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Since 9/11, the American policy towards Africa has been strongly influenced by national security interests and in particular by the fight against international terrorism and Islamic radicalisation. Traditionally, the American Africa policy has been the result of bureaucratic policymaking with the Pentagon and the State Department playing prominent roles. The paper argues that in the current century, evangelical Christian lobby groups have gained increasing influence on policymaking on Africa. Because policymaking has been influenced by a number of different actors, the American Africa policy may appear incoherent and ambiguous if judged narrowly on the expectation that it only aims to take care of US national security concerns and economic self-interests. The paper concludes that Africa was important to the United States during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama because of the combination of strong security interests and strong domestic lobby groups that have pressured to place Africa on the US foreign policy agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is argued that China's relationship with Africa has transformed into one defined by a dynamism and African agency, thereby lessening the hold the former previously had on Africa in the early days of this evolving alliance. First, the authors will conduct a literature review of historical Sino-African relations, from the early Han dynasty to its contemporary manifestations. The second section will continue with this analysis by focusing exclusively on the status quo of the Sino-African economic relationship, including analysis of trade flows, investments, development, economic cooperation, and Chinese support for regional integration. Finally, this paper will conclude with an elaboration of some key, emerging relationship areas, such as opportunities for China and Africa to collaborate on the achievement of the latter's Agenda 2063 and African Mining Vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on a seeming contradiction between ‘Islamophobic’ and ‘Islamophilic’ approaches in contemporary Western policies and discourses on the Middle East. While Islamophobia continues to shape some domestic policies of Western states and provide ideological justification for the wars they wage abroad, ‘Islamophilic’ tendencies in foreign policy have also emerged, especially in responses to the ‘Arab Spring’. Not clearly noted in Western public discourse, this represents a historical continuation of Western support for Islamism common during the Cold War, but is also a shift from the Islamophobic discourse of the post-cold war period, especially since 9/11. While Islamophobic and Islamophilic discourses may appear to be opposites, the paper argues that they represent two sides of the Orientalist logic, continuing to reduce understanding of Middle Eastern societies and politics to a culturalist dimension. Unlike traditional Orientalism, they treat Middle Eastern people as political subjects, but approach them as defined by their culture and religion. They define ‘moderate’ Islamism as the typical (and preferred) politics of the people of the region. Focusing on specific recent developments, the paper suggests that, rather than paving the way to more peaceful relations with the region or to internal peace and stability there, the Islamophilic shift in Western policy may rather lead to new waves of catastrophes by further destabilising and fragmenting the region, threatening to evoke new waves of Islamophobia in the West. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes that the tumultuous events associated with the Arab uprisings are unlikely to engender democracy in the foreseeable future. At best, they will probably produce unstable political orders on the basis of accommodation and ad hoc political alliances. The argument of this paper lends itself to analysis through the examination of Arabs' experience with (1) failed reforms, (2) regime defiance, (3) the gap between youth awakening and sociopolitical reality and (4) the uneasy encounter between nascent competence, confidence and political consensus. The author's assessment suggests that recent dramatic developments in the Arab region are only the beginning of a long process of political evolution that is unlikely to be concluded before the successful resolution of the issue of political identity and the transformation of Arab publics from subjects into citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominant narrative of global income inequality is one of convergence. Recent high-profile publications by Branko Milanovic and the World Bank claim that the global Gini coefficient has declined since 1988, and that inter-country inequality has declined since 1960. But the convergence narrative relies on a misleading presentation of the data. It obscures the fact that convergence is driven mostly by China; it fails to acknowledge rising absolute inequality; and it ignores divergence between geopolitical regions. This paper suggests alternative measures that bring geopolitics back in by looking at the gap between the core and periphery of the world system. From this perspective, global inequality has tripled since 1960. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How we understand the state is important when addressing issues of human rights. During the debate on the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda, the country was, at times, presented as nearly uniformly homophobic, exemplified by references to ‘Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill’. The state, which does discriminate against gender and sexual minorities, is comprised of different institutions and people, holding, at times, conflicting positions. This paper documents these differing positions that parts of the state adopted, along with how those positions changed over time in response to political changes and lobbying from civil society. Uncovering gaps in the coherence of the state by identifying these opposing views is useful both for how we understand and study the state, and for activism against political homophobias. Strategies against legislation similar to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill can target those within most likely to oppose such laws. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Turkey has thus far been generally neglected in most IR studies on power categorisations, such as middle or middle-range power, regional power or rising/emerging power, despite its rising regional power status in the past decade. This paper attempts to understand Turkey’s regional power together with its rising power status using an integral approach. In doing so, it empirically tests whether or not Turkey fits Daniel Flemes’s ‘regional power’ category, which seems to be proposing a more complete and integral framework through the fulfilment of four basic preconditions: claim to leadership; possession of necessary power resources (material and ideational); employment of material, institutional and discursive foreign policy instruments; and acceptance of leadership by third parties. Based upon these analytical tools, the article will discuss Turkey’s performance in creating a regional impact in its neighbouring regions of the Middle East, the Balkans and the Black Sea and Caucasus. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The complex relationship between democracy and development has been extensively discussed in academic literature. However, we do not have much knowledge of how this translates into donor practices. How does the European Commission (ec) deal with tensions arising from promoting democracy and development? To answer this question, this article operationalises the distinction between ‘democracy promoters’ and ‘developmental donors’, focusing specifically on budget support and governance incentive tranches. Empirically we examine the implementation of the ec’s budget support and Governance Incentive Tranche in Ethiopia (2005–10), a case where the dilemma between democracy promotion and development cooperation is particularly strong. Investigating the position of the ec along the democracy promoter versus developmental donor continuum, we conclude that the ec’s position lies between these extremes. However, in the case of budget support, a shift has been made away from the Commission being a democracy promoter and towards the role of developmental donor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What role does China play in the recent rush for land acquisition in Africa? Conventional wisdom suggests a large role for the Chinese government and its firms. Ou r research suggests the opposite. Land acquisitions by Chinese companies have so far been quite limited, and focused on production for African consumption. We trace the evolution of strategy and incentives for Chinese agricultural engagement in Africa, and examine more closely several of the more well known cases, sorting out the myths and the realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can the policies pursued by successful examples of developmental states be transferred to other countries under current global conditions? This question has represented one of the key concerns of the academic community in the wake of this reinterpretation of East Asian developmental success. This article will contribute to both the Latin American literature and the developmental state literature simultaneously and symbiotically, through arguing that Argentina in the period 2003-2015 represents an excellent empirical opportunity to revisit key debates associated with the concern of transferable lessons from the original East Asian developmental state experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As development is no longer simply conceived of as economic growth, but also as encapsulating human development, the role of the developmental state must be rethought. Focusing on the state's ability to deliver collective goods such as welfare has become an important task for developing and developed nations alike, and nowhere is this more important than in China. Consequently, intimate connections between the political and industrial elites are no longer sufficient and may actually be counterproductive to the success of the developmental state. Diverging from traditional developmental states, China shows that incorporation of new stakeholders is not premised on principles of human development. The novelty that China brings to re-thinking and re-articulating a new developmental state framework is that the development state of the twenty-first century can create new alliances such as with non-governmental organisations to meet human development objectives, but substantive change with regards to how the state is organised is not a precondition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article intends to provide responses to some of the many unanswered questions about the making and the transformation of the uprising in Syria by exploring a new avenue of research: media development aid. Most academic interest has been oriented towards the role that the new media played at the time of the uprising; insufficient interest, by contrast, has been directed to the development of the sector in the years predating it. What emerges from this article is that the Syrian media landscape was strongly supported by international development aid during the years prior to the outbreak of the uprising of 2011. By looking at the complex structure of media aid architecture and investigating the practices and programmes implemented by some representative organisations, this article reflects on the field of media development as a new modus operandi of the West (the EU and US especially), to promote democracy through alternative and non-collateral, bottom-up support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Piracy off the coast of Somalia has resulted in a steady decline in trade through the Arabian Sea and higher costs of doing business for multiple world regions. The EU has responded to the threat with a large-scale anti-piracy operation in the Horn of Africa, which constitutes the first free-standing Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) military operation that is not entirely dependent on North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) planning and assets. The operation is designed to interdict Somali piracy operations across the Gulf of Aden and to keep some of the world’s busiest sea lanes open for reasons of world trade. This article argues that the EU preoccupation with military solutions to the piracy problem, based on interventions through the Somali federal government with an emphasis on security, is insufficient because it fails to address the underlying causes of piracy and misunderstands the Somali socio-cultural-security nexus and the need for practical longer term land-based approaches to development. The reduction of Somali piracy activities can be linked to this increased military response capacity as well as to increased security precautions undertaken by shipping companies, but none of these strategies has succeeded in dismantling piracy networks. They therefore offer only a temporary and costly stopgap measure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The rise and subsequent erosion of friendly relations between Iran and Turkey was a result of their regional ambitions. While Turkey had long seen its secular system as presenting an alternative to Iran's Islamic ideology, the alignment of their regional interests facilitated a rapport between the two states in the first decade of the twenty-first century. However, the Arab Spring proved divisive for this relationship as each state sought to advocate its model of government and secure a leadership role in the Arab world. The war in Syria widened the divide, as Iran's long-standing support for the Bashar al-Assad regime could not be reconciled with Turkey's desire to see President Assad out of office. Using a close reading of Persian and Turkish sources, the authors will analyse the Iran-Turkey divide, focusing specifically on how the Iranians have portrayed it as a clash of civilisations, citing Turkey's so-called 'neo-Ottoman' ambitions as the primary cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking Palestine as the focus of inquiry, and drawing on our experiences as co-directors of Karamah, a judicial education initiative focused on dignity, we reflect on the attributes of colonisation and the possibilities of decolonisation in Palestine through development aid. We conclude that decolonisation is possible even within development aid frameworks. We envision the current colonial condition in Palestine as a multi-faceted, complex and dynamic mesh that tightens and expands its control over the coveted colonial subject but that also contains holes that offer opportunities for resistance or refusal. We turn to Karamah to illustrate how some judges have insisted on a professional identity that merges the concepts of human dignity and self-determination and ultimately rejects the colonial condition inherent in both occupation and development aid. We conclude that in this process of professional identity (re)formation, members of the Palestinian judiciary have helped reveal the demands of decolonisation by demonstrating their commitment to realising human dignity through institutional power, and bringing occupation back into international development discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the advent of the local turn in the mid-2000s, critical approaches have attempted to rethink peace building from the bottom up, placing local agents at the centre of the debate, declaring the end of top-down governance and affirming the fragmented, complex and plural nature of the social milieu. While local turn approaches have become popular in peace-building theory, this article invites the reader to question and problematise the local turn’s use of the concept of ‘everyday’, in order to explore paradoxes and contradictions that indicate the need to think more deeply about the impact of the local turn’s project of critique. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Debates on intervention and sovereignty since 1945 can be summarised as a tale of two cities, San Francisco and Bandung, and of two countries, Rwanda and Libya. All are symbolic of different phases of these debates. The UN was born in San Francisco in 1945 with very little substantive participation by Asian and African governments. The great powers established a system in which they would determine when, where and how military interventions could take place. The 1955 Bandung Conference saw Asian and African countries seek to use new norms of intervention to regain their sovereignty. The 1994 Rwandan genocide, however, forced African countries to dilute notions of absolute sovereignty to allow military interventions for human protection purposes. The 2011 NATO military intervention in Libya did potentially irreparable damage to future UN-mandated interventions and was widely seen in the Global South as an abuse of the responsibility to protect (R2P). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The conditional cash transfer (CCT) programme Bolsa Família (Family Allowance), introduced in Brazil in 2003, is one of the largest such programmes in the world. Bolsa Família has played a role in the recent reduction of poverty and income inequality in Brazil. But what has been its impact on democracy? An assumption in the literature on social policy, derived from the European experience, is that targeted programmes such as Bolsa Família divide citizens, erode trust between citizens and between citizens and the state, and weaken democracy. This article challenges that assumption, showing that there is considerable evidence that Bolsa Família has strengthened the citizenship rights of the poor and enhanced democracy. The Brazilian experience suggests that, in highly unequal developing countries under conditions of 21st-century capitalism, the argument that targeted social programmes will inevitably undermine democracy is incorrect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades there has been a rapid increase in funds for local civil society actors in fragile states. Current peace-building and development efforts strive for the recreation of a vibrant, active and ‘liberal’ civil society. In the case of Sierra Leone, paradoxically, this growing support has not strengthened civil society actors based on that liberal idea(l). Instead of experiencing enhanced proactive participation stemming from the civil sphere, Sierra Leone’s civil society appears to be largely depoliticised. Drawing on empirical data gathered over the past four years, this article offers three interrelated causal explanations of why this phenomenon occurred during the country’s peace-building phase from 2002 to 2013. First, Sierra Leone’s civil society landscape has become instrumentalised to serve a broader liberal peace-building and development agenda in several ways. Second, Western idea(l)s of participatory approaches and democracy are repeatedly challenged by the legacies of colonial rule and socially entrenched forms of neo-patrimonialism. Third, abject poverty and the lack of education affect activism and agency from below. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The resilience of the problem of child labour in the global economy has been amply documented, but, we suggest, the reasons for this situation have not yet been fully captured in the associated debates. Our aim is to advance a way of thinking about those forms of child labour which occur in the context of global production networks (gpns), and to contend that greater attention must be paid to the organisation and functioning of gpns, and the social foundations on which they rest, if we are to grasp more fully the conditions and processes which facilitate the persistence and evolution of child labour. The way of thinking we propose is rooted in the concept of ‘adverse incorporation’ in the global economy, which we develop by drawing together currents in gpn analysis and poverty research to explore the commercial and social dynamics in gpns which give rise to these forms of labour exploitation. We illustrate our arguments with reference to the garments industry in New Delhi, India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite criticism, global biofuel production continues to rise, using primarily food crops. Between 2001 and 2012 it increased nearly six-fold, driven primarily by domestic policies, yet raising strong international concerns, eg over impacts on global food prices. Nevertheless, little international biofuel governance has emerged. This article examines the various extraterritorial dimensions of domestic biofuel policies and investigates why international biofuel governance has remained vague, despite its controversial nature. It uses the politics of scale to analyse why countries may wish to frame it as a global or domestic issue. Three extraterritorial dimensions are identified: global environmental impacts, global socioeconomic impacts, and attempts at extraterritorial control over biofuel production abroad. While major producers have successfully avoided liability for impacts by preventing the scaling up of much biofuel governance to the international level, major importers have tried to fill perceived governance gaps using policies aimed at extraterritorial control. We show that both the rise of nationally oriented development policies with extraterritorial impacts and of unilateral sustainability rule making primarily affect weaker countries, making global inequalities more pronounced. It is essential that adaptation governance take into account both environmental and global socioeconomic changes, such as higher agricultural commodity prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international development arena is currently subject to major changes in the geographies of power. In this article I analyse how and to what extent the (re)entry on the development scene of China, India and Brazil, together with increasing prices for primary commodities and improved access to international finance, has affected Zambia’s political leverage to set, implement and fund its own developmental policies. I argue that, while real changes in external financial flows comparable to aid from these non-traditional state actors are still small, these actors’ experience is providing Zambia with an alternative development model that combines purposive state intervention with market-based economic growth and integration into world markets. While Zambia may be taking the first steps in strengthening its ‘sovereign frontier’, the extent of this movement is still small and its development outcomes are far from assured. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]