scholarly journals Making the State Blush

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Tess Altman

The Australian state’s hostile deterrence policy toward people arriving by boat who seek asylum evokes polarized public sentiments. This article, which ethnographically follows a humanitarian NGO campaign in the lead-up to the 2016 Australian election, examines how citizens who opposed deterrence sought to affectively and morally influence the state and the public. Building on anthropological theories of the state and feminist scholarship on the sociality of emotion, I develop the notion of ‘affective relations’. Distinguishing from nationalist, humanitarian, and activist relations that set up divisive dynamics, campaigners invoked ‘humanizing’ to create affective relations based on common values, personalization, and responsiveness. Although the desired election results were not achieved, the focus on humanization represented a long-term shift to an inclusive alternative politics based on the transformation of power relations.

Focaal ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 2009 (54) ◽  
pp. 89-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Projit Bihari Mukharji

The reflections in this article were instigated by the repeated and brutal clashes since 2007 between peasants and the state government’s militias—both official and unofficial—over the issue of industrialization. A communist government engaging peasants violently in order to acquire and transfer their lands to big business houses to set up capitalist enterprises seemed dramatically ironic. De- spite the presence of many immediate causes for the conflict, subtle long-term change to the nature of communist politics in the state was also responsible for the present situation. This article identifies two trends that, though significant, are by themselves not enough to explain what is happening in West Bengal today. First, the growth of a culture of governance where the Communist Party actively seeks to manage rather than politicize social conflicts; second, the recasting of radical political subjectivity as a matter of identity rather than an instigation for critical self-reflection and self-transformation.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Željko Marić

Bosnia and Herzegovina is in a state of long-term recession. Under these conditions, the State would have to apply the Keynesian economic policy instead of the neoclassical free market policy. This means that the State should take on the role of the main driver of economic development by increasing public spending and the fiscal consolidation. In doing so, it is very important to understand and evaluate the fiscal multipliers, as the successful application of the Keynesian policy depends exclusively on them. The aim of this paper is, after conducting an analysis of determinants and limitations of the fiscal multipliers within the conditions present in transition countries, to provide guidance on how to conduct the public spending policy, together with the monetary policy and structural reforms which would reduce the possible limitations regarding the effect of fiscal multipliers, thus increasing their impact on economic development. The analysis will be conducted on the example of Bosnia and Herzegovina.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-55
Author(s):  
Saiyid Radzuwan Syed Sopi

The 14th general election (GE 14) reveals that Pakatan Harapan (PH) had become a ruling party (2018-2020), but they failed to get any parliamentary or state assembly seats in Kelantan. The failure of PH to expand their influence in Kelantan is due to several traditional factors that are difficult for PH to break it out. This study is a qualitative study and reference materials that are physical and online are used as reference sources. In addition, information regarding political scenario in Kelantan also obtained through interviews with some respondents live in Kelantan. Therefore, this research found that the desire of PH to expand their influence in Kelantan was blurred. This is because PAS wisely set up a long-term political strategy by strengthening the education system under YIK, producing many hardcore supporters or fanatic followers, controlling the ‘surau’ and the mosques according to their needs and control of the state administration. Furthermore, PH needs to make concrete reformations to the party’s management such as producing talented young leaders and fostering a spirit of cooperation among members of the PH coalition if they are still interested in power in Kelantan.


Author(s):  
James R. Gosz

Through the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program, I have learned to appreciate the complexity of environmental dynamics when they are analyzed at multiple time and space scales. My experience as a postdoctoral fellow and in the LTER program facilitated much of my understanding of interdisciplinary research because of access to multiple disciplinary approaches and accumulation of long-term and multiple- scale information. My teaching of science benefited through recognition of the need for a combination of a deep understanding of each discipline’s role in an issue (reductionist approach) and the collaborative need for integrating disciplines to fully understand complexity. No single discipline can answer the complexity in an environmental question. I have improved my communication with the public through the combination of teaching and research reporting. The challenge is to develop the information in ways that can be communicated: free of scientific jargon, containing only essential data, and developed in scenarios that are recognized as real-life situations. The public has many forms and levels of understanding—there are K to gray and ordinary citizens and policy-makers; consequently, communication needs to be targeted appropriately. I value the role of collaboration; there is tremendous satisfaction and reward from working in teams that can accomplish so much more than can an individual. This collaboration requires compromise, interaction, and time, but those that strive for this approach to science are well recognized. I am fortunate in being in positions that have created opportunities for sustaining a long career in stimulating interdisciplinary and collaborative science. I had a traditional forest management and soil science education (Michigan Technological University and the University of Idaho). However, my entrée into ecosystem science was set up by my very valuable postdoctoral fellowship at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest under the guidance of Gene Likens from 1969 to 1970, before the formation of the LTER program. The Hubbard Brook experience, quite literally, educated me about systems thinking, with the watershed approach to understanding integrated responses from complex, multifactor interactions and influences of forest management as disturbances.


Author(s):  
Stephen Crossley

This chapter explains how austerity has led to an increasingly fragmented and disparate economy and geography of welfare. These changes have affected people's ability to access services, leaving some of them isolated and excluded from activities that they previously enjoyed. The chapter then questions the use of new information technology (IT) systems and the related expansion of cybernetic relations to register, administer, manage, and target some of the most vulnerable members of society. It argues that these virtual systems emerge as a way of dealing with cases that need physical and in-depth contact in the context of austerity budgets rather than a tested way of pooling information to save lives. This argument suggests that they can also be a way to exclude service users from decision-making about their entitlement and ultimately their lives, reconfiguring the power relations between the public and the state.


2001 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 59-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khalil Chamcham

AbstractFrom my experience in Morocco, I discuss the difficulties one can face while trying to set up projects in a country where astronomy is a forgotten science: everything has to be built from scratch and, at the same time, one is required to keep up the pace at the international level. But, on the other side, it is quite a relief to see the strong demand from students and the public. In these circumstances even professional astronomy cannot survive without feedback from the public and long-term investment in education at all levels.


2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 937-939
Author(s):  
Renato Vrenčur ◽  
Michael Knaus ◽  
Matjaž Tratnik

Servitudes (easements) traditionally include the right to use foreign property. Specific types of servitudes are servitudes in the public interest. These are set up either in favour of the state, municipalities or operators of utilities. These servitudes are subject to some specific rules. For example, servitude in the public interest is established to carry out an undertaking for the operation of economic activity, i.e. to pursue public interests. It is needed for the duration of the use of public infrastructure; therefore, Article 227 of SPZ, under which a servitude may only be established for a limited duration of not more than thirty years, is not suitable for these servitudes. Furthermore, these servitudes are not independently transferable; they are transferred together with the right to operate economic public infrastructure. The authors discuss in particular the specific legal nature of a servitude in the public interest.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 895-905 ◽  
Author(s):  
Micah Odhiambo Nyamita ◽  
Nirmala Dorasamy ◽  
Hari Lall Garbharran

The public sector reforms’ programme in Kenya, has witnessed five state-owned corporations being privatised, and several more, from hotels to banks, have been scheduled to be privatised. However, many of Kenya’s state-owned corporations are in considerable debt, which reduce their value in the process of privatisation. This study attempted to determine the extent and the theory suitable for explaining debt-financing within the state-owned corporations in Kenya from 2007 to 2011. The study applied both descriptive statistics and a hybrid of cross sectional and longitudinal quantitative surveys. The results observed some level of stability on the aggregate long-term debt ratios, with minimal use of stock market instruments, which implied the application of the agency theory.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted Hsuan Yun Chen ◽  
Paul McLachlan ◽  
Christopher Fariss

The legitimacy of the state rests on individuals' perceptions of fairness when interacting with state institutions and state agents. The police as an institution and as individual agents have wide latitude to detain and use force against individuals. We argue that encounters with state bureaucracy and civil servants, specifically the police, can generate individual-level grievances against the state, and that these grievances make it more likely an individual participates in protest against the state. We study support for and the legitimacy of policing in the context of the anti-police protests in Baltimore, MD following the death of Freddie Gray in April, 2015. Using data from police records and social media, we show that individuals with higher exposure to discretionary arrests --- arrests that are potentially viewed as illegitimate or arbitrary --- are more likely to support protests against the police. In contrast, we demonstrate that exposure to arrests for major crimes such as murder does not follow the same pattern. Thus, support for the police as an institution varies systematically with exposure to arbitrary and capricious encounters with police agents. As these grievance generating encounters become more widespread, we expect to see increased protests against the police and further erosion in support of the police as an institution. Alternatively, shifting institutional resources to focus on major crimes and limiting the discretionary authority of police agents when interacting with the public may help to repair the legitimacy of policing institutions over the long term.


Politik ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hughes Hallet ◽  
Svend E. Hougaard Jensen

This paper o ers a critical assessment of the scal set-up in the Euro Area and considers a new framework for achieving scal discipline. e key idea is an inter-temporal assignment where national scal policies focus on long-term objectives and a common monetary policy on short-term objectives. e result is a self-stabilising set-up where the enforcement problem has largely been resolved. For practical implementation purposes, scal policy is stated in terms of a target for the public debt-to-GDP ratio. We argue that the debt target should be set in a forward-looking fashion to account for implicit liabilities, such as the discounted budgetary impact of changing demographics in addition to conventional debt measures. 


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