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State Interests (state + interest)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Fragments of Economic Accountability and Trade Policy

FOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS, Issue 2 2007
RYAN KENNEDY
While there has been a prodigious amount of literature on trade policy written in the past two decades, very little of that literature has dealt with countries in economic transition or nondemocratic regimes. There has also been a lack of work dealing with state interests in trade policy beyond realpolitik discussions of national security. This article seeks to fill some of these gaps through a study of two samples: one of liberalization in 25 post-Communist countries between the years 1991 and 1999 and the other of 124 countries from around the world in 1997. The study concludes that a key element in the choice between free trade and protectionism is the level of "fragmentation of economic accountability." Such fragmentation consists of two major components: (1) the existence of a strong capitalist class that is independent of the government; and (2) the dispersion of political power among actors both inside and outside the government. Where the government is more accountable to a wide range of interests, policies are more likely to be aligned with market mechanisms, encouraging the adoption of reforms, including the liberalization of trade policy. This article builds on the conclusions of Frye and Mansfield in several ways: (1) it embeds political fragmentation into a larger theoretical framework of economic accountability of government institutions; (2) it introduces the importance of state ownership in shaping government interests; (3) it introduces an idea of social, not just institutional, accountability; and (4) it proposes a statist view of trade policy that is lacking in the present literature. [source]

Family and nation: Brazilian national ideology as contested transnational practice in Japan

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 4 2008
PAUL GREEN
Abstract Studies of Brazilian Nikkeis (Japanese emigrants and their descendants) living in Japan tend to conceptualize ,family' and ,nation' as two distinct entities. Such distinctions are filtered through mutually exclusive discourses and understandings of national and ethnic identity. In this article, however, I view national attachments and migrant experiences in Japan through the lens of ideology, embodied experience and kinship relations. Treating national ideology as lived process sheds fresh light on the dynamics of state,society relations in transnational social spaces. I suggest that the ability of Brazilian state actors to impose social, moral and economic regulation on its citizens in Japan is compromised by the extent to which such discourses are ontologically grounded in the social relations of migrant family life. It is through these kin ties, I argue, that people set the tone and rules of play for state interests to encroach or otherwise on their everyday lives in these transnational social spaces. [source]

The UNHCR and World Politics: State Interests vs.

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW, Issue 1 2001
Institutional Autonomy
This article situates the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) within the context of world politics. States remain the predominant actors in the international political system. But this does not mean that international organizations like the UNHCR are completely without power or influence. Tracing the evolution of the agency over the past half century, this article argues that while the UNHCR has been constrained by states, the notion that it is a passive mechanism with no independent agenda of its own is not borne out by the empirical evidence of the past 50 years. Rather UNHCR policy and practice have been driven both by state interests and by the office acting independently or evolving in ways not expected nor necessarily sanctioned by states. [source]

A Clash of Vulnerabilities: Citizenship, Labor, and Expatriacy in the Cayman Islands

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 3 2001
Vered Amit
In this article, I examine the stalemates produced in the Cayman Islands, a major center for offshore finance and tourism, by globalizing processes that have encouraged the valorization of transnational mobility, commodification of labor, and exclusivity of citizenship. I argue that globalization takes form in the Cayman Islands through the channels carved out for it by local state interests and regulation that have defined citizenship as a terrain for competing entitlements between expatriate workers and enfranchised permanent residents. Caymanians struggling to retain local political control over their labor market only further its incorporation into the global economy while expatriates can find their exit from Cayman stymied by the localization of labor markets elsewhere, [citizenship, transnational, labor, offshore finance, tourism] [source]

New shapes to shift: war, parks and the hunting person in modern West Africa

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 4 2000
Melissa Leach
The deployment of Mande hunters' brotherhoods in environmental defence around Guinea's national parks, and in civil defence in Sierra Leone's war, represent two cases where international and fragmented state interests are interlocking transformatively with ,traditional' organizations in modern West Africa. Emphasizing the embeddedness of hunting in ideas and practices linking social and ecological processes, this article explores how the construction and representation of gender and authority domains are negotiated in articulation with larger political-economic processes in these two cases. Important parallels and interconnections include the ambiguous basis of hunters' identity, distinctiveness, and sociality in the region; the reproduction of both hierarchies and ambiguities in gender relations; potent linkages between environmental protection and conflict, and the ways apparently technocratic or peace-building initiatives can serve to fuel oppositional politics and the creation of armed ethnic regionalisms. [source]

Crisp, The Senate, And The Constitution

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 4 2008
Stanley Bach
This essay explores the development of L.F. Crisp's understanding of the appropriate role of Australia's Senate in the national political system. A review of his widely-used textbook over three decades reveals that, to Crisp, the Senate was conceived primarily to protect state interests, but that role was nullified almost immediately by the emergence of disciplined parties. Thereafter, the Senate usually was an ineffectual irrelevancy until the introduction of proportional representation transformed it into a threat to the constitutional system as it should operate. Crisp also appreciated that disciplined parties undermined effective control of government by the House of Representatives, yet he consistently failed to recognize in the Senate an institution capable of doing what the House of Representatives cannot: enforcing accountability on the government of the day. [source]

The Swedish Welfare State and the Emergence of Female Welfare State Occupations

GENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 4 2000
Lars Evertsson
The Swedish welfare state has, during the twentieth century, developed into the primary guarantor of health and social services as well as economic security. As the welfare state has developed, a new group of professions has emerged which can be described as welfare state professions. In this paper I will point out a few central aspects of how female-dominated welfare state professions have emerged and developed within the framework of the Swedish welfare state's expansion. These ideas will then be demonstrated on two female-dominated occupations, nurses and occupational therapists, which have developed in close association with the expansion of the welfare state. The results indicate that the emergence of a centrally planned welfare state and the occupational groups' organizational resources have been of crucial importance for the professional development of female-dominated health and care occupations in Sweden. The welfare state has opened up new professional fields and created a stable labour market, which has provided good conditions for professional organizing. The state has also been quick to establish relationships with occupational groups whose professional competence has been deemed to be suited to the welfare political context. However, the state's interests in professional matters have often been in conflict with those of the professions themselves, regarding, for example, education, sub-specialization and certification. One conclusion that can be drawn is that the Swedish welfare state has acted both as an engine and a brake regarding professional development and status. [source]