National Global Imaginaries

This article draws on Edward Said's notion of 'imaginary geographies' to explore how representations of small island states enabled particular colonial interventions to take place in the Indian Ocean region and to show how these representations are currently being reworked to support development strategies. It examines how particular colonial imaginaries justified and legitimised spatially and temporally extended transactions before focusing on two examples of forced population movements: British colonial policy of forcibly exiling anti-colonial nationalists and political 'undesirables' from other parts of the empire to Seychelles; and the use of islands in the region as strategic military bases, requiring the compulsory relocation of populations. While a colonising legacy pervades contemporary representations of these societies, such depictions are not immutable but can be, and are being, appropriated and reworked through various forms of situated agency. Thus an 'island imaginary' has become an important cultural and economic resource for small island states, most notably in the development of a tourist industry. The key challenge for vulnerable peripheral states is to create new forms of representations that contest and replace tenacious colonialist depictions to provide greater opportunities for sustained development.

This article assesses Thomas Pogge's recent argument that it is sometimes justifiable to harm innocent persons in light of his claims about the causes of global poverty. It argues that if Pogge's two theses are correct then a third thesis follows: that those immiserated by the international system can legitimately resist the institutions responsible for the systemic violations of human rights, even at the cost of grievously harming innocent persons. This article does not assess the validity of Pogge's theses, but draws attention to a neglected topic in the debate on transnational economic justice: the right of resistance.

The global financial crisis of 2009-2010 has further underscored the demise of social democracy as a legitimate political alternative, for example, due to an absence of a clearly articulated alternative approach to the crisis offered by Social Democratic parties, even though neoliberal deregulated markets have proven to be vulnerable to the corrupt and opaque practices that created a massive crisis of systemic confidence. The author contends that the Maastricht process has transformed the Western European party system away from parties based on ideology and toward catchall issue-oriented parties. For Socialist and Social Democratic parties, this has meant the end of the centrality of the welfare state in their ideological domain. However, other trends have been equally damaging. Unionization, which has been in decline since the 1980s, primarily because of the changing nature of the labor force in postindustrial societies, has been further affected by the Maastricht criteria, which sought to enhance the competitiveness through increasing productivity, reducing wage costs, and significantly restructuring the labor relations that organized labor had achieved. For Social Democratic parties, the changing demographic of its support base, the ideological collapse of the Soviet Union, the adoption of the Maastricht convergence agenda, and the rise of a debt-infused consumer culture has meant death.

Sub-state nationalist parties of the industrialised West occupy different positions along the left-right political spectrum. Despite the similarities of their political agendas, these parties adopt different ideological identities. This paper seeks to exp

Current approaches to democratic state building place serious conceptual limits on policy options. A democratic future for Bosnia's people will require far more searching engagement with identity formation and its politicization than reform efforts have s

During the late Victorian period, British anarchist writers commented on Irish political affairs while the celebrated Irish author Oscar Wilde offered moral and practical support to them. Wilde's position was especially radical, since anarchism was associ

How does the life experience of an academic matter and how may it shape the ways in which scholarship is pursued? Starting from this question, the article offers a reading of the use of the discourse of Balkanism in Vesna Goldsworthy's recent memoir Chern

Must every state be a nation and every nation a state? Or should we look instead to the example of countries such as India, where one state holds together a congeries of "national" groups and cultures in a single and wisely conceived federal republic?

Ko Un is one of South Korea's most important writers of the past 50 years, and a poet whose work provides important insights into crucial linkages between language, identity and community. He lived through, chronicled and critically engaged most of the tr

The bulk of scholarly literature views nationalism as harmful to democratic transition. Yet Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan indirectly suggest that nationalism may benefit democratization. This study shows that under the right conditions nationalism can benef

this change at the top level arose from years of steady electoral growth (notably, in Brazil and Uruguay), while in other countries it was the fruit of social movements capable of overthrowing neoliberal parties and governments (Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuel

This study is based on the argument that globalism is a product of nationalism. I argue that globalism, understood as the imagination of the world as a single place, was made possible by and accompanies the emergence of nationalism, defined as the formati

This initial encounter, led by Portugal and Spain, and subsequent interactions between Latin America and the rest of the world, particularly the West, have had profound effects on the region, including drastic changes in demography, racism and the destruc

Campesino (farm worker) communities in North Peru have not benefitted well from globalization because of a national devotion to capitalism and the global market's need for export goods. The consequence of the new focus is that a balanced national infrastr

This article places Afro-Brazilian women in the midst of the discourse of globalization, in light of its impact on marginalizing women of color, economically, politically, and culturally. It extends the concept of globalizing discourses to the history of

This article is an analysis of Brazilian foreign policy largely since the coming to power of Luis Inácio "Lula" da Silva. It is an assessment of policy and implementation in Brazilian international organizations that speak to south-south issues. As a back

In post-neoliberal Bolivia, state and social-movement efforts to "seat" (sentar) sovereignty and "reestablish" (refundar) the state pose an interpretive challenge to critical ethnographers of power because sovereignty-making practices have instrumentalize

Judith Butler's perception of a shift in feminism's relationship to the state in Antigone's Claim serves as a useful starting point for my reflections in this essay. The familiar feminist representation of Antigone's "defiance" that she describes and ques

In an interview, Gita Sen, a founding member of DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era), reflects on the network's two and a half decades of experience connecting scholars, policy advocates, and activists in Africa, Latin America, the Car

Since September 11 and the war on terrorism, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the Arab world have acquired a special presence and weight, requiring critical analysis. The increase in NGOs just in the past few years-from an estimated 175,000 in 1995