The Roots and Rationalizations of U.S. Torture in Vietnam

This chapter traces the twin tales of the CIA’s and the U.S. military’s use of torture during the Vietnam War. The CIA’s interrogation program was rooted in the early days of the Cold War, when the agency was founded. U.S. foreign policy elites like Dwight Eisenhower and Allen Dulles were convinced that the Soviet Union’s freedom from norms and laws gave it an edge. As a result, the CIA began researching and practicing behavioral control techniques, using drugs and sensory deprivation to compete with Soviet programs. The agency’s KUBARK interrogation manual (1963) considered physical torture off-limits and ineffective, but recommended “maxim[izing] mental discomfort.” Likewise, CIA interrogators in Vietnam such as Frank Snepp believed isolation and sensory deprivation were both ethically and efficaciously superior to harsher alternatives. While racism and exasperation explain much of the U.S. military’s use of torture, soldiers also used water and electricity because the techniques were “unpleasant” but not “injurious.”

Gold rush: the political economy of the Yugoslavian gold exchange standard

This article analyses the economic, political and cultural factors that influenced the decision of policy-makers in Yugoslavia to join the gold exchange standard in the midst of the Great Depression in June 1931. The analysis proceeds in three stages. First, the economic reasons why policy elites and interest groups endeavoured to adopt the gold exchange standard are examined by looking at debates in Yugoslavia's central bank, correspondence between governmental institutions and the views of policy elites as depicted in various economic newspapers. Subsequently, the article analyses how the beliefs in economic benefits analysed in the previous part were formed, considering the state of economic knowledge in the country, as well as pressures exerted by foreign lenders such as the Bank of England, the Banque de France and the Bank for International Settlements. The third part analyses reasons for legal stabilisation that go beyond economic rationales, considering how the government employed the prestige involved in legal stabilisation for its political agenda, and how cultural attachments to ‘gold core countries’ made sharing their monetary system a matter of cultural integration.

Grand Strategy in a Fractured Marketplace of Ideas

In theory, grand strategies should benefit from a robust marketplace of foreign policy ideas, in which experts can critique and improve upon the status quo. There is growing evidence, however, that in practice this marketplace has shifted in ways that make the sustainable articulation of grand strategies more difficult. This chapter reviews these shifts and considers how they weaken the ability of foreign policy elites to influence grand strategy. The erosion of trust in expertise, increase in political polarization, and weakening of legislative interest in grand strategy have degraded the ability of experts to proffer new ideas and critique alternatives. These trends ensure that the lifespan of each grand strategy has been shortened, reducing their utility.

POLICY OPTIONS FOR INCREASING UTILIZATION OF COMMUNITY CLINIC SERVICES: A STUDY IN RURAL BANGLADESH

This paper aims to identify the problems of Community Clinic (CC) services in rural Bangladesh and to provide some policy options to increase the utilization. Here qualitative methods have been used, including document review, observation, fact check and key informant interviews with policy elites. Among those, the option relating to the absenteeism of health care providers at CC, scored the highest total value of 2.7 in multi criteria analysis as well as viable in PESTLE analy-sis. Therefore, the recommended option is introduction of biometric system at the CCs. This system is necessary in the CCs to ensure timely presence of the service providers to promote quality and safety in health care towards healthy communities. This system will also assist in implementing the plan of Digital Bangladesh by directly connecting the CCs with the main serv-er of Management Information System of Directorate General of Health Services.

War on Diabetes in Singapore: a policy analysis

Background In April 2016, the Singapore Ministry of Health (MOH) declared War on Diabetes (WoD) to rally a whole-of-nation effort to reduce diabetes burden in the population. This study aimed to explore how this policy has been positioned to bring about changes to address the growing prevalence of diabetes, and to analyse the policy response and the associated challenges involved. Methods This qualitative study, using Walt and Gilson's policy triangle framework, comprised analysis of 171 organizational documents on the WoD, including government press releases, organizational archives, YouTube videos, newspaper reports and opinion editorials. It also involved interviews with 31 policy actors, who were policy elites and societal policy actors. Results Findings showed that the WoD policy generated a sense of unity and purpose across most policy actors. Policy actors were cognisant of the thrusts of the policy and have begun to make shifts to align their interests with the government policy. Addressing those with diabetes directly is essential to understanding their needs. Being clear on who the intended targets are and articulating how the policy seeks to support the identified groups will be imperative. Issues of fake news, unclear messaging and lack of regulation of uncertified health providers were other identified problem areas. High innovation, production and marketing costs were major concerns among food and beverage enterprises. Conclusion While there was greater public awareness of the need to combat diabetes, continuing dialogues with the various clusters of policy actors on the above issues will be necessary. Addressing the various segments of the policy actors and their challenges in response to the WoD would be critical.

How to make elite experiments work in International Relations

For decades, many International Relations (IR) scholars did not engage in elite experiments, because they viewed it as too risky, too costly, or too difficult to implement. However, as part of a behavioral turn in IR, a growing number of scholars have begun to adopt the method in their own research. This shift raises important questions. Under what conditions do elite experiments add value to IR scholarship? How can scholars overcome the logistical and ethical challenges of sampling such an elusive group? This article makes an original conceptual contribution to methodological debates on the role of behavioral approaches by analyzing experiments on foreign policy elites. We analyze the method’s strengths and weaknesses, evaluate ethical considerations, and present what is—to the best of our knowledge—the most comprehensive set of implementation guidelines. Our article draws on recently published IR research and argues that the payoffs from elite experiments are well worth the effort.

Pensions Imperilled

Private pensions provision in the United Kingdom is in crisis—but it is not the crisis often depicted in political and popular discourses. While population ageing has affected traditional pensions practice, the imperilment of pensions is due in fact to the incompatibility of pensions provision’s peculiar temporality with the financialization of the wider economy. This book offers a political economy perspective on the development of private pensions, focusing specifically on how policy elites have sought to respond to perceived crises of demographic change, undersaving, and fund deficits, and in doing so absorbed imperatives to subject individuals to a market-led regime under the influence of neoliberal ideology. This terrain is explored through chapters on the historical and comparative context of UK pensions provision, the demise of collectivist provision, the rise of pensions individualization (and the state’s role as facilitator and regulator in this regard), and the financial and economic context in which pensions provision operates. The book offers an original understanding of the unique temporality and materiality of pensions provision, as a set of mechanisms for coping with generational change and forecast failures in capitalist economies. Accordingly, it also offers a nuanced account of pensions statecraft, challenging a tendency in the existing literature to focus on the boundary between state and market, rather than how the pensions market operates (and the state’s role in this). The book ends by outlining a coherent and radical programme of progressive pensions reform, steeped in the author’s experience as a policy practitioner.

Unwitting Architect

The global rise of neoliberalism since the 1970s is widely seen as a dynamic originating in the United States and the United Kingdom, and only belatedly and partially repeated by Germany. From this Anglocentric perspective, Germany's emergence at the forefront of neoliberal reforms in the eurozone is perplexing, and tends to be attributed to the same forces conventionally associated with the Anglo-American pioneers. This book challenges this ruling narrative. It recasts the genesis of neoliberalism as a process driven by a plenitude of actors, ideas, and interests. And it lays bare the pragmatic reasoning and counterintuitive choices of German crisis managers obscured by this master story. This book argues that German officials did not intentionally set out to promote neoliberal change. Instead they were more intent on preserving Germany's export markets and competitiveness in order to stabilize the domestic compact between capital and labor. Nevertheless, the series of measures German policy elites took to manage the end of golden-age capitalism promoted neoliberal transformation in crucial respects: it destabilized the Bretton Woods system; it undermined socialist and social democratic responses to the crisis in Europe; it frustrated an internationally coordinated Keynesian reflation of the world economy; and ultimately it helped push the US into the Volcker interest-rate shock that inaugurated the attack on welfare and labor under Reagan and Thatcher. From this vantage point, the book illuminates the very different rationale behind the painful reforms German state managers have demanded of their indebted eurozone partners.

POLICY ELITES OF RUSSIA’S MULTIETHNIC REGIONS: A SOCIAL PORTRAIT

The study of Russian elites is one of the urgent topics of post-Soviet political science. The numerous works of domestic and foreign authors, as well as the emergence of a separate research direction “Elitology” has become the result of the growing interest to this social group. Along with the federal political elite, the researches study regional elites. The subject of research is the functioning of the group, standing at the top of the social hi-erarchy, as well as its social portrait, the features of recruitment, and system of values. The latter due to its particular importance and insufficient coverage, are of the greatest interest. Taking into account this fact, we analyze one of the key elements of a social portrait of the studied social group — the level of education. One of the first overall studies of republican political elites we carried out in 2009–2010, during the survey 618 representatives of ex-ecutive, legislative and municipal authorities of the republics of Buryatia, Sakha (Yaku-tia), Tyva were interviewed (576 questionnaires were analyzed). In addition to the ques-tionnaire survey, we also conducted expert interviews in three studied regions of Russia. Within the framework of the study, based on the analysis of biographical documents, we identified and systematized the types, places of education, and training programmes of the representatives of republican political elites, as well as information about their academic degrees. In the article, we also focused on the correlation between the level of education of political elites and the pace of development of the Russian state.