Talking Politics Research Articles

Civil Society and Web 2.0 Technology: Social Media in Bahrain

In the era of globalization, the spread of Information and Communication Technology has created a new opportunity for the emergence of civil society in the Middle East. Barber (1999) defined civil society as "the free space in which democratic attitudes are cultivated and democratic behavior is conditioned." In countries where talking politics in public is still not welcome, social media became an important tool for expressing personal opinions on recent developments in politics. In Bahrain, the Internet provided a platform for the exchange of information and for political mobilization that is anonymous and difficult to control by the establishment. We suggest that in the long run social media could promote the growth of civil society, which is the bedrock of democracy. In this paper we aim at assessing the role of social media in the creation of civil society in Bahrain. On the one hand, we observe the positive effects of the growing community of Bahraini bloggers. On the other hand, we analyze the use of social media in the Day of Rage uprising and its aftermath, which shows that the process of creation of civil society is still at an early stage. The case of the Kingdom of Bahrain illustrated overall trends observable also in other GCC countries.

Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the Union (review)

Reviewed by: Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the Union Angela M. Zombek (bio) Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the Union. By Roger Pickenpaugh. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. 400 pp. Cloth $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-1652-5.) Conditions that inmates faced in Civil War military prisons have generated controversy for the past century and a half. Historians such as William B. Hesseltine and Charles W. Sanders Jr. have sought to explain the prisoner-of-war crisis and inmates’ consequent suffering. Hesseltine cites Union officials’ responses to rumored atrocities in Southern camps to explain poor conditions, while Sanders contends that both Northern and Southern captives suffered intentional maltreatment at the hands of Union and Confederate officials who viewed prisoners as pawns in a political game. Pickenpaugh’s [End Page 131] Captives in Gray accepts these interpretations of prisoners’ suffering, holding federal officials culpable for harsh conditions due to the implementation of a retaliatory policy (188, 209). Pickenpaugh’s work builds on existing interpretations and significantly adds to the scholarly understanding not merely of administrative decisions but of how such decisions impacted inmates behind bars. Captives in Gray provides a survey of how prison establishment, the Dix-Hill Exchange Cartel, the breakdown of prisoner exchanges, and the consequent spike in prison population affected Northern camps such as Johnson’s Island, Camp Chase, Camp Douglas, Elmira, Fort Delaware, and Point Lookout, among many others. The book is based on solid research. Pickenpaugh readily acknowledges and carefully avoids relying on the bias of veterans’ memories of the prison experience that were recorded in the late nineteenth century. Instead, he weaves a narrative from countless manuscript sources that illuminates the boredom and loneliness of prison life, prisoners’ hopes for exchange, their attempts at escape, their suffering from disease and malnutrition, and death behind bars. Pickenpaugh’s work begins in 1861 with the establishment of the war’s earliest prisons, the capture of political prisoners, and an overview of William Hoffman’s role as commissary general of prisoners. The book concludes by detailing the unfortunate spike in the prison population during the war’s final months and the high death rate apparent in early 1865. The author’s main contribution to prison scholarship is his description of how top-down dynamics—such as the federal government’s unpreparedness in meeting the prisoner-of-war crisis, the operation and cessation of the exchange cartel, the inexperience and inconsistency of prison guards, Hoffman’s reluctance to address sanitary conditions, and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s “policy of harsh retaliation”—affected inmates behind bars (220). These dynamics forced inmates into crowded camps where improvised activities, such as talking politics, forming prison bands, writing letters home despite censorship, or participating in work details, either as punishment or for physical activity, helped inmates pass long hours of confinement. After the exchange cartel collapsed, inmates relinquished hope for release, unless they decided to attempt escape. This option, Pickenpaugh asserts, was hardly promising, as escapees faced enormous odds when they ventured over or under prison walls into enemy territory on their journeys south. Northern prison camps were indeed tragic, as Pickenpaugh’s work demonstrates. He starkly notes that 25,967 of the total 214,865 Southern captives held—a figure that totals just over 12 percent—died in Union camps (202). The suffering of Confederate captives is a relatively well-known fact, but Pickenpaugh’s work highlights a number of aspects not typically discussed in prison scholarship. He calls attention to the fact that political prisoners [End Page 132] represented a “wide variety of social classes,” that prison guards suffered from the same monotony that plagued inmates, that prisoners frequently engaged in work details outside of prison walls, and that many Southern prisoners became “galvanized Yankees,” choosing Union military service over imprisonment (6, 171, 199). Both scholars and the general public can gain much knowledge about the prison experience from Pickenpaugh’s work, as it encourages thought about war and the consequent crisis of imprisonment. Angela M. Zombek University of Florida Angela M. Zombek Angela M. Zombek is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Florida. Her dissertation...

The Quality of Social Capital and Political Participation in South Korea

Previous research claims that associational membership produces social capital. Employing the first wave of the Asian Barometer Survey conducted in 2003, this study investigates the development of social capital and its political consequences in South Korea. Rather than study simple association membership, I examine thequalityof civil society (defined as associational commitment and interaction) that individuals pursue through membership. This, I believe, provides a close test of the theoretical impact of social interactions on political participation. The findings indicate that there is a positive association between voluntary activity and two modes of political activity (voting and campaign participation) in different ways and to varying degrees. Associational membership is a significant predictor of voting. In the case of the quality of social capital, associational interaction (talking politics with group members) turns out to be significant in encouraging participation in election campaigns. Overall, my findings on the role of social capital support Putnam's argument that group interactions foster democratic participation.

Science governance and the politics of proper talk: governmental bioethics as a new technology of reflexive government

The article examines the emergence of governmental bioethics in Great Britain, France and Germany, i.e. bodies, discourses and procedures meant to guide policy-making in terms of ethical considerations. It argues that governmental bioethics, marked by openness, transparency and participation, can be understood as a form of reflexive government in the realm of science governance. It grew out of the problematization of older forms of science governance based on ideas of effectiveness, scientific expertise and system stability, and operates through structuring and managing proper talk rather than intervening in processes of techno-scientific development. Yet, rather than challenging the commitment to techno-scientific ‘progress’, it stabilizes it through mechanisms of inclusion, involvement and mobilization: within the framework of proper ethical talk, participation can be employed to pursue rather than oppose system stability.

Talking Politics Online within Spaces of Popular Culture

Talking politics online is not bound to spaces dedicated to politics, particularly the everyday political talk crucial to the public sphere. The aim of this article is to move beyond such spaces by examining political talk within a space dedicated to popular culture. The purpose is to see whether a reality TV discussion forum provides both the communicative space, content, and style for politics that both extends the public sphere while moving beyond a conventional notion. The central question is whether it fulfils the requirements of rationality and deliberation. The analysis also moves beyond a formal notion by investigating how expressive speech acts interact and influence the more traditional elements of deliberation. The findings indicate that nearly a quarter of the postings from the Big Brother sample were engaged in political talk, which was often deliberative in nature. It was a communicative space where the use of expressives both facilitated and impeded such talk.

Cultures of Argument and the Democratic Imaginary: Notes from Bulgaria

Just beneath roar of traffic and sound of euro-dance and local chalga music escaping from sidewalk cafes, there is steady buzz across Bulgarian cities and towns. It is sound of conversations, animated discussions, and endless commentary. This culture of long preceded label transitional which Bulgaria received with fall of communist regime in 1989. Under that label, in which talking politics, complaining about fallacies of government, and carping at behavior of public figures have long been national pastimes, does not amount to civil capable of maintaining structures of democracy, at least as we understand these concepts here in West. At heart of this definitional divergence lies an intellectual problem that argumentation scholars are well aware of; it is problem of determining what range of human communicative interactions will be covered by term 'argument' (Gilbert, 1997, p. 28). The semantic figurations of word argument, however, are not primary point of interest emanating from Bulgarian example. Rather, Bulgaria presents an appealing case for inquiring into political character of idea of itself: politics of its recognition, circulation, and globalization. Attention to status of argument, as Asen (2005) suggests, is not a question of occurrence but rather an inquiry into functions of argument (p. 119). In case of Bulgaria, I would argue that deployment of idea of has created conditions for perpetual transition to democracy. To Bulgarians, is foreign in most literal sense. It is not to say that Bulgarians don't argue or haven't done so historically, but it means that notion of as public display of reason, along with idea of argumentation and deliberation as tools of democratic governance, have been imported only recently and so idea of has created communicative space that is inherently dynamic and political. There are efforts under way to introduce instruction in argumentation in public schools' Bulgarian language arts curriculum in order to align Bulgarian public pedagogy with EU educational standards for communicative competence (Padeshka, 2004). Also, attention to argumentation and public deliberation, often hailed as key techniques of democratic governance, is currently actively promoted in Bulgaria by organizations such as Center for Liberal Strategies, Open Society Institute, Ben Franklin Transatlantic Fellows Initiative, and Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford. The impact of these organizations and their programs can be measured in part by attention they have gained from prime-time politicians and key government officials. For instance, in 2007 Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford conducted Deliberative Poll on issue of integration of Roma minority population into Bulgarian society. In his remarks at closing of event, then Bulgarian Prime Minister Sergey Stanishev praised practice of public deliberation for its value as tool of democracy by noting that the National Deliberative Poll is something brand new for Bulgarian and in Bulgarian politics. It is very important ... to implement this method to get public support for other crucial or divisive issues in Bulgarian ... This method allows for deeper knowledge of essence of issues, for possible ways to resolve these issues, and for policies and actions which institutions should undertake with support of society (as cited in Center for Deliberative Democracy, 2007). Such statements by public officials certainly generate discourse about as tool of democratic governance; however, it might be too rash to suggest that performance of public arguments in fact creates democratic culture of argument. As it often happens, travel brings about change of character, and notion of too has been vulnerable to hybridization. …

Bringing the mosque home and talking politics: women, domestic space, and the state in the Ferghana Valley (Uzbekistan)

In this article I argue that domestic space has to be theorized as an important center of religious practice and socio-political activism. Born-again and devout Muslim women in the Ferghana Valley (Uzbekistan) use domestic space as an important sacred place for religious observance and socialization equal to the mosques. This sacred place has a special meaning for born-again and devout Muslims as it carries a promise of personal and social change. In the context of religious and political persecution by the Uzbek state, domestic space is experienced as a politically safe place and as a critically important site of socio-political criticism and activism, as some intimate in-house discussions about religious, political, and social oppression take a form of public protest on the streets.

The Politics of Pleasure Talk in 18th-Century Europe

This article provides an analysis of the role played by competing conceptions of pleasure in European cultural politics during the 18th century. Beginning with the `onanism' panic, which gripped western Europe in 1712, and with the apparent paradox that new concern about masturbation developed at a time when the pursuit of pleasure was increasingly legitimized in intellectual discourse, this article suggests that the panic can be understood as part of a wider process. This was a process in which a legitimization of pleasure was accompanied by a series of battles to define the concept in more socially useful ways. These battles can be traced across a range of literary fields from theology and aesthetics to physiology and political and moral theory.

Why Teaching “Everyday Science” Makes Sense

American education is plagued by a fundamental confusion--a mismatch between goals we claim to value and the strategies we use to achieve them. This confusion is rooted in the seemingly simple idea that education should prepare students for the future. For some, this preparation is about good citizenship and a satisfying life. For others, it's about a scientifically and technically skilled workforce. Each vision is clear and compelling, but each requires a different educational strategy. To prepare citizens, we should base our educational strategy on an understanding of life--in particular, the role played by in life. To prepare a scientific workforce, we should ensure that students have the skills and knowledge to pursue advanced training in scientific and technical fields. We claim to value civic engagement and literacy, but our education system is more suited to producing a scientific workforce. Because we like the idea that education prepares students for the future, we take for granted that any good education can make us capable of leading interesting, responsible, and productive (Rutherford and Ahlgren 1990, p. 1). Yet as hard as we try, we will never reach citizenship goals with a workforce strategy. What's the alternative? American educators have long nourished an interest in ways that affects our daily lives (Aikenhead 2006). In the past, our ability to design an education system around everyday was limited by how little we actually knew. Now, because of a critical mass of research in the young, multidisciplinary field called Science, Technology, and Society, we finally have a strong intellectual foundation for that education system. As we begin to envision what a rigorous classroom looks like, the challenges and the true promise of that vision become clear. INSENSITIVE TO RHETORIC Classroom practice--what teachers actually do--is surprisingly insensitive to changes in political rhetoric. Science education is no exception. For the past century, whether the political spotlight was shining on international competition or domestic social problems, lessons have been built around a core set of scientific facts and principles. With few exceptions, these facts and principles were chosen because they were central to biology, chemistry, or physics--not because they were relevant to daily life. Everyday has typically been relegated to alternative instructional paths or consigned to the dusty shelf of enrichment activities, only to be taken down once the facts and principles are covered. One of the clearest signs that we aren't pursuing a citizenship-oriented version of education is our apparent disregard for concrete, real-life outcomes. Do students with a good education make better health- and career-related decisions? Can they correctly interpret scientific news (or science-related policy) and understand its implications for them? We don't know--and not because the research is equivocal. We don't know because we haven't asked. No large-scale studies, and precious few studies of any sort, have tried to connect school with substantive, real-life outcomes. WHY TODAY IS DIFFERENT Given our track record, we shouldn't be surprised that the more recent enthusiasm for hasn't transformed America's classrooms. The shiny new content standards and science curricula almost never start with a serious consideration of life. Instead of peering over the shoulders of ordinary Americans as they watch television, visit the doctor, and talk politics, today's curricula rely on 'experts,' often scientists, to tell them what's really important and useful for students to know. In other words, all of the talk about literacy is starting to look like new paint on an old car. …

Constitutional Cases Involving Teachers

law of public employment has come long way since 1892. That's when Oliver Wendell Holmes made his infamous statement, The petitioner may have constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be policeman. (1) Back then, public employment was seen as privilege, not right. Today, it's clear that public employee does not shed his constitutional rights at the workplace door. While public employees have more rights than they did in the 19th century, their legal protections have been decreasing in the past two decades. Public employees' constitutional rights reached peak during the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, the Supreme Court has been diluting their rights. Some of the most significant court decisions shaping the employment environment for public school teachers have come in the areas of freedom of expression, procedural due process, and search and seizure. FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION landmark case in terms of setting constitutional standards for teacher employment came in 1968 in Pickering v. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court ruled that a teacher's exercise of his right to speak on issues of public importance may not furnish the basis for his dismissal from public employment. (2) In Pickering, the Court ruled that public employer had to show compelling state before firing teacher for speaking about matters of public concern. In such case, the court must balance the rights of the employee against the public employer's right to run an efficient workplace. Pickering represents the closest that the free speech rights of teachers approached those of the general public. In 1983, the Supreme Court clarified public employees' free speech rights in Connick v. Myers. (3) Court ruled that when public employee speaks out on matter of private or personal interest and not as citizen on matters of public concern, the speech is not protected by the First When employee expression cannot be fairly considered as relating to any matter of political, social, or other concern to the community, government officials should enjoy wide latitude in managing their offices, without intrusive oversight by the judiciary in the name of the First Amendment. In the school setting, courts assess whether teacher's speech is made mostly in the teacher's role as citizen or as an employee of the school. (4) But even teacher whose speech is matter of public concern can be disciplined if such speech disrupts the school environment. In 2006, the Supreme Court ruled in Garcetti that when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, they are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline. (5) Some scholars have argued that this new employer-friendly rule constitutes sharp break from the traditional Pickering test and discourages public employees from speaking out. Subsequent cases involving teachers illustrate how the Garcetti ruling is weakening the First Amendment rights of teachers both inside and outside the classroom. In Michigan case, the court upheld the termination of teacher who wore t-shirt complaining of lack of contract. Citing Garcetti, the court simply ruled that the t-shirt caused disharmony in the workplace. (6) Similarly, the Seventh Circuit ruled in 2007 that an Indiana teacher who was dismissed for sharing her views against the war in Iraq in class discussing current events was unprotected by the First (7) In 2008, school psychologist sued her school district, alleging that the district retaliated against her after she spoke about noncompliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). A federal district court ruled that she was speaking as an employee rather than as citizen. Citing Garcetti, the court concluded, Plaintiff has not alleged that she was speaking as citizen when she voiced her concerns about alleged IDEA violations. …

Impasse Tempête

227 He’d lived in Port-au-Prince his whole life, and when I first knew him he liked to mock the Macoutes and their country ways, their bumbling attempts at urban cool. “Macoute guy, he dance like this,” Pierre would say, stomping and lurching around like a man trying to fling a crab off his foot. “But you born in Port-au-Prince, you from the city, you dance like this,” and now he’d ease into a fluid shuffle and glide that made you thankful for your eyes. But that was years ago, and now he never left his house except to see the doctor. One of his legs was always numb, and the high blood pressure often made him dizzy, and with his cataracts he felt lost on the streets. “I can see far,” he told me, “I can see the mountains, but I can’t see your face. Your face just look all dusty to me.” People kept wandering through the room where we sat, his wife, kids and grandkids, nieces, nephews, stray children from the neighborhood . It wasn’t a big house, four cinderblock rooms next to the massive gulch that cut through the heart of Martissant. When he’d first shown me where he planned to build his house, this part of Martissant had looked like a demolition site, a dead landscape of scorched rubble and debris. But a bidonville had grown up around Pierre’s house, and the unpaved alley that led through the neighborhood had an official name now, Impasse Tempête. I can see the mountains, but I can’t see your face. He brought out a plastic shopping bag filled with medicines and described each one for me, Ben Fountain Impasse Tempête fiction 228 Ecotone: reimagining place going by feel, recognizing them by the shapes of the bottles. Yesterday’s storm had almost flooded his house, a spectacular lavalas that roared down the mountains and overflowed the gulch, spilling into the antheap network of alleys and paths. Nou la, Pierre said when I asked about the storm. Grâce à Dieu, nou la anko. We’re here. Thanks to God, we’re still here. The gulch held five or six feet of standing water today, a thick, sludgy roux slowly roiling in spots where jets of methane gas bubbled up from below. From the looks of the sky there would be no storms today, only the sun beating down like a punishment. We sat in the soft gray light of the room, sweating and drinking warm 7-Up. As always, he wanted to talk politics, although his mind kept wandering, shuffling past and present like a deck of cards. “You see Aristide up there?” he asked, pointing at the ceiling. “He’s sort of hard to miss.” Whenever that big black helicopter screamed across the sky, the entire city knew their president was on the move. Aristide in his helicopter, far above them all; that story had turned bitter a long time ago, and as we talked Pierre seemed to get the priest and Papa Doc confused in his mind. But soon enough he came back to the present. “That thing in Iraq,” he said now, “everybody in Haiti know they only want the oil.” “Then you guys are way ahead of Americans,” I said. “Mohammed Atta, you know that guy? He marry a Haitian girl.” “I didn’t know that.” “CIA all over Haiti looking for that girl, they take her away. Take her to Cuba, people say. Nobody see that girl again.” He took a drink of 7-Up and shook his head, faking a long look at me. “That guy Bush,” he asked with a plaintive, wondering break, “what does he want?” It was a fair question. “Like you said, Pierre, I think he wants the oil. And whatever else Cheney tells him to want.” Pierre smiled, looked down at the palms of his cracked hands. He knew how it worked, he had a veteran’s highly developed feel for Here in his cinder block house, next to that latrine of a gulch, he could smell the sickness three thousand miles away. 229 ben fountain the personal...

Interview: Paul Davie

Paul Davie, founder of Secerno, met Eleanor Dallaway at RSA to talk start-ups, compliance and politics

The Politics of Talk on German Free Radio Stations

Today there are a wide range of non-commercial radio stations in Germany. Though mostly treated similarly by broadcasting authorities there are major differences in how these stations are thought of and run. This paper argues that for community radios to be radical media they have to develop a way of empowering people to use radio for promoting their issues, especially helping those who are normally not heard. This goes far beyond the training for media literacy most German broadcasting regulators encourage. Drawing on a conversation analysis case study of current affairs programmes on a German Free Radio station, it is pointed out that these shows incorporate both forms of talk that encourage political participation and thereby successfully empower people to take part in political discourse and forms of talk that simply imitate commercial and public service broadcasting stations, thereby applying power structures inherent in these organisations to community radio.

Needles in a Haystack

Talking politics online is not exclusively reserved for politically-orientated discussion forums, particularly the everyday political talk crucial to the public sphere. People talk politics just about anywhere online from reality TV discussion forums to numerous other forum genres. Thus, the need to tap into those discussions is important if our aim is to provide a more comprehensive overview of the online discursive landscape. However, widening our scope of analysis presents us with a new set of diffi culties, namely, how do we identify political talk within the vast pool of threads and postings, and how do we assess such talk in light of the public sphere, while at the same time, taking into account its informal nature. The aim of this article is to tackle these questions by presenting a methodological approach, which attempts to detect, describe, and assess political talk in non-political discussion forums.

Christine M. Quail/Kathalene A. Razzano/Loubna H. Skalli: Vulture Culture. The Politics and pedagogy of daytime television talk shows

Christine M. Quail/Kathalene A. Razzano/Loubna H. Skalli: Vulture Culture. The Politics and pedagogy of daytime television talk shows

The Man-Woman and the Idiot: Madame de Staël's Public/Private Life

Madame de Stael's insistence on talking politics in her daily life as well as in her writing was partly what caused her banishment by Napoleon, and she continued unreformed on return from exile. From living political life at second hand through her father Jacques Necker and her lover Louis de Narbonne both before and during the Revolution, she moved on to promoting its claims in her salon. Yet although she insisted to the Duke of Wellington that she needed politics in order to live , her attitude towards the propriety of female political engagement varied: at times she declare that women should simply be the guardians of domestic space for the opposite sex, at others that denying women access to the public sphere of activism and engagement was an abuse of human rights. This paradox partly explains the persona of the homme-femme she presented in society, and it remained unresolved throughout her life. For all the (disappointed) feminist intimations of the Revolution, however, her imaginitve writing, like the Revolution itself, consistently shows woman's attempts at public self-assertion as doomed.

The Limits of Deliberative Discussion: A Model of Everyday Political Arguments

Can citizens learn from talking politics with one another? To bring out the logic of deliberation, we focus on a simplified model of political discussion: a one-exchange argument. Our model rests on three conditions, all commonly satisfied in real life: (1) that only two alternatives are open for choice—support or opposition to a policy; (2) that as political sophistication increases, so too does the probability that citizens will choose the policy alternative more consonant with their most thoroughly considered view of the matter; and (3) that arguments on opposing sides of an issue are of equal quality. Taking advantage of a specially designed experiment embedded in a large public opinion survey in France, we find that the proportion of citizens choosing policy alternatives consonant with their more general ideological orientations does not increase over the course of our experiment. In the aggregate, we find that deliberation leads at least as many people to ideologically inconsistent positions as it h...

The Politics of Talk

Talk of public dialogue and engagement has become fashionable internationally, and particularly within Europe. Building especially upon recent British experience, this paper argues that ‘public talk’ (that is, talk both by and about the public) represents an important site for science and technology studies analysis. The relationship between ‘new’ and ‘old’ approaches to scientific governance is considered. Drawing upon a series of official reports, and also the GM Nation? public debate over genetically modified food, the paper suggests that, rather than witnessing the emergence of a new governance paradigm, the current approach can more accurately be portrayed as an uneasy blend of ‘old’ and ‘new’ assumptions. Eschewing a straightforward normative account, the paper explores the social construction of public talk, the relationship between talk and trust, the search for the ‘innocent’ citizen, and the pursuit of social consensus. Current initiatives should not simply be criticized for their inadequacies, but should also be viewed as symptomatic of the state of science–society relations. In that way, stresses and strains within the politics of public talk assume wider analytical significance than the ‘mere talk’ epithet would suggest.

Social Security and the middle-class squeeze: fact and fiction about America's entitlement programs

Foreword Acknowledgements A Practitioner and a Historian Combine Ideas Government and the Promise of American Life The Middle Class and the American Dream Explaining and Analyzing are not Enough New Ways to Look at Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid Misconceptions and Myths About Social Security Government Cannot Legislate Investment Success Big Budget Deficits - Not Good for Stocks and Privatization Let's Talk Politics Forecasting by the Trustees - Flaws and Recommendations Social Security Around the World Some Parting Thoughts Appendix I: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - Facts and History Appendix II: The Tables Notes About the Authors Index

South Asia's arms control process: cricket diplomacy and the composite dialogue

Nuclear arms control on the Indian subcontinent has had a rather chequered immediate past. In far less than ten years talks have begun, both sides have formally become nuclear powers, fought a war, nearly fought another, have threatened each other with dire consequences, and yet have reached important agreements. This article traces those developments, particularly focusing on the recent talks, from the end of 2003. It sets out the limits to the current process, but also the possibilities for further important advances. This is a crucial process: Indian—Pakistani relations are highly crisis prone, and the nuclear dimension may add to that. Symbols—as in all processes—have been very important, and the ability of the two countries to talk politics and play cricket has been highly significant; it symbolizes the hope for the future.