Party Building as Institutional Bricolage: Asserting Authority at the Business Frontier

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is expanding its organizational infrastructure in the private sector, revealing the dynamics of CCP-style institutional change. Party building follows a distinct version of adaptive governance. Hesitant to rely on innovative tools alone, organizers productively tinker with traditional and disparate elements. Grassroots Party organs, sanctified by their venerable history, are redeployed – initially for modest purposes that fall short of their original revolutionary potential. The Party's surge in private-sector firms was triggered by technocrats overhauling Leninist systems to reconnect to Party members; the search for a broader mission came later. To empower CCP organs in companies, organizers use tactical precedents ranging from incentives to negotiations around Party financing, and membership discipline. Combining tactics from different eras, overseas Party building deploys old organizational arrangements to new ends, whereas digitization gives time-worn procedures a second life. The inclination for institutional bricolage is a deeply rooted hallmark of innovation in Chinese statecraft.

Natural Resources, Conflict and Peacebuilding in Darfur

The natural resources and conflict discourse has been instrumentalised by commentators on Darfur as a means of disputing the relative significance of conflict at national and local levels. The significance of natural resources is played down by those wishing to focus on government culpability for violence but emphasised by those focussing on local peacebuilding and a strategy of constructive engagement with the government. Mindful of this disputed context, we review an institutional perspective on natural resources and peacebuilding. We find that Darfur is undergoing a contested and traumatised institutional bricolage relating to natural resources, livelihoods and ethnicity. Institutional bricolage therefore provides a frame in which peacebuilding relating to the environment can be analysed. A comparative neglect of these issues by international actors is aligned with conflict framings which focus on national conflict dynamics and international relations at the expense of Darfur’s own protracted political contest.