State Attempts Research Articles

An Air Map for World Cinema: Aeroflot as an Infrastructure for Cinematic Internationalism

The expansion of global air travel in the Cold War era fueled diverse forms of state‐sponsored internationalism, including international writers' congresses, concert tours, and especially art and film festivals. Film festivals served as a key stage for cultural competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as the main way for decolonized Asian and African states to showcase their new national cinemas. The Soviet state airline, Aeroflot, shaped international participation at the Moscow International Film Festival (1959‐) and Global South participation at the Tashkent Festival for Asian, African, and Latin American Cinema in Uzbekistan (1968‐). This article analyzes Aeroflot as an infrastructure for cinematic internationalism. The socialist economics of air travel shaped “world cinema maps” that emerged at Moscow and Tashkent. Aeroflot enabled Soviet cinematic diplomacy, but also constrained it: it delayed Tashkent festival's expansion to Latin America, where the airline had few inroads. For local publics, films brought in airplane luggage at the last minute provided uncensored transnational cinematic experiences that occasionally elided not just Soviet, but also Syrian or American diplomatic control. Aeroflot's inefficiencies put foreign delegates face‐to‐face with Soviet everyday life and reproduced global inequalities: filmmakers from the Global South, whose travel was covered by their Soviet hosts, were at the mercy of Aeroflot's delays, while festival guests from Western Europe and the United States could count on their own national airlines for transportation. Free Aeroflot tickets ensured nearly comprehensive participation of Global South nations, in order to promote Soviet filmmaking as the model for emergent Asian and African cinemas. Yet Third Worldist alliances forged at Moscow and Tashkent—among African organizers of the Pan‐African Federation of Filmmakers, or between Cuban and Vietnamese militant cineastes—often bypassed, contradicted, or exceeded Soviet diplomatic goals. More broadly, I argue that Soviet official internationalism—its technologies, bureaucracies, and expenditures—should be analyzed as an infrastructure that enabled multiple internationalist projects, some conceived elsewhere and working toward goals tangential or inimical to Soviet state purposes. Much existing work on Soviet internationalism zeros in on the state's attempts to win the “hearts and minds” of Soviet or foreign citizens. Conversely, the infrastructural approach focuses on informal transnational alliances and personal ties built on Soviet terrain, while also accounting for Soviet institutional, economic, and technological power that shaped the “contact zones” where these encounters took place.

Ordering Diversity: Co-Producing the Pandemic and the Migrant in Singapore during COVID-19.

What do measures of management during this exceptional and volatile time tell us about the regulation of migrant‐driven diversity and its implications in the arrival city? Using the term “differential diversification” from Singapore, I examine how the socio‐political life of the pandemic is deeply entangled with the management of low‐waged labour migrants. Techno‐political discourses and practices of pandemic management accelerated the state’s attempts to differently include migrant workers, revealing the bare viscerality of biopolitics already in place prior to the pandemic. I argue that diversity is ordered through a striking co‐production of migrant management and pandemic management. This paper draws upon government discourses to demonstrate that measures of pandemic management contribute not only to the spatial regime of migrant management. They also articulate and rationalise the subject transformation of the low‐waged migrant to the extent that, on top of being a moral risk, they are also now a medical risk.

Los otros: Raza, normas y corrupción en la gestión de la extranjería en México, 1900–1950

Pablo Yankelevich's recent book Los otros: Raza, normas y corrupción en la gestión de la extranjería en México, 1900–1950 scrutinizes Mexico's relationship with foreigners in the national territory from the end of the Porfiriato to the postwar period. The study will appeal first and foremost to historians, but it will also be of use to scholars of migration both to and from Mexico, the national tourism industry, and race and ethnicity in early to mid-twentieth-century Mexico. Rather than organize his study chronologically, Yankelevich uses each chapter to trace specific topics from the Porfiriato to the 1950s.Chapter 1, “Ante el yunque de la patria,” builds a conceptual framework that grounds early twentieth-century immigration policy within the context of postrevolutionary mestizophilia. Building on the work of Manuel Gamio, Yankelevich notes that immigration posed certain problems to the Indigenous/European binary. The state identified “races”—particularly Chinese, Black, Jewish, and eastern European—that, it believed, would not successfully contribute to a mestizo order. While the state created strict guidelines to keep such people out of the national territory, financial interests often led to revision of these policies. For example, the United States objected to attempts to keep Blacks out of Mexico because this made it difficult for US firms—particularly railroad companies—to operate there. That said, state officials continued to favor immigration policies that would whiten the nation and bring a desirable mestizaje.Chapter 2, “El servicio migratorio: Andamiaje normativo e infortunio institucional,” discusses the state's attempts to attract so-called desirable migrants, a term with both economic and eugenic overtones. Of chief importance was the enunciation of a legal distinction between tourists and immigrants, though there was later a need for an interim status for people, like students, who would stay in the country for an extended period of time before leaving. While policymakers ultimately aimed to use immigration as a tool for promoting mestizaje, they also aimed to ensure resources for Mexican citizens before supporting foreigners. Mexico thus tended to be reactive in its immigration policies. For instance, on several occasions the United States carried out deportation initiatives and sent large numbers of Mexicans home. The Mexican government responded by cracking down on immigration within its own borders. This was, of course, because thousands of Mexicans had suddenly arrived home in need of work.Chapter 3, “Negocios de la migración,” discusses corrupt public officials who failed to enforce the laws that they had been charged to uphold. Legislation was ineffective because public servants were not committed to upholding established laws, whether it was Porfirian executives paying off customs officials to let sickly immigrants enter the country without a medical exam or crooked coyotes and customs agents during the postrevolutionary period. During the 1920s, border cities attracted Prohibition-era US citizens in search of bars and brothels—often financed by US citizens—that were ripe for corruption. The chapter also discusses how the Mexican state frequently collaborated with the United States to expel migrants—many of whom traveled through Mexico on their journey northward—that both countries viewed as undesirable. The most dramatic case of this was the expulsion of Asian migrants from the northern states of Mexico in 1932. During World War II, Mexico monitored nationals from fascist countries like Spain, Italy, Germany, and Japan. That said, Mexico also made it nearly impossible for European Jews to flee to the country on the eve of the Holocaust—even if they had family in Mexico.Chapter 4, “Naturalización de extranjeros y ciudadanía restringida,” examines philosophies surrounding citizenship. Debates revolved around notions of jus soli (birthright citizenship), jus sanguinis (citizenship through family), and naturalization. During the Porfiriato the country passed the Ley Vallarta, which recognized only jus sanguinis, though it provided a pathway to naturalization for foreigners and their children who had been born in the country. The law remained in effect after the ratification of the Constitution of 1917. Mexico finally adopted jus soli alongside jus sanguinis in 1930, a move that situated the country alongside peer nations in the Americas (pp. 250–51). The final chapter expounds on the discussions raised in chapter 4 by tracking immigration rates from different countries and regions to Mexico across time.As I read Los otros, I couldn't help but think about current migration flows through Mexico to the United States and the accompanying anti–Central American sentiments that have gripped the nation. Yankelevich's rigorous study clearly reverberates with contemporary events as it interrogates how notions of nationalism, race, and ethnicity contribute to national debates on immigration. Ultimately, Los otros will be required reading for students and scholars of Mexican studies across multiple disciplines; Yankelevich's excellent study has had a powerful impact on the field.

Soner Cagaptay, The New Sultan: Erdogan and The Crisis of Modern Turkey

Reviewed by: The New Sultan: Erdogan and The Crisis of Modern Turkey by Soner Cagaptay Hatice Mete Soner Cagaptay. The New Sultan: Erdogan and The Crisis of Modern Turkey. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017. 256 pp. Cloth, $35.00. ISBN: 978-1784538262. The New Sultan: Erdogan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey provides a road map of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's electoral successes and increasing political power.1 It is an extensive study that investigates the main factors and challenges in Turkish politics that have contributed to shaping Erdogan's political road map. As a historian by training, the author opens the layers of Turkish modern history starting from the 1920s until early 2017 while sharing Erdogan's story with the readers. The book is organized around giving an introduction about major developments in Turkish history, and explaining how these developments had affected Erdogan's life. It looks at Erdogan's story, and Turkish modern history, in periodic order starting from his childhood years, in Kasimpasa, a district in Istanbul, and in Rize, where he was originally from, to be elected as mayor of Istanbul, and finally into his presidency. The author displayed, for instance, how growing up in Kasimpasa, a "rough-hewn, conservative area" (p. 16), has shaped Erdogan's perception of the "other," which is the Westernized, [End Page 282] Kemalist, and secular side of Turkey. The author did not only reveal political developments in Turkish history but also provided glimpses of economic and social developments that had left a mark on Erdogan. It traces Erdogan's life story along with major events in Turkish history from the state's attempts to stamp out grassroot movements of Islam in the 1920s, through a street fight between militant leftist and rightist groups in the 1970s, the military's frequent intervention into politics through coup d'états and memorandums, and the Turkish economy's experience with neoliberal policies, and finally into the emergence of Erdogan's "conservative democracy." The author provides major turning points that have deeply affected not only Erdogan's political success and Turkish modern history but also Turkish foreign policy. One of the major points was political Islam coming to Turkey in the 1970s as a possible pillar against rising communism within the Cold War context, and the marginalization of Imam Hatip graduates, state-created religious schools used by governments as an instrument to control the religion in the public sphere. While religion has been an important element in Erdogan's personality, with the injection of Islam into politics by the 1980 junta, it has become a crucial factor in Turkish politics as well. Other turning points that shaped Erdogan's political life and modern history stated in the book include dissolution of the Turkish right in the 1990s along with the ten percent threshold that was put into effect after the 1980 coup d'état, 1997 soft coup, 2001 financial crisis, and the European Union (EU) accession process. The author explains, for instance, how the ten percent threshold, implemented to block Kurdish nationalist parties from gaining access to parliament, had backfired so unexpectedly and rather acted as an impediment for center-right and center-left parties entering the parliament in the 2002 elections, which resulted in the AKP's getting the majority of the parliamentary seats and the beginning of the AKP governance. Another interesting theme in the book is comparisons of Ataturk's modernization project and Erdogan's "New Turkey" project. The author emphasizes that "the irony is that while claiming to revive the pre-Ataturk empire, Erdogan is actually reviving the caricature of the Ottomans that he was taught by the Kemalists" (pp. 196–97). He explains that Kemalism no longer serves as a glue that brings together different ethnic and religious groups in Turkish society, as Erdogan relies on religion and the pre-Ataturk past to bind his electorates. Apart from Erdogan's story, the book involves details about other political leaders of center-right and Islamist parties such as former prime minister and leader of the Democrat Party (1946–61), Adnan Menderes, former president of Turkey, Suleyman Demirel, and founder of the Islamist National Order Party (1970–71) Necmettin Erbakan, who...

“We have achieved great feats…but our struggle is far from over”: Centering caste difference in feminist discourse of the Bodhgaya Land Movement of Bihar, India

This paper situates ‘difference’ in terms of caste to deepen feminist discourse about the Bodhgaya Land Movement (BGLM) of Bihar, India. Urban, educated, elite activists initially read the BGLM as a successful women's movement because it resulted in landless and marginal peasant women obtaining titles to land. Activists and scholars then saw it as having had only limited success when some of the women passed the land to men in their families. The recollections of Bhuiyan Dalit elders who participated in the BGLM provide a more capacious reading of the movement. Stories of their early history as kamia (bonded laborers), the increased caste violence that accompanied the state's attempts at land reform and redistribution, and their activism in the 1980s show that the movement not only intervened in the patriarchy, caste hierarchy, and other power inequities in the region, but produced a new subjectivity amongst formerly subjugated, disenfranchised people. Accounting for caste difference in women's experiences of the land movement uncovers a complex process of Dalit becoming and belonging. Their narratives push feminist scholars to broaden historical readings of the movement to understand how women who have been involved in social activism may be empowered and gain agency despite an intransigent patriarchy.

Cavernous politics: Geopower, territory, and the Kurdish question in Turkey

This article expands upon recent attempts to shift focus to the material and earthly aspects of power to explore territorial politics and state power in Turkey's Kurdish-populated southeast or Turkish Kurdistan. It focuses on the limestone caves scattered along the Upper Tigris Valley as a locus of geopower, examining the sociopolitical life of limestone caves in relation to the environmental geographies of oil extraction, development, and counterinsurgency. Examining three historical segments where the limestone caves of the Upper Tigris Valley have become objects of the Turkish state's attempts to govern Kurds and territorialize Turkish Kurdistan, this paper demonstrates the shifting configurations of geopower in Turkey vis-à-vis the Kurdish Question. As geological formations fundamental to the Turkish state's attempts to exert and secure territorial power, the caves of the Upper Tigris Valley have also been central to the ways in which Kurds in Turkey have attempted to unsettle state power and territorial politics. Surveying the workings of geopower through caves in Turkish Kurdistan, the article reveals the uneven and violent ways in which geological formations are entangled with hegemonic territorial politics and counter-hegemonic politics.

The Security Dilemma Exercise: Hawks, Doves, and Moles

A key concept and problem in international relations, the security dilemma obtains when one state's attempts to increase its security decreases the security of other states. The security dilemma’s consequences are said to include unnecessary armament and conflict spirals. Described herein is an in-class exercise that challenges students to role-play government decision-makers in a stylized international system of states with no explicit revisionist aims, nor incentives for aggression. Decisionmakers must choose how to allocate resources between “guns” and “butter”, which seems a straightforward decision problem until uncertainty is amplified by defecting spies, who share information about neighboring states’ armament plans. The ensuing dynamics typically include arms racing and conflict spirals, thus illustrating the operation of the security dilemma, and providing the class with an opportunity to experience firsthand an emergent security dilemma, and to discuss its operation and implications for world politics.

“Quem nunca teve origem não volta”: o direito da autodeclaração e seus impasses no acesso às vagas para indígenas no Ensino Superior

O objetivo do presente artigo consiste em realizar uma reflexão sobre o critério da autodeclaração, presente na Lei de Cotas 12.711/2012, para a ocupação de vagas pelos povos indígenas no ensino superior público e os debates que tal critério gera acerca da indianidade. O critério de autodeclaração produziu um debate acerca da indianidade não pelos ameríndios, mas sim para as instituições universitárias que se veem diante do imperativo de ter que lidar com a indianidade nas suas burocracias. Tomo como campo empírico a construção de comissões para garantir as vagas para indígenas na Universidade Federal do Maranhão(UFMA) sob pressão das lideranças indígenas, em especial, do povo Tenetehara/Guajajara. Nesse embate em torno da garantia da ocupação das vagas por indígenas o idioma da guerra reaparece entre os tenetehara para continuar em sua rexistência em relação à tentativa constante de desindianização por parte da sociedade brasileira(Viveiros de Castro, 2017).

Settler colonialism in Australia and the cashless debit card

AbstractSettler colonialism continues in Australia today. One way this occurs is through processes of assimilation such as targeting First Nations subjectivities with behavioural conditions on their social security payments. In this paper, I draw on a 13‐month study examining one such programme; the Cashless Debit Card trial in the East Kimberley region in North West Australia. Through restricting cash and purchases to curb alcohol consumption, illegal drug use, and gambling, card aims to instil “responsible behaviour” such as getting a job in the capitalist economy, accumulating private property, and succeeding in English education. Through drawing on critical discourse analysis, I ask, what does the Cashless Debit Card tell us about the settler state's attempts of continued assimilation? The paper explores specific ways the state legitimising assimilation through provoking narratives of First Nations dysfunction, depoliticising poverty and colonisation, constructing evidence around success of policy, and constructing ideas of “community” in order to regulate who speaks and who is overlooked. Although assimilation attempts are made, there is resistance and pushback in the trial site. Attempts of assimilation, not actual assimilation, can only be observed.

Refusing a “City without Slums”: Moroccan slum dwellers' nonmovements and the art of presence

In June 2018, as a result of a program known as “Villes Sans Bidonvilles” (VSB) or “Cities without Slums,” the Kingdom of Morocco declared 58 of 85 cities across the country as slum-free. This paper analyzes the “pockets of resistance” that the Kingdom of Morocco has faced in the implementation of the VSB program. I assert that the contestations and acts of resistance pursued by slum-dwellers are an art of presence – “the ability of the subaltern subjects to assert their collective will in spite of all odds, to circumvent the constraints, utilizing what is possible, and discover new spaces within which to make themselves heard, seen, felt and realized” (Bayat, 2017:111). The art of presence is “the fundamental movement in the life of nonmovements,” therefore I combine the two concepts to argue that slum-dwellers responded to the VSB in incremental/spontaneous and organized/strategic ways, and in doing so they forced the authorities to change their approach against all odds. Using two case studies, I demonstrate how slum dwellers' responses to the rehousing scheme delayed the VSB process by a number of years, and in fact made the authorities offer a resettlement option (recasement) that was preferable to the residents. As slum dwellers resisted the intervention of the state and used tactics of refusal, protest, and grassroots organizing, they turned urban space into a site of contention, and made claims to that space despite being “dispersed, unorganized and atomized” (Bayat, 2017:106). The social ‘nonmovement’ of the slum-dwellers led to tangible benefits for them, and led to the “socialization of the state” through the replacement of the government rehousing program with a resettlement scheme that they preferred. They therein resisted the state's attempt to make them invisible, eradicate their built environment and inculcate them into proper neoliberal development subjects. Their resistance was not a form of radical, insurgent citizenship, but rather a form of “deradicalized dissent” that amended the existing order instead of producing a new one. Against all odds, the art of presence of the slum-dwellers induced a dramatic change in housing policy in their favor.

Seeing Like an Islamic State: Shari‘a and Political Power in Sudan

Islamic law, or shari‘a, has been incorporated into the legal systems of many states. In much of the existing literature, this process is understood as part of the colonial and postcolonial state's attempt to render law legible—that is, codified, standardized, and abstract. In this article, I show how some state actors chose to move in the opposite direction, actively discouraging the transformation of shari‘a into a formal and codified system of law. Using the case of colonial and postcolonial Sudan, I argue that these actors viewed legal legibility as a threat to state power, recognizing the jurisgenerative potential of an informal and uncodified law.

The Influence of Natural Monopolies on Cultural Democracy in the Performing Arts in Estonia

The core question of this article is to what extent has the state set securing cultural democracy (vs. the democratisation of culture as defined by François Matarasso and Charles Landry1[1]) in the performing arts in Estonia as its policy goal. In Estonia, the theatre field is dominated by natural monopolies. These are companies that receive most of the financial subsidies in a respective field, making it economically non-viable for any other company to duplicate these resources. In Estonia, there are eight state-owned theatres (called G8-theatres) that collect, on average, 60% or more of the state subsidies for theatres, the state-subsidized theatre visits and the total income from ticket sales. As stated in the Competition Act of Estonia, company or companies that earn more than 40% of the turnover of the whole market are considered natural monopolies. Therefore, the G8-theatres are natural monopolies. The question whether the Estonian state has done enough to compensate non-governmental theatres (called NonGov theatres) for the aggregation of resources to natural monopolies is one of the main focuses of this article. Here, two strategies are analysed: the activity of the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and the state's attempt to invest in building an alternative infrastructure for NonGov theatres.
 
 [1] François Matarasso and Charles Landry, Balancing act : twenty-one strategic dilemmas in cultural policy, Cultural Policies Research and Development Unit, Policy Note No. 4, Council of Europe Publishing, Belgium 1999, p 13–14.

"China and Japan and their Region"

"China and Japan and their Region" Edward Friedman (bio) Ezra F. Vogel. China and Japan: Facing History. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. x, 523 pp. Hardcover $39.95. isbn 978-0-674-91657-9. Regions differ. There are more than twice as many Vietnamese as all the people of the entire Caribbean. China attempting to dominate a maritime Asia full of major powers such as Japan therefore is not the same as America in the early twentieth century dominating the Caribbean where little Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic are the biggest states. Japanese national identity, according to June Dreyer's brilliant and illuminating history of China–Japan relations,1 requires Japan to preserve its dignity and independence by not submitting to subordination to China. Japan, the world's third largest economy, actually, wants more. It seeks to rival China for influence in the region. In contrast, no Caribbean nation can even imagine rivaling the United States. Yet Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders, wishing to copy America's global rise, imagine regional dominance, as with America and the Caribbean, as the prelude to the CCP state's global centrality. A key question then is what happens when regional nations, for example, Pakistan versus India, Ukraine versus Russia, Tonga and Fiji versus Australia, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam versus China, or even little Cuba versus the superpower United States, resist a would-be regional hegemon, in our case, Japan versus China. Regional resistance to a would-be hegemon is pervasive. It would be a catastrophe if the CCP state's attempt to dominate Japan and the region led to a major military conflict. Ezra Vogel's book is a well-written and well-informed effort to contribute to the noble purpose of avoiding such a regional war. He offers, in place of a history where conflict pervades the relationship, a narrative in which the two people have done best when they have cooperated with each other, as "from 600 to 838 when Japan borrowed . . . from China, and from 1905 to 1937 and 1978 through the 1990's, when China borrowed from Japan" (p. 412). Vogel vividly describes these three periods as well as the long history of China and Japan in general. His important book is also a wonderful read. Vogel is surely correct that the national narrative of China's chauvinistic rulers omits times of China–Japan cooperation. Yet, even Vogel ignores some periods of Japan's cooperation with Chinese. In the Meiji era, Sun Yat-sen's anti-Manchu rebels cooperated with Japan at a time when the Qing Empire of Manchu militarism was aligned with an expansionist Tsarist Russia. China joining with Russia worried Japanese ruling groups. They sought a partner in [End Page 228] Sun Yat-sen. Another China/Japan entente that Vogel does not discuss was a Mao era quest for cooperation with democratic Japan from 1971 to 1981 as part of a global CCP united front policy against Soviet Russian expansionism. In these two instances of cooperation of Japan with Sun and Mao, the political source of alignment was a perceived need of both sides to join against a common threat, Russia. But, military superpower Soviet Russia imploded in 1991, leaving behind a much-weakened Russia. The CCP state's military then could change its focus from a now militarily secure continental Asia, no longer occupied by USSR troops, to maritime Asia. It could promote the People's Republic of China (PRC) maritime expansion. Whatever Japan's continuing problems with Russia occupying Japan's four northernmost islands, the immediate threat to Japan's territorial integrity became an ambitious CCP state. In the post-Soviet era, Russia and China became partners. There no longer was a common Russian enemy of both Beijing and Tokyo to provide a solid basis for deep cooperation and peace between China and Japan. This is not a lesson that Vogel draws from his magnificent study of China–Japan relations. Regions change. China–Japan relations require contextualization. An imperial era Confucian East Asia of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam is without substance in an age where market imperatives and technological capabilities place China and Japan in the Indo...

Abortion by telemedicine in Northern Ireland: patient and professional rights across borders

The uneasy legal and political settlement regarding abortion in Northern Ireland has long relied on the outsourcing of aspects of reproductive health care. While local health services offer only highly restricted access to termination procedures, women travel to access abortion services elsewhere. However, technological changes, in particular the development of abortifacient medicines, are revolutionising this aspect of reproductive healthcare. Rather than women having to travel to a service, today that service can travel to women through the postal supply of abortion pills, sourced via the internet. While online supply of pharmaceuticals can pose potential public health risks, at least two groups offer safe and effective telemedical services to women in Northern Ireland. Women on Web and Women Help Women each supply abortion pills, under prescription from a doctor based in another country, to women who wish to end a pregnancy of nine weeks or less. Here, we consider the extent to which the telemedical abortion services that they offer are protected by transnational law, in particular, EU provisions on cross-border services. This offers new and hitherto unexplored lines of legal argument (including defences against criminal prosecution and challenges to a state's attempts to restrict the flow of services). Through claiming the autonomy-based legal relationships implicit in transnational law and the power that flows therefrom, we suggest, women may challenge regulatory arrangements which seek to limit their reproductive rights.

Demystifying Money: Fictions of Capital and Credit

The 2007 global financial crisis fueled critical scholarship on the geographies of finance, money, credit and debt. This research led to calls for clarifying and demystifying modern money and credit to better understand the proliferation of debt, austerity, and inequality within the contemporary nexus of capitalist class relations, and the broader imperative of managing global economic growth and crises under financialization. This article contributes to demystifying modern money by outlining two prominent historical-theoretical narratives of money: commodity-money and credit-money. These monetary narratives in turn reflect the dialectical imperatives of capitalist social relations, especially capital/labor conflicts, but also the congealing relations between finance capital and the state. Critical analysis demonstrates that both these contradictory monetary narratives are manifest within the institutional design and policies of the U.S. monetary system. This monetary framework is institutionalized through a monetary geography of power that operates through the hegemonic networks of the U.S. Federal Reserve System. This is demonstrated by incorporating the credit-money account into a Marxian framework, which is employed at the national scale to analyze the functional contradictions, history and institutional structure of the U.S. monetary system. The competing money narratives, explicit within the functional design of the Fed System itself, reflect the capitalist state's attempt to reconcile competing social agendas between capital and labor. The mystified monetary fictions underlying monetary authority obscure the political power of commodity-money and the bond/financial markets and class interests they serve, as well as mask the reality and progressive fiscal possibilities of the U.S. Federal Reserve credit-money system.

The Difficulties and Possibilities of Getting Land to Women and Youth

This paper focuses on the challenges faced by women and youth in the Senegal River Valley in their quest to get access to land where they can control the production process and the product. It provides an introduction to one very promising Senegalese effort to meet these challenges by providing women and youth jobs on irrigated farms that are run as worker-owned commercial enterprises. The paper builds on analyses of the traditional social and agricultural systems by prominent Senegalese sociologists (Yaya Wane 1969, Arame Top 2014, Aly Tandian 2013). It analyzes the transformation of the traditional forms of livelihood following the 1980s construction of two large dams on the Senegal River. RThe dams weakened the ability of customary landholders to provision their households because they badly damaged flood-dependent food production, livestock rearing, and fishing. The state's attempts to replace traditional livelihood systems by providing pump irrigated plots for rice production was undercut by high costs. This made male youth migration increasingly important to households' ability to purchase inputs (Koopman 2009). In the current rural economy, both women and male youth are expected to provide substantial inputs to the family economy in the form of food, household goods, and money. These economic pressures have resulting in their increasing demands for land. The paper argues that it is important that the land reform commission take the social aspects of traditional systems of intra-household land control into account so that the reforms will be able to facilitate community-based development of equitable and sustainable ways of managing land in the post-land reform period. Finding ways to get land to women and youth in a manner that is acceptable to both traditional landholders and government is a complex task. The paper discusses one experiment in which traditional village leaders give land for the establishment of an irrigated commercial farm, nominate the young men and women from their village who become worker-members, and implicitly acknowledge that the incomes earned belong to these women and junior men. This experience is important because it seems to be succeeding in a way that attracts the support of both customary authorities and the state.

Maritime Strategies of other Nations and Their Implications for China

Based on a review of existing studies on the development of maritime strategies of the US, UK and China's neighboring countries, this paper summarizes their history and features of each state's maritime strategies and attempt to infer their influence to China's strategy. The findings of this study suggests that, due to difference of historical and environmental backgrounds, each nation took different strategic paths with different features, but their core target was always in pursuit of their own national interests. The suc- cess of a maritime power, in achieving its goals, relies on the overall strategy of a nation and its comprehensive national power. Socio- economic strength and advanced science and technology have formed solid foundations for transforming China into a great maritime power. Other countries' maritime strategies provide useful data for China's development of its own sea power.

The Kurds of Syria: Political Parties and Identity in the Middle East

The Kurds of Syria: Political Parties and Identity in the Middle East

The Kurds of Syria: Political Parties and Identity in the Middle East

The Kurds of Syria: Political Parties and Identity in the Middle East

Ashes of co-optation: from armed group fragmentation to the rebuilding of popular insurgency in Myanmar

This article argues that attempts to buy insurgency out of violence can achieve temporary stability but risk producing new conflict. While co-optation with economic incentives might work in parts of a movement, it can spark ripple effects in others. These unanticipated developments result from the interactions of differently situated elite and non-elite actors, which can create a momentum of their own in driving collective behaviour. This article develops this argument by analysing the re-escalation of armed conflict between the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO) and Myanmar's armed forces after a 17-year-long ceasefire broke down in 2011. After years of mutual enrichment and collaboration between rebel and state elites and near organisational collapse, the insurgency's new-found resolve and capacity is particularly puzzling. Based on extensive field research, this article explains why and how the state's attempt to co-opt rebel leaders with economic incentives resulted in group fragmentation, loss of leadership legitimacy, increased factional contestation, growing resentment among local communities and the movement's rank and file and ultimately the rebuilding of popular resistance from within.