China’s Belt and Road Initiative

The Belt and Road initiative announced by China’s President Xi Jinping has introduced a novel economic model that seeks to shift the site and purpose of development outside China. The initiative proposes the construction of a series of transportation platforms along the ancient Silk Road that connected China with Central Asia, Europe and West Asia. This outward thrust of investment and capital construction envisages significant reduction of distance and in spatial barriers between and China and the world that will form the road traversing different geographies of nations, territories and cultures. I call China’s Belt and Road initiative a transnational development model as it aims to coordinate factors of economic circulation across different national spaces controlled by different governance models, legal norms and political contingencies. Centuries ago when the original trading route of the Chinese Silk Road was formed, this overland route was a contiguous territory where boundaries remained too fluid for any authorities to impose its will. But today the Silk Road is an imagined geography as this route is controlled by sovereign national territorial states having effective authority structures over each of these units. The initiative then requires China to entail a broad-based economic coordination with a diverse governance systems. My paper will explore how the transnational scope of the Belt and Road initiative come to negotiate diverse authority structures in particular national contexts.

From Sheikhs to Sultanism

Muhammad bin Salman Al-Saud and Muhammad bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the respective princely strongmen of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have torn up the old rules. They have spurred game-changing economic master plans, presided over vast anti-corruption crackdowns, tackled entrenched religious forces, and overseen the mass arrest of critics. In parallel, they also appear to have replaced the old ‘sheikhly’ consensus systems of their predecessors with something more autocratic, more personalistic, and perhaps even analytically distinct. Moreover, ‘MBS’ and ‘MBZ’, as they are known, are now effectively in command of the two wealthiest and most populous Gulf monarchies, and increasingly important global actors--Saudi Arabia is a G20 member, and the UAE will be the host of the World Expo in 2021–2022. Such sweeping changes to the two countries’ statecraft and authority structures could thus end up having a direct impact--for better or worse--on policies, economies, and individual lives all around the world. This study tests the hypothesis that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are now effectively contemporary or even ‘advanced’ sultanates, and situates these influential states within an international model of autocratic authoritarianism. Drawing on a range of primary sources, including new interviews and surveys, the book puts forward an original, empirically grounded interpretation of the rise of both de facto rulers.

Introduction

This introductory chapter establishes the importance of studying the Gulf monarchies, while noting that relatively little attention has been paid to contemporary statecraft and the ways in which underlying authority structures might be changing. It describes how recent and possibly interconnected shifts have been taking place deep inside the political systems of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, particularly in the wake of the conspicuous strengthening of personal powers in the hands of MBS and MBZ. Given that these states now indisputably serve as major components of the global economy and are increasingly influential members of international organizations, it identifies an urgent need to recognize that major ruptures in the structural logic of their regimes could well end up having a direct impact--for better or worse--on policies, economies, and individual livelihoods all around the world.

Authority, Ijtihād, and Temporality

Chapter 2 traces changes in Ḥanafī conceptions of history by examining the manner in which authority is conceptualized within the school by both colonial-era writers and their predecessors. It locates self-representations of the school’s history as embedded within formal hierarchies of the relative standing (and authoritativeness) of Ḥanafī jurists. By examining Bakhīt’s ranking of Ḥanafī jurists, I reveal his refashioning of ijtihād within the school and its implications for a new conception of legal authority mirrored in Reformism’s insistence on an increasingly democratized and direct access to the primary texts of the Qurʾan and sunna, unmediated by the historical corpus of the fiqh tradition. I argue that this reworking of authority structures, in turn, relies on a new temporality, moving from one which sees ulama-subjects as inheritors of a tradition expressed through a continuous and organic history to one which displays a “historical consciousness,” privileging the Prophetic generation so as to be able to downgrade the “accretions” of the medieval interlude.

Zugang zu Recht

'Access to law' examines both personal and substantial conditions of access to the different phases of law creation and its legislative, executive and judicial manifestations. These conditions also include actual authority structures which affect threats to freedom and equality. The conference volume addresses access to legal and extrajudicial knowledge, private influence on legislation, the relationship between courts and legislatures, and access to the government and its offices. The volume discloses strategic litigation approaches and state actors’ attempts to escape from legal scrutiny.

Authority Structures and Single-Party Dominance in Indigenous Communities in Taiwan

Researchers have demonstrated that local institutional contexts such as organizational networks and leadership cohesion explain the lasting support across developing countries for elite parties originating from former authoritarian regimes. But variation in the emergence of party competition in rural underprivileged populations that were once strong supporters of the regime party requires a thorough examination of local power structures. Analysis of aboriginal societies in Taiwan, based on interviews and ethnographic research, demonstrates that the type of authority structure guides how power relations organize communities and how local elites attain their status. In indigenous communities where inherited hierarchy determines social prestige, chiefs and headmen have retained control of contemporary politics. In contrast, in villages without preexisting hierarchies, big men need to build political influence on personal grounds, which creates room for contestation and the emergence of internal competition for political allegiance. Regression analyses provide further support for these findings and imply that authority structures mediate local communities’ linkage with the party and the state during democratization.