Women and Politics in Comparative Perspective:

No abstract available for this article.     

城市区域形成的集聚机制——基于集聚尺度的理论诠释

空间集聚存在不同的尺度,城市区域作为当今具有较强竞争力的区域空间组织是一种大尺度的集聚。经典集聚理论、模型以及相关扩展性实证研究为城市区域尺度集聚的形成提供了方向性的暗示。这种集聚在本质上是聚集力和分散力动态组合的一种空间结果,其中,分散力的增强对城市区域尺度集聚的形成起到了重要的作用。随着区际运输成本的降低,核心区域-外围区域间共享的区际外部性逐渐增强;核心区域的拥挤效应进一步加强了经济活动向外围转移的倾向,最终促使部分经济活动突破地区边界,在地理邻近的地域之间形成更强的空间依赖,呈现出大尺度的经济集聚。城市区域尺度集聚的经济性为发展城市群、促进区域一体化提供了理论依据,但在实践中也遇到很多障碍,这对政府在打破行政割据、促进要素自由流动以及加强中心城市周边地区发展方面提出了要求。     

The Cultural Politics of Integrating Deaf Students in Regular Schools in Zimbabwe

The integration of deaf students into regular schools in Zimbabwe is fraught with cultural and political problems. Traditional beliefs that are negative toward disability are still prevalent among many people. The adult deaf community views integration negatively and with disrespect mainly because integration programmes in Zimbabwe do not promote deaf culture. The influences of foreign individuals and organisations of the deaf are at times, in directions that are not compatible with an agenda that aims to meet the educational needs of all deaf students. These factors are problematic and mitigate against the integration of deaf students in regular schools. This paper examines the cultural politics involved in the integration of deaf students in regular schools in Zimbabwe. It suggests ways to alleviate this dilemma for parents to make correct school choices for their deaf children.     

Representation Beyond the State: Towards Transnational Democratic Non-state Politics

The crises of representative democracy and of state-based politics have been declared many times and ‘participation’ is often advocated as a remedy for the shortcomings of both. While the literature has extensively discussed representative practices in relation to territorial states, we argue in this article that more attention should be paid to the question of representation within transnational social movements striving for a politics that transcends current territorially bounded representative democracy. Analysing the World Social Forum and West African participatory trade policy-making, we find that as transnational social movements aiming at democratic goals deepen their interactions, they can face demanding questions such as: who or what has a right to be made present in a given political process and how is this established? We claim that avoiding the question of representation in transnational non-state-centred politics leaves power too many places to hide.     

State Fragmentation: Toward a Theoretical Understanding of the Territorial Power of the State

In existing theories of revolution, the state is narrowly defined as an administrative entity, and state breakdown simply refers to the disintegration of a given political regime. But this narrow definition cannot deal with this question: Why, in a revolutionary situation, do some states become fragmented and others remain unified? I would therefore argue for the broadening of the concept of state breakdown to include the territorial power of the state and to treat the latter as a key analytical dimension in the study of state fragmentation. The dynamics of territorial state power involve the control of critical territories and valuable resources associated with the spatial position of a given state in the interstate system. A strong territorial state is able to maintain its organizational coerciveness and territorial integrity, whereas a weak territorial state is vulnerable to fragmentation. The overall state crisis derives from the accumulated effects of geopolitical strain by which territorial fragmentation unfolds.     

Migration and Development: A Theoretical Perspective1

The debate on migration and development has swung back and forth like a pendulum, from developmentalist optimism in the 1950s and 1960s, to neo-Marxist pessimism over the 1970s and 1980s, towards more optimistic views in the 1990s and 2000s. This paper argues how such discursive shifts in the migration and development debate should be primarily seen as part of more general paradigm shifts in social and development theory. However, the classical opposition between pessimistic and optimistic views is challenged by empirical evidence pointing to the heterogeneity of migration impacts. By integrating and amending insights from the new economics of labor migration, livelihood perspectives in development studies and transnational perspectives in migration studies – which share several though as yet unobserved conceptual parallels – this paper elaborates the contours of a conceptual framework that simultaneously integrates agency and structure perspectives and is therefore able to account for the heterogeneous nature of migration-development interactions. The resulting perspective reveals the naivety of recent views celebrating migration as self-help development “from below”. These views are largely ideologically driven and shift the attention away from structural constraints and the vital role of states in shaping favorable conditions for positive development impacts of migration to occur.     

Beyond Ethnic Relations: Racial Politics and the Origins of the Welfare State in Republican France

To explain racial fissures in France today, one must revisit the structural and ideological failings in the origin of key Republican institutions. This article analyzes how the symbolic and material significance of labor structures imposed on black French citizens in the Third Republic produced differentiation in the value of labor to the nation. The production of social patterns and belief systems based on racial inequality were integrated into the structure of the French welfare state. The experience of black political actors, Hégésippe Légitimus, Blaise Diange, Lamine Senghor, and the state illustrates how the welfare state, as an engine of assimilation, defined a differential and racialized status for blacks during the process of crucial institution building. Although the majority of blacks in the French Empire were subjects during the Third Republic, the experience of those who were citizens indicates contradictions related to incorporation and race.     

Becoming a Population: Seeing the State,Being Seen by the State,and the Politics of Eviction in Cape Town

Qualitative Sociology - While existing literature has amply demonstrated how states may “see” their populations, we know less about which residents are legible to the state as...     

Inside the Sending State: The Politics of Mexican Emigration Control1

The social science of international migration has generally ignored labor emigration control policies. In the critical case of Mexico, however, the central government consistently tried to control the volume, duration, skills, and geographic origin of emigrants from 1900 to the early 1970s. A neopluralist approach to policy development and implementation shows that the failure of emigration control and the current abandonment of serious emigration restrictions are explained by a combination of external constraints, imposed by a highly asymmetrical interdependence with the United States, and internal constraints, imposed by actors within the balkanized Mexican state who recurrently undermined federal emigration policy through contradictory local practices.     

State Management, Trade Unions and Politics in Brazil

Abstract The state in Brazil not only built industrial plants in the mid twentieth century, but also established patterns of control and domination over the workers of these companies. State-management purposes were to 'mould' a 'Brazilian worker'for the nation' and to extend control beyond the point of production. Evidence is presented to explain these strategies of domination and to show how the workers built their resistance, both at work or through trade union participation. This is developed into a discussion of the process of politicisation through trade union action in the state companies and the disagreements that arose between militant workers and workers with 'factory consciousness'.     

EMBEDDED CORPORATISM: Auto Transplants, the Local State and Community Politics in the Midwest Corridor

Change in the global economy leads to examination of auto transplants in six Midwest states, identifying the forces leading states to compete for transplants, and the politics of growth in communities that host transplants. The concept of embedded corporatism is used to analyze the actions of an activist state working with the local business class to have the ideology of corporatism and the transplant initiative embraced by the community.     

The Nonprofit Sector and the Informal Sector: A Theoretical Perspective

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - How do and why might different nations demarcate socioeconomic activity into distinct societal sectors? In this review and...     

Forward vs. Reverse Gear: Politics of Proliferation and Resistance in the Italian Fascist State

Abstract Gender is a useful category for historical analysis of the project of Italian fascist nation-building, how it proceeded and how it became trapped in its own paradox. Fascist policies played upon normative and limited gender stereotypes of women as mothers and prolific bearers of children, yet in the process the dictatorship constructed women as political subjects for the first time in the history of the Italian nation. This paper focuses on the fascists' demographics campaign - Il Duce's politics of proliferation—and investigates the possibility of subjectivity as a site for political struggle and resistance. Practices such as coitus interruptus and abortion, it is suggested, conformed to one hegemonic process while they defied another.     

The Politics of Regional Inequality in Ghana: State Elites,Donors and PRSPs

Through an analysis of Ghana's HIPC Fund which was established as part of the PRSP process, this article shows how aid‐financed efforts to reduce regional inequality in Ghana have failed. Dominant political elites agreed to policies reducing regional inequality in order to have access to aid funding but, once approved, these funds were allocated on quite different criteria in ways that marginalised the poorest. This analysis reinforces the growing recognition that developmental outcomes in most poor countries are shaped not so much by the design of ‘good’ policies per se, but more importantly by the power relationships within which policy‐implementing institutions are embedded. Aid donors seem unable to grasp this important lesson fully, and so their capacity to contribute to reducing regional inequality remains limited.     

The Politics of Commensuration: The Violence of Partition and the Making of the Pakistani State

Abstract  This article examines how official representations of the violence and displacement of Partition organized the sovereign power of the post-independence Pakistani state. It addresses how Partition's chain of violence and displacement engendered the state as an entity capable of wielding the sovereign power to decide on life and death. Crucial to this process were practices of knowledge and power in which the refugee was produced ambivalently, as a figure of right and a biopolitical problem in need of resolution. Focusing on Pakistan's official response to the "refugee problem", I analyze how the management of the potential and actual movement of populations relied upon, and informed implicit logics of official commensuration with the communal violence of the mass.