Political Science Commons^™

July Roundtable: Introduction

Human Rights & Human Welfare

An annotation of:

What Next for Sri Lanka's 2.5 Million Tamils? by Amantha Perera. Time. May 26, 2009.

and

How to Defeat Insurgencies: Sri Lanka's Bad Example by Bobby Ghosh. Time, May 20, 2009.

Moving Beyond Conflict In Sri Lanka: The Economic Rights Dimension, Shareen Hertel

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Much of the literature on transitional justice underplays the role of economic rights in shoring up peace. The case of Sri Lanka demonstrates the urgency of addressing them. Until a month ago, Sri Lanka was the country with Asia’s longest running civil war. Since independence in 1947, the island nation has been wracked by conflict between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority—a conflict that has eroded political stability and aggravated internal inequalities. The struggle was marked not only by inter-ethnic and religious tensions but also by a fight for control over land and resources.

The War Goes On - No Reconciliation At This Stage, Anja Mihr

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The victorious Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaska has been quite bold to pass a reconciliation note after he declared the thirty year war over. Can he be taken seriously?

Politics, Policies, And Poverty In Latin America, Jennifer Pribble, Evelyne Huber, John D. Stephens

Political Science Faculty Publications

Why do Latin American countries exhibit stark differences in their ability to protect citizens from falling into poverty? Analysis of poverty levels measured by ECLAC in eighteen countries shows that political factors-including the democratic record, long-term weight of left-of-center parties in the legislature, and investment in human capital-are significant and substantively important determinants of poverty. These findings contribute to the growing literature that emphasizes the importance of regime form, parties, and policies for a variety of outcomes in Latin America, despite the weaknesses of democracy and the pathologies of some parties and party systems in the region.

St. Louis Currents: The Bi-State Region After A Century Of Planning, Andrew Theising, Mark Abbott Ph.D.

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

This collection of essays by leading scholars examines urban issues facing the St. Louis region in the 2010 era, which is 100 years after the first city plan in the US in 1907.

Riding Obama's Coattails: The Democrats Finally Take The Ohio 1st, Randall E. Adkins, Gregory A. Petrow

Political Science Faculty Publications

In 2006 the Democratic Party swept both houses of Congress. It was a tidal wave. For the first time since 1994, both branches of the legislature were under Democratic Party control. While many of his Republican colleagues lost in 2006, Steve Chabot survived by narrowly defeating Cin-cinnati City Council member John Cranley by roughly 9,000 votes. The political environment favored the Democrats again in 2008, and this year the Democrats believed that Steve Driehaus, the Minority Whip in the Ohio state legislature, was the person to unseat Chabot.

The Corruption Enigma: Understanding Success And Failure Of Corruption Reform Programs In Highly Corrupt Countries, Matthew T. Hall

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

There exists a corruption enigma. Experts and analysts largely agree on the institutional reforms that constitute successful corruption reform programs—this is the 'Corruption Consensus.' Unfortunately, the well-designed and resourced reform programs created from this consensus and intended to improve national institutional capabilities rarely work. Yet the reform programs patterned on the Corruption Consensus continue on. Everyone agrees what to do in order to reform corruption but everyone also agrees that it will not work. This is the Corruption Enigma.

This dissertation employs a structured, focused analysis to determine the reasons for varying success levels between otherwise similar countries in order …

Radical Politics In Hong Kong: Can Business Make A Difference?, James T. H. Tang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

As Hong Kong in 2009 retained its title as the world’s freest economy for the fifteenth consecutive year, radicalism seemed to have gained wider support in local politics at a time of economic turbulence—even though a timetable for universal suffrage has been set.

Moving In The Open Daylight, Nicola Colbran

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The road ahead for Sri Lanka is certainly not easy. Although the government has declared that the LTTE ( Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) has been defeated, this “victory” has come at a high cost for civilian lives and democratic values. Decades of instability and violence have given rise to deep rooted and sustained human rights violations. Thousands of Sri Lankans have been displaced, killed or wounded, and are malnourished and traumatized after months of extended fighting between the two sides.

Justice After War: Sri Lanka And The Rights And Duties Of A Vanquisher, William Paul Simmons

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Human rights scholars, attorneys, and activists will deservedly focus on the human rights abuses committed by the Sri Lankan military as the decades - long civil war against the Tamil Tigers came to a crushing end this past spring. The military’s brutality, especially its failure to discriminate combatants from non-combatants, should be investigated by both domestic and transnational institutions. It remains to be seen whether such wanton disregard for civilian collateral damage will become the norm for regimes embroiled in civil wars and present yet another realpolitik threat to humanitarian law, or will Sri Lanka and other regimes face accountability …

Malaysia's Transitional Moment? : Democratic Transition Theory And The Problem Of Malaysian Exceptionalism., Jason P. Abbott

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Many theorists of democratization transition have, either explicitly or implicitly, a teleological concept of political progress, liberalization and reform. For such theorists, countries such as Malaysia are therefore in transition towards substantive 'full' liberal democracy. Taken in this light, the significant advances by opposition political parties in the 2008 federal and state elections in Malaysia represent a major advance towards this end goal. While many have highlighted that Malaysia may in fact be an exception to this rule, this paper contends instead that the Malaysian case study challenges the central tenets of democratic transition more profoundly. Indeed, since independence the …

Climatic Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy And National Security Implications Of Climate Change – Edited By Kurt M. Campbell, Elizabeth L. Chalecki

Political Science Faculty Publications

Climatic Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate Change . Washington, DC : Brookings Institution Press . 237 pages. ISBN 978‐0‐8157‐1332‐6 , $28.95 cloth. Edited by Kurt M. Campbell . 2008 .

Awkward title notwithstanding, Climatic Cataclysm is the first attempt at a systematic generation of future climate scenarios and their possible security and foreign policy impacts, and as such is sorely overdue in the field of environmental security. Much of the scholarly literature in this field is devoted to statistical models and general theories; what is lacking is serious national security consideration of the best climate …

Tehran Events And Tiananmen Analogies

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

With so many references to Tiananmen showing up in the news, we wanted to take a quick break from our time away to recommend a couple of the best uses of 1989 analogies (if we weren’t on hiatus, we’d also look at some of the worst, and there have been some pretty bad ones). One powerful rumination on the relevance of China’s 1989 for thinking about Iran’s 2009 is by Andrew Leonard of the “How the World Works” blog at Salon.com:

He begins as follows:

“In the spring of 1989, the fax machine was China’s Twitter — the miracle technology …

June 4th Around The World: Notes From One Week After The Anniversary

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A week (or so) after the anniversary of the “May 35th” events (as some Chinese netizens put it to circumvent automatic blocks on mention of a highly charged date), we got several more responses to our request to Friends of the Blog for word on how June 4th was commemorated, discussed, or ignored in various parts of the world. The most substantial (reproduced in full below) is a second contribution to the series (click herefor her first) by Paola Voci (an Italian-born, American-trained, New Zealand-based specialist in Chinese visual culture whose book, China on Video: Small Screen Realities, is due …

Humanitarian Intervention In North Korea?, Steve Chung

Conference on “Improving the Human Destiny"

No abstract provided.

A Different Path From Tangshan To Wenchuan : China’S Participation In The International Disaster Reduction Regimes And Its Domestic Impacts, Lin Peng

Conference on “Improving the Human Destiny"

The catastrophic Wenchuan earthquake provides an uncomfortable opportunity to examine China’s disaster management system. This paper would approach this issue from the perspective of international politics, trying to explore the interaction between the international factors and the development of China’s domestic disaster administrative system.

Berkshire Encyclopedia On New Media

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Berkshire Publishing has recently published its Encyclopedia of China with contributions by China scholars like Sherman Cochran, Kerry Brown, Judy Polumbaum and many others and featuring one thousand entries on a diverse range of historical, social and cultural topics.

A few of the entries caught our attention as a little unusual for a print encyclopedia—including entries on “internet use,” “online social networking,” and “blogging.” As these topics are of particular interest to us (and we’re guessing to many of you, too), we were curious how Berkshire would cover them in the encyclopedia format. Here are a few relevant excerpts (selected …

June 4 Around The World: California

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

We wrote to the peripatetic Pico Iyer, a Friend of the Blog, to see how June 4th was marked wherever he happened to be this year on the anniversary date. He sent us the following ruminations, in which he alludes to the mid-1980s when he first went to Beijing and first saw Lhasa, at a time when each, in ways he’s described elsewhere, was a very different place than it is now:

On the Fourth of June–the great annual feast-day at my old English school, the very opposite of its associations for modern Chinese–I was, as I so often am, …

Looking Backwards: From 1989 To Han Times And From 2008 To 1964

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

There have been many efforts during the last month, on this site and elsewhere, to bring history into discussions of the twentieth anniversary of June 4th (particularly via allusions the May 4th Movement of 1919), just as a year ago there were many efforts to bring history into discussions of the Beijing Games (especially via allusions to the Berlin Olympics of 1936 and Seoul Olympics of 1988). But there’s still room for this Top Five list of historically minded pieces on 1989 or 2008 that have just appeared and stand out as especially worth checking out, due to either how …

June 4 Around The World: A Letter From Lima And A Hong Kong Perspective

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In this third offering in our series, we limit ourselves to one short post, from a Friend of the Blog who recently moved from Shanghai to Peru, and a brief description of and link to what one of China Beat’s longtime contributors, Angilee Shah, has been up to lately: a podcast series on “Global Lives,” the most recent of which offers a perspective on Tiananmen from the former Crown Colony turned PRC SAR. For additional reading on June 4 from a perspective that takes you into a different part of the world, check out this piece on France’s special connection …

The Mexican Economic Crisis Of 1982 And The Brazilian Economic Crisis Of 1999 - Critical Junctures In Economic Policy, John Hogan, Ana Maza

Articles

This paper utilises a new critical juncture framework to help us determine whether changes to Mexican macroeconomic policy in the early 1980s, and Brazilian macroeconomic policy at the turn of the century, were clean breaks with the past, or continuations of previously established policy pathways. The framework consists of three elements, which must be identified in sequence in order to declare, with some certainty, if an event was a critical juncture. These are crisis, ideational change, and radical policy change.

Historical Bafflement Of The Chinese People

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

David Kelly, researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, translated the following opinion piece by overseas political commentator Liang Jing. He has published several previous pieces at China Digital Times, including, “Trigger for an Earthquake in Chinese Society” and “Where Does Wen Jiabao’s Faith Come From?”

One of the most significant cultural phenomena in Chinese society in recent years is the growing interest in history. Everyone—elite and general populace, leftists and rightists—shows an unprecedented enthusiasm for understanding China’s past. And in 2009 a series of major historical anniversaries, including the 90th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, have pushed China’s …

6/4 Around The World: The First Sequel

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In our second installment of the series (for part one click here), we return to Japan (via a follow-up post by James Farrer on coverage in Tokyo) and offer a view from Hanoi (where long-time Reuters China correspondent John Ruwitch is now based and sometimes writes on themes that link or divide the two countries).

John Ruwitch, Hanoi

Six-four didn’t make its way into the official Vietnamese media, of course, but reports about it on CNN, which is widely available in Hanoi, were not censored. When I told a Vietnamese friend I found that mildly surprising, given the somewhat similar …

A 6/4 Reader

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

1. Su Yang has never written anything for China Beat, but a few of us get to have lunch with him occasionally as he is a professor (of sociology) at UCI. TheOrange County Register profiled Su, discussing his experiences in 1989 and after.

2. Jeff Wasserstrom’s most recent piece at the Huffington Post points out some of the good coverage on China in recent weeks (and sketches some of what was missing or wrong).

3. Friend of the blog and former student leader Wang Chaohua has completed her Ph.D. at UCLA and is graduating this weekend. UCLA Today has a …

Warren County, Kentucky - New Deal Programs, 1934-1935 (Mss 253), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 253. Documents related to New Deal relief programs in Warren County, Kentucky and surrounding counties; correspondence of Ida Leighton Hodges, Bowling Green, Area Administrator of the Kentucky Emergency Relief Administration.

Notes From A Non-Anniversary, Jeremiah Jenne

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

I woke up this morning and took a short walk to a big square. As expected, it was pretty calm in the kind of jittery, strained, composed way one usually associates with a dinner party where one of the hosts is having an extramarital affair with one of the guests. The square looked relatively normal but with a beefed-up security detail that included a ring of young slack-jawed crew cut types in tracksuits and matching gray badges worn on unmatching t-shirts. Reports of visitors being asked to produce passports, to weed out foreign journalists, appear to be overstated. I walked …

6/4 Around The World

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Last August, we called on contributors and friends of the blog around the world to send in short reports on how the Olympics were being covered and received in their neck of the woods. Recently, we sent out a similar call regarding today’s anniversary. Here are a few of the responses we’ve received so far, pulled together into a piece that we think would make for interesting reading beside the very different “around the world” survey that David Flumenbaum has done and will keep updated over at the Huffington Post. Included here are some comments by people who contributed to …

6/4/89: The Night Of No Moon

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

This piece is excerpted from the manuscript of Philip J. Cunningham’s forthcoming book, Tiananmen Moon, part of an on-going China Beat feature of excerpts from Cunningham’s book. Interested readers can see more at Cunningham’s website.

You didn’t have to be a fortune-teller to know Tiananmen was the target, but what were they going to hit it with and when? The long anticipated crackdown had been postponed so long, getting it over with might resolve the political impasse, but it wouldn’t bring justice, it wouldn’t buy back the mandate of heaven.

Being part of the teeming mass as the army approached, …

China’S Growing Cage: The Legacy Of Tiananmen, Zhang Lijia

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Whenever “1989” is mentioned, people in the West instantly think about the protesting students in Tiananmen Square. In fact, although it started in Beijing and was led by the students there, the democratic movement was a nationwide event, drawing together people from all walks of life.

Twenty years on, I remember vividly every detail of that day when I organized a demonstration among the workers from my Nanjing factory in support of the movement. It was Sunday, May 28, a week before the crackdown in Beijing.

The death of Hu Yaobang had triggered the spontaneous democratic movement. The popular former …

Another Anniversary

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In Taiwan, June 4 marks another anniversary, namely the 185th day of Chen Shuibian’s detention without having been convicted of a crime. Chen was first ordered to be held in custody on the night of November 11, 2008, with actual detention beginning on November 12. Taking into account the few days during which he was released in December, Chen’s incarceration has lasted almost 200 days now, with no end in sight. In principle, he can be held in detention indefinitely due to the fact that he has been charged with a felony, and because prosecutors have expressed concerns that Chen …