scholarly journals When Law and Order Politics Fail: Identifying Protective Factors that Limit the Politics of Fear

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murray Lee ◽  
Justin R Ellis ◽  
Chloe Keel ◽  
Jonathan Jackson ◽  
Rebecca Wickes

The political economy of crime and insecurity has long been a topic of scholarly work. The leveraging of fear of crime for political capital has been of particular concern. Australia provides an interesting case study in the dynamics of such politics, and this article focuses on the state of Victoria, where prior to the 2018 state election crime became a significant political issue, particularly through racialized discourse about ‘African gangs'. Considering why the politics of law and order failed, we conclude with the idea that the political economy of crime and insecurity needs to be understood in the context of broader individual, community, and social vulnerabilities related to protective factors regarding the fear of crime.

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Haruo Nakagawa

Akin to the previous, 2014 event, with no data on voter ethnicity, no exit polls, and few post-election analyses, the 2018 Fiji election results remain something of a mystery despite the fact that there had been a significant swing in voting in favour of Opposition political parties. There have been several studies about the election results, but most of them have been done without much quantitative analyses. This study examines voting patterns of Fiji’s 2018 election by provinces, and rural-urban localities, as well as by candidates, and also compares the 2018 and 2014 elections by spending a substantial time classifying officially released data by polling stations and individual candidates. Some of the data are then further aggregated according to the political parties to which those candidates belonged. The current electoral system in Fiji is a version of a proportional system, but its use is rare and this study will provide an interesting case study of the Open List Proportional System. At the end of the analyses, this study considers possible reasons for the swing in favour of the Opposition.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Joseph

Valve Corporation’s digital game distribution platform, Steam, is the largest distributor of games on personal computers, analyzed here as a site where control over the production, design and use of digital games is established. Steam creates and exercises processes and techniques such as monopolization and enclosure over creative products, online labour, and exchange among game designers. Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding framework places communication at the centre of the political economy, here of digital commodities distributed and produced by online platforms like Steam. James Gibson’s affordance theory allows the market Steam’s owners create for its users to be cast in terms of visuality and interaction design. These theories are largely neglected in the existing literature in game studies, platform studies, and political economy, but they allow intervention in an ongoing debate concerning the ontological status of work and play as distinct, separate human activities by offering a specific focus on the political economy of visual or algorithmic communication. Three case studies then analyze Steam as a site where the slippage between game-play and work is constant and deepening. The first isolates three sales promotions on Steam as forms of work disguised as online shopping. The second is a discourse analysis of a crisis within the community of mod creators for the game Skyrim, triggered by changes implemented on Steam. The third case study critiques Valve Corporation’s positioning of Steam as a new space to extract value from play by demonstrating historical continuity with consumer monopolies. A concluding discussion argues Steam is a platform that evolves to meet distinct crises and problems in the production and circulation of its digital commodities as contradictions arise. Ultimately, Steam shows how the cycle of capital accumulation encourages monopolization and centralization.


2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 232-240
Author(s):  
Kathryn Moeller

Drawing on an integrative review of the literature on the privatization of education and an empirical case study of technology corporations in education, this article examines the corporate within the political economy of education. It argues that by analytically conceiving of corporations under the banner of the private sphere and, correspondingly, by subsuming the processes of corporatization within the processes of privatization, the literature on privatization conceals the very specific role and influence of corporations. The article puts forward an analytic framework for researching and theorizing corporations in education. How the field of education conceives of corporate actors and their related practices, processes, and power relations is analytically and empirically significant for ensuring equitable, transparent, and accountable educational systems in the United States and globally.


2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hal Hill

Economists broadly agree on many key economic policy issues, but economics as a discipline has provided much less guidance on why and how economic policy reform occurs and how to develop institutional mechanisms that enable governments to adopt “good” economic policy. Political scientists are adept at identifying coalitions, constituencies, institutions, and interest groups, but they less commonly examine the implications for economic policy. Thus, work at the intersection between economics and politics—of why and how policy reform takes place—remains relatively unexplored territory. This is especially so in developing countries where political processes are more personalistic, institutions often less well established, outcomes more fluid, and the detailed case study literature on economic policy making still in its infancy. This paper provides an analytical survey of economic policy reform in Southeast Asia. It ranges across the major policy U-turns and the incremental reforms, with special reference to macroeconomic management and trade policy. On the basis of several case studies and set against the broader international literature, we advance nine conclusions on the political economy of reform.


2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faridah Zaman

This article rethinks the complicated encounter between the East India Company and the built heritage of India in the early nineteenth century. Through an extended case study of the imperial mosque in Allahabad, which was periodically subject to British intervention over some sixty years, it traces vicissitudes in attitudes towards history, religion, and the social existence of Muslims in India generally and Allahabad in particular. The article argues for the need to look beyond the narrative of Britain's relationship with architecture as artefact or heritage—a relationship that took on institutional form in the 1860s—to the comparatively less familiar story of the Company State's prolonged and serious interest in the built environment, and specifically religious buildings, as part of the political economy of its rule. It demonstrates that such an interest was simultaneously a logical outcome of and a tension within the legitimating discourses that the Company State fashioned during the last half-century of its rule in India.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-78
Author(s):  
Benni Yusriza

Employing the concept of unfree labor, this article explores the role of the state in reinforcing victims’ vulnerability and shaping the political economy of trafficking practices. Based on a case study of trafficking victims in Benjina and Ambon, Maluku Province, Indonesia, I argue that Indonesian authorities’ intervention was driven not by humanitarian interest, nor by the concern for the protection of migrant workers’ rights, but rather by the intent to advance a political and economic agenda against the Thai fishing industry. Consequently, the intervention ignored the exploitative relations of production that underpinned the vulnerability of victims, despite being conducted in the name of victim-protection and improving livelihoods.


2011 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albena Azmanova

This is an inquiry into the economic psychology of trust: that is, what model of the political economy of complex liberal democracies is conducive to attitudes that allow difference to be perceived in the terms of ‘significant other’, rather than as a menacing or an irrelevant stranger. As a test case of prevailing perceptions of otherness in European societies, I examine attitudes towards Turkey’s accession to the European Union.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document