Western Policymakers Research Articles

Ann Norton, on the Muslim Question

Historically, most Western nations, from the age of enlightenment, established a firm divide between church and state. This chasm engendered a concept that stressed the separation of religious morality from secular law. The assumption that the secularisation of the world is a necessary precondition for the establishment of modern, democratic form of government, has gained a lot of currency among many Western policymakers. Indeed, the need for reform is a necessity in the Muslim context, but the path towards realising it in the form of secularization is a debatable issue. Western history is characterised by the conflict between church and state, and this conflict has no precedent in the Muslim history. The nexus between religion and secular obligations, and a societal consensus is not as prominent in the Muslim context as it is in the Western societies. Ann Norton’s book, “On the Muslim Question” provides deeper political and philosophical insights into the intricate relationship between Muslims and the West. Norton asserts that in the contemporary times the Muslim question is as fundamental as the emancipation of Jews in the context of enlightenment philosophy. Norton organises her work efficiently and manages to weave together the distinct but related topics in 2 parts containing 10 chapters along with an introduction and an index.

Ann Norton , on the Muslim Question

Historically, most Western nations, from the age of enlightenment, established a firm divide between church and state. This chasm engendered a concept that stressed the separation of religious morality from secular law. The assumption that the secularisation of the world is a necessary precondition for the establishment of modern, democratic form of government, has gained a lot of currency among many Western policymakers. Indeed, the need for reform is a necessity in the Muslim context, but the path towards realising it in the form of secularization is a debatable issue. Western history is characterised by the conflict between church and state, and this conflict has no precedent in the Muslim history. The nexus between religion and secular obligations, and a societal consensus is not as prominent in the Muslim context as it is in the Western societies. Ann Norton’s book, “On the Muslim Question” provides deeper political and philosophical insights into the intricate relationship between Muslims and the West. Norton asserts that in the contemporary times the Muslim question is as fundamental as the emancipation of Jews in the context of enlightenment philosophy. Norton organises her work efficiently and manages to weave together the distinct but related topics in 2 parts containing 10 chapters along with an introduction and an index.

Foreign Direct Investment from China: Sense and Sensibility

Inspired by psychological studies on human judgment, this article represents the first attempt to provide a systematic account of how various heuristics and cognitive biases can influence public perception as well as regulatory response to foreign direct investment. In particular, it catalogues the main social and cognitive mechanisms through which various well-organized interest groups can exploit public fear of foreign direct investment from China. By closely studying two cases — the U.S. Congress’ hostile response to CNOOC’s attempted acquisition of Unocal and the European Commission’s increased antitrust scrutiny of Chinese state-owned enterprises’ acquisitions in Europe — this article shows how fear of Chinese investment can lead to counterproductive regulatory response. Contrary to the popular perception that Chinese state-owned enterprises are mere puppets of the government, the article draws attention to the pervasive but neglected agency problems that have powered the surge of Chinese outward investment. It calls for more effortful thinking by western policymakers and cautions against extreme precautionary measures for investment from China. At the same time, however, it questions the wisdom of overseas investment by Chinese state-owned enterprises. Empire building incentives, exacerbated by weak corporate governance structures and the lack of financial disclosure, make it highly likely that state assets are squandered in overseas acquisitions.

Civil Society, Ngos, and Egypt’s 2011 Popular Uprising

Western policymakers, scholars, and foundations share a broad consensus that a dynamic civil society, often reduced to the presence of NGOs, is the essential ingredient of democracy. Although the concept of civil society is imprecisely and ubiquitously deployed, rendering it of dubious analytical utility, it has been widely applied to the Arab region. Despite the proliferation of Arab NGOs and other forms of association, authoritarian Arab regimes were fairly effective in blocking the emergence of truly independent associations of any sort. In fact, “civil society organizations” played only a small role in mobilizing the demonstrations and occupations of public space that were the emblematic expressions of the 2011 Arab uprisings. The Egyptian and other Arab popular uprisings were not the result of proliferating NGOs or “building civil society.” Rather, they were the consequence of converging vectors of diverse social protest movements over the previous decades involving urban intelligentsias, disaffected educated youth, blue- and white-collar workers and professionals, and marginalized religious communities and regions.

Richard Kirby and the Tjaringin Murders A Western Response to the Indonesian Revolution, 1946

On 17 April 1946, seven Australian war crimes investigators left the military perimeter British troops were maintaining around the city of Batavia and travelled into an anarchic, lawless Javanese hinterland, rife with different Indonesian revolutionary militants fighting the Dutch and each other. As they entered the kampong of Tjaringin, north of Bogor, automatic rifle fire hit their car. Two men died immediately; a third was found days later in a nearby ditch, shot in the back of the head. Amid outrage in the Australian press, External Affairs Minister H. V Evatt announced he was sending an Australian judge, Richard Kirby, to investigate the killings. This article analyses Kirby's trip to Indonesia and his approach to the task of locating and bringing to trial the murderers.Kirby's task was a microcosm of the challenge the West faced in responding to the nationalist uprisings that convulsed postwar Asia. Those uprisings, at times marked by violent antiforeign sentiment, raised for Western nations the spectre of permanent instability and anarchy impeding their interests and influence: O.S.S. officer Peter Dewey's murder in Vietnam the year before had similarly encapsulated this issue for the United States. Yet by the end of the 1940s, Western policymakers had for the most part moved from supporting formal colonialism to supporting the formation of independent states run by Asian nationalists. Australia's support for the Indonesian Republic in its struggle against Dutch rule was an early example of this shift. It so happened that Kirby's 1946 Java mission coincided with a period of backtracking in Australia's progressive attitude to the Indonesian question: indeed, Kirby's minister at times expressed qualms with Kirby's approach.

The Muslim Brotherhood after the Arab Spring: Tactics, Challenges and Future Scenarios

The brief analyses the situation of Muslim Brotherhood (MB)-inspired entities throughout the Arab world two years after the beginning of the Arab Spring. In keeping with the flexibility and political opportunism that has characterised the group since its early days, MB-inspired entities have adopted different positions according to the circumstances. In Tunisia and Egypt, where for the first time in history they have gained power through elections, MB entities are trying to gradually solidify their positions and advance their agendas while avoiding dramatic moves that could undermine their still weak hold on power. In Arab countries where authoritarian regimes still rule, MB entities are adopting positions ranging from participation in government to military confrontation. The brief concludes by analysing potential concerns for Western policymakers and future scenarios.

Jordan: The Ruse of Reform

Why has Jordan’s authoritarianism remained so stubborn? What makes the country’s Hashemite monarchy exceptional is that virtually no constituency apart from domestic oppositionists and international human-rights organizations puts consistent pressure on the kingdom to democratize. Western policy makers and Jordanian officials have successfully cultivated the kingdom’s image as a “moderate” Arab state, an oasis of stability and key ally in the world’s most strategic and turbulent region. Foreign aid from the United States and its allies remains the kingdom’s economic lifeline, and thus the best means by which to encourage the regime to actually take popular demands into account in its next reform gambit. With stability on the line, the next five years will prove to be the crucible for the Jordanian crown.

The Economic Dimension of Cold War Intelligence-Gathering: The West's Spies in the GDR's Economy

This article uses new evidence from the former archive of the Ministry of State Security (Stasi) of the German Democratic Republic to show that important intelligence was gathered by Western intelligence agencies, above all those of the United States, from well-placed human sources in the GDR's economy during the first twenty years of the Cold War. This intelligence influenced policymakers' understanding of the GDR's economy and informed debates about weapons procurement and the best trade, credit, information, and aid policies to pursue vis-à-vis the GDR and the Soviet bloc. The intelligence obtained from spies in the GDR's economic bureaucracy and industrial enterprises declined in quality from the 1960s on because of effective counterintelligence measures adopted by the Stasi. The loss of this information contributed to Western policymakers' failure in the 1980s to grasp the full extent of the economic crisis in the GDR that helped to precipitate the Communist regime's collapse.

Crude 'Oil Mercantilism'? Chinese Oil Engagement in Kazakhstan

In 1991, the state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) commenced the first Chinese national oil company equity oil investment overseas when it invested in a UN-sponsored oil sands project in Canada. Since then, the CNPC and the other Chinese national oil companies (Sinopec and the CNOOC) have steadily increased their equity oil investments in developing nations, sometimes with the assistance of various Chinese party and government organs. Viewed in the context of China’s burgeoning oil consumption and plateauing oil production, these investments have led to accusations by Western analysts and policy makers that China is engaging in “mercantilism” by “locking up” oil supplies from vulnerable developing nations to assuage their mounting energy-security woes. Through examining Chinese oil engagement in Kazakhstan, this paper will analyze whether accusations of “mercantilism” can adequately capture the complexities and dynamics that drive Chinese oil company investment in developing nations. This will be achieved by first surveying contemporary debates regarding Chinese oil engagement abroad and then linking these debates to historical and contemporary conceptualizations of mercantilism. This will allow for a new multi-faceted definition of “oil mercantilist” behaviour, which will shift the label from a statement of ethical value to a statement of empirical fact that can be tested. This definition will then be used to examine the institutional contexts in China that support and counter contemporary accusations of oil mercantilism, and then to explore Chinese oil engagement in Kazakhstan from 1996 to the present day. This paper will contribute to emerging literature that suggests Chinese oil investment and diplomacy cannot be simply understood through mercantilist perspectives. Analyses of Chinese oil engagement need to recognize the important influence that China’s institutional reforms have had on Chinese national oil companies’ increasingly commercial approach to foreign investment, in addition to the unique host-country contexts China encounters through its oil investments.

The power of words: the deficient terminology surrounding Islam-related terrorism

Terms usurped and capitalised upon by Al-Qaeda and other similar terrorist and extremist organisations have a special place in Islamic culture and a particular resonance with Muslim populations. The aforementioned terrorist groups normally utilise these terms in order to further their objectives and gain, first, the support of larger audiences and, ultimately, legitimacy for their actions. At the same time, Western policy makers, security agencies and, crucially, the media have also used and regurgitated the same terminology in an uncritical fashion. This article explains the semantic nuances behind terms like “Islamic”, “Islamist”, “fundamentalist”, “Salafi”, “Wahhabi” and “jihadi terrorism”, and the potential that such use has for the alienation of moderate segments of the Muslim creed and the obstacles it raises for intercultural counter-radicalisation efforts. The article then suggests the adoption of a more-nuanced term by Western circles – one that is equally embedded in Islamic culture and its value system and one that is not as negligent or power-related as the ones that are currently used.

Syria Contextualized: The Numbers Game

The popular discourse on the Syrian conflict has largely taken for granted that Bashar al-Asad and his regime are unpopular in Syria, the revolution is widely supported domestically, the rebels are “winning” the war, and the fall of the regime is inevitable and imminent. To justify their interpretation of the conflict, opposition activists, Western policy makers and media outlets make frequent reference to a number of “facts,” often statistical in nature. However, should we contextualize this data more rigorously, it becomes apparent that a radically different dynamic may be at work “on the ground” in Syria. This becomes important, as a more nuanced understanding of what is happening will have implications for what strategy the United States should pursue.

Pakistan's Populist Foreign Policy

If US policymakers did not fully understand before 2011 how important the so-called ‘Arab street’ is in the politics of the Middle East and North Africa, they surely do by now. Whether this principle extends to other parts of the Muslim world is not yet clear, but in Pakistan, one of America's most important Muslim-majority allies, the effect of public opinion on the country's politics, including its foreign policy, may be critical. Despite an apparent alienation between much of Pakistan's elite and the public at large, many observers are prepared to accept that public opinion drives the behaviour of Pakistan's civilian politicians. But public opinion is also a key driver of choices made by the Pakistan military. Western observers and policymakers tend to assume that senior military officers run the show and have been slow to realise that Pakistani behaviour, even among the upper echelons of the army, is powerfully shaped from below.

Democracy Promotion in the Age of Social Media: Risks and Opportunities

The potential that Social Digital Media (SDM) have to support and promote democracy is attracting growing interest from researchers and policy-makers. However, the debate on this issue is controversial. The prominent role played by SDM in the popular uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East has led to the coining of the catchphrase “Social Media Revolution”. Yet critics argue that some Western policy-makers may be hamstrung by a cyber-utopian view that regards the Internet as inherently pro-democratic. The undifferentiated call for “Internet freedom” that results from such cyber-utopism is a dangerous one. Rather than that, policy makers should start out by asking how SDM can be used to sideline existing policies on democracy assistance in a given country and let the answer to that question shape their strategic choices. Any serious debate on the promise of SDM to aid democracy promotion must consider that different types of SDM vary in their specific characteristics and that such variation translates into different opportunities and risks depending on the political context in which they are employed.

Open educational resources: education for the world?

Education is widely seen as an important means of addressing both national and international problems, such as political or religious extremism, poverty, and hunger. However, if developing countries are to become societies that can compete properly with Western industrialized countries, not only is a fundamental shift in thinking with regard to the value of education and more/better provision of teaching required, but strong support from other countries is needed as well. This article explores questions such as whether Western policymakers can avoid a repetition of some of the failures of the past few decades in terms of providing foreign aid; how educators and providers of educational scenarios and learning contents can foster and manage the creation of a worldwide knowledge society; and in particular, if the provision of open educational resources (OER) can realistically overcome the educational gap and foster educational justice.

Democratic Peace Theory and the Realist-Liberal Dichotomy: the Promise of Neoclassical Realism?

The idea of a separate (dyadic) peace among (liberal) democracies remains an alluring proposition for Western intellectuals and policy makers, despite criticism from non-Western circles. We contend that explanations of the democratic peace have degenerated into theoretical stalemate, with the structuralist bias depicted in (neo)realist theories and, conversely, the individualist nature of liberal theories of the democratic peace, providing little room for alternative conceptions. As a distinct theory of foreign policy in which the relationship between agents and structures, and their intersection across differing levels of analysis, is more fully explored, neoclassical realism could hold potential for transcending the explanatory dichotomies plaguing the theorisation of the democratic peace. Moreover, it could open up room for an alternative theoretical framework for theorising the dyadic peace and its implications for how peace-building initiatives are approached.

The Future of Human Rights in a Global Order of Change and Continuity

The remarkable rise of human rights is deeply connected with the expansion of the global liberal order sustained and promoted by Western States since the end of the Second World War. From dominant understandings of human rights as individual protections against a potentially threatening State to the relative exclusion of socio-economic and collective rights, Western liberal thought has fundamentally shaped both the theory and practice of human rights. Yet, in recent years much attention has been given to ‘emerging powers’ such as Brazil, China, India, and South Africa and the effects their growing influence may have on the present and future management of issues of global concern. If political, economic and social power is important in understanding the development of the international human rights regime, what are the implications as power shifts in the international system? This multi-faceted question is becoming increasingly crucial to address given incipient debates that focus on the meaning and wider implications of the rise of non-Western States.The assertion by rising powers of alternative domestic and regional conceptions of human rights and their pursuit of different understandings of moral and political legitimacy could increasingly bring into question the extant human rights regime. The future of human rights in a changing global order is of a wider significance that goes far beyond the travails of Western policymakers struggling with the notion that their era of dominance in world affairs may be coming to an end. For human rights advocates around the world, as well as for rights-bearing people worldwide, understanding the present and future evolution of human rights constitutes one of the key challenges of the twenty-first century.As a set of concluding comments to an edited volume on human rights in a non-Western world, this chapter focuses on two cross-cutting themes that have been given relatively scant attention in ongoing debates concerning the potential future trajectory of the global human rights regime: (i) the return of harder conceptions of State sovereignty and its implications for human rights enforcement; and (ii) the practice of human rights in an enduring international system of States.

Notes

The Non-Aligned Movement is the largest grouping of states engaged on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation issues, comprising more than two-thirds of the membership of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Yet, the movement is often misunderstood by Western scholars and policymakers, who typically fail to appreciate the diversity of views among its 120 members and 17 observer states. This Adelphi explores the structures and politics within NAM, and stresses the potential for greater engagement between NAM members and the West in mitigating many of the most pressing nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation and terrorism challenges. Its thorough examination of how NAM business is conducted, along with an analysis of how prominent members or groups of members have sought to dominate it for their own purposes, offers invaluable insight ahead of the 2015 NPT Review Conference and as NAM approaches a possible watershed moment inthe movement's history: the assumption by Iran of the chairmanship in mid-2012.

Chapter One: NAM origins, structure, policymaking and politics

The Non-Aligned Movement is the largest grouping of states engaged on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation issues, comprising more than two-thirds of the membership of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Yet, the movement is often misunderstood by Western scholars and policymakers, who typically fail to appreciate the diversity of views among its 120 members and 17 observer states. This Adelphi explores the structures and politics within NAM, and stresses the potential for greater engagement between NAM members and the West in mitigating many of the most pressing nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation and terrorism challenges. Its thorough examination of how NAM business is conducted, along with an analysis of how prominent members or groups of members have sought to dominate it for their own purposes, offers invaluable insight ahead of the 2015 NPT Review Conference and as NAM approaches a possible watershed moment inthe movement's history: the assumption by Iran of the chairmanship in mid-2012.

Chapter Four: Looking to the future

The Non-Aligned Movement is the largest grouping of states engaged on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation issues, comprising more than two-thirds of the membership of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Yet, the movement is often misunderstood by Western scholars and policymakers, who typically fail to appreciate the diversity of views among its 120 members and 17 observer states. This Adelphi explores the structures and politics within NAM, and stresses the potential for greater engagement between NAM members and the West in mitigating many of the most pressing nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation and terrorism challenges. Its thorough examination of how NAM business is conducted, along with an analysis of how prominent members or groups of members have sought to dominate it for their own purposes, offers invaluable insight ahead of the 2015 NPT Review Conference and as NAM approaches a possible watershed moment inthe movement's history: the assumption by Iran of the chairmanship in mid-2012.

Chapter Three: Peaceful uses and beyond: NAM in Vienna

The Non-Aligned Movement is the largest grouping of states engaged on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation issues, comprising more than two-thirds of the membership of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Yet, the movement is often misunderstood by Western scholars and policymakers, who typically fail to appreciate the diversity of views among its 120 members and 17 observer states. This Adelphi explores the structures and politics within NAM, and stresses the potential for greater engagement between NAM members and the West in mitigating many of the most pressing nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation and terrorism challenges. Its thorough examination of how NAM business is conducted, along with an analysis of how prominent members or groups of members have sought to dominate it for their own purposes, offers invaluable insight ahead of the 2015 NPT Review Conference and as NAM approaches a possible watershed moment inthe movement's history: the assumption by Iran of the chairmanship in mid-2012.