due to his misreading of the civil–military relations, as well as his own ambiguous perception of the military as a protector and potential threat that led to a lack of loyalty on the side of senior army officers. His departure was not the result of a deliberate decision or a coup d’état, per se, but rather the consequence of miscommunication between representatives from different bodies in the security establishment. In addition, the article shed lights on the role the military played in securing the country's political transition during the immediate aftermath of the dictatorship's fall.

Borrowed Power: Debt Finance and the Resort to Arms

Military expenditures are often funded by debt, and sovereign borrowers are more likely to renege on debt-service obligations if they lose a war than if they win one or if peace prevails. This makes expected debt service costlier in peace, which can affect both crisis bargaining and war termination. I analyze a complete-information model where players negotiate in the shadow of power, whose distribution depends on their mobilization levels, which can be funded partially by borrowing. I show that players can incur debts that are unsustainable in peace because the opponent is unwilling to grant the concessions necessary to service them without fighting. This explanation for war is not driven by commitment problems or informational asymmetries but by the debt-induced inefficiency of peace relative to war. War results from actions that eliminate the bargaining range rather than from inability to locate mutually acceptable deals in that range.

Justice in the Shadow of Power: Understanding the Limits of Civil Justice Reform in China Through Entrepreneurs’ (Un)Willingness to Use Courts

Based on the private enterprise surveys conducted in the 2000s, this paper ascertained that, in China, entrepreneurs who are politically connected were more inclined than those unconnected to resolve disputes through litigation, especially when the disputes were between private parties. Administrative disputes were much less frequently resolved in courts for either the political haves or have-nots. Moreover, the different litigation inclinations did not seem to be a consequence of different mastery of legal knowledge since the gap did not narrow in spite of the increase of learning opportunities over time. All these findings seem to confirm the political bias ingrained in the Chinese judiciary. At the same time, the quantitative study also showed the recent civil justice reform to be ineffective in correcting this judicial bias. Lack of judicial independence was blamed to have led the civil justice reform to a dead end. With no improvements in courts’ neutrality, the technocratic reform failed to win support from the people. The Chinese experience told an illustrative story of judicial professionalism not being self-sustainable when divorced with judicial independence.

The Retreat fromWestphalia: Iraq and the “Shadow of Power”

The Retreat fromWestphalia: Iraq and the “Shadow of Power”

Bryan and House: Political Leaders of the Progressive Era

Few political leaders of the Progressive Era had more disparate lives and careers than William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) and Colonel Edward M. House (1958-1938). In the early 1890s Bryan launched an extraordinary political career, capturing the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1896 and becoming, for many years, a charismatic reformer and the dominant figure in the Democratic Party. In the same decade House organized a powerful faction within the Texas Democratic Party, our crowd, putting in office men who depended on his advice and support. Bryan was a public man, happiest when he was crisscrossing the nation inspiring his followers; House was a private man, content to work in the shadows of power and to exercise his influence through others. During the early years of Wilson's presidency their different paths to political power met when Bryan became secretary of state and House the president's friend and adviser. Both Bryan and House operated on the national and world stages, accumulating many admirers and detractors, dramatic successes and failures, and leaving behind complicated life histories with which historians have had to deal. The rich materials about each man, the largeness of their lives, could easily justify lengthy biographies. But Kazin and Hodgson both chose to write relatively brief books (A Godly Hero has 306 pages of text, Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand only 276 pages). Perhaps Kazin felt that Bryan had been heavily studied over the last forty years (especially by Paola E. Coletta in William Jennings Bryan, 3 vols., 1964-69) and needed only a compact, up-to-date life. Hodgson's decision is more puzzling, since House has been the subject of some specialized studies but of no scholarly biography.1 Despite his massive collection of personal papers at Yale University, including a diary of 2,950

Book Review: Shadows of power: an allegory of prudence in land-use planning

Book Review: Shadows of power: an allegory of prudence in land-use planning

In the Shadow of Law or Power? Consensus-Based Bargaining and Outcomes in the GATT/WTO

This article explains how consensus decision making has operated in practice in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization (GATT/WTO). When GATT/WTO bargaining is law-based, consensus outcomes are Pareto-improving and roughly symmetrical. When bargaining is power-based, states bring to bear instruments of power that are extrinsic to rules, invisibly weighting the process and generating consensus outcomes that are asymmetrical and may not be Pareto-improving. Empirical analysis shows that although trade rounds have been launched through law-based bargaining, hard law is generated when a round is closed, and rounds have been closed through power-based bargaining. Agenda setting has taken place in the shadow of that power and has been dominated by the European Community and the United States. The decision making rules have been maintained because they help generate information used by powerful states in the agenda-setting process. Consensus decision making at the GATT/WTO is organized hypocrisy, allowing adherence to the instrumental reality of asymmetrical power and the sovereign equality principle upon which consensus decision making is purportedly based.

Rober Powell, In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies in International Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. 310 pp. $55.00 (hardcover), $19.95 (softcover).

Rober Powell, <i>In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies in International Politics</i>. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. 310 pp. $55.00 (hardcover), $19.95 (softcover).

In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies in International Politics. By Robert Powell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. 310p. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies in International Politics. By Robert Powell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. 310p. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

In the shadow of power: states and strategies in international politics

Robert Powell argues persuasively and elegantly for the usefulness of formal models in studying international conflict and for the necessity of greater dialogue between modeling and empirical analysis. Powell makes it clear that many widely made arguments about the way states act under threat do not hold when subjected to the rigors of modeling. In doing so, he provides a more secure foundation for the future of international relations theory. Powell argues that, in the Hobbesian environment in which states exist, a state can respond to a threat in at least three ways: (1) it can reallocate resources already under its control; (2) it can try to defuse the threat through bargaining and compromise; (3) it can try to draw on the resources of other states by allying with them. Powell carefully outlines these three responses and uses a series of game theoretic models to examine each of them, showing that the models make the analysis of these responses more precise than would otherwise be possible. The advantages of the modeling-oriented approach, Powell contends, have been evident in the number of new insights they have made possible in international relations theory. Some argue that these advances could have originated in ordinary-language models, but as Powell notes, they did not in practice do so. The book focuses on the insights and intuitions that emerge during modeling, rather than on technical analysis, making it accessible to readers with only a general background in international relations theory.

In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies in International Politics

In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies in International Politics