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| 1 |
ID:
140333
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| Summary/Abstract |
Rwanda and Burundi have both emerged from civil wars over the past 20 years and foreign donors have provided significant contributions to post-conflict reconstruction and development in the two countries. Yet, although Rwanda and Burundi share several important characteristics, their post-conflict social, political and economic trajectories have been different. This article argues that the nature of the ruling parties in Rwanda and Burundi is key to understanding the countries’ relationships with donors. Rather than seeing aid as an exogenous factor, causing particular development outcomes, it shows how local party elites exert considerable agency over the aid relationship. This agency is influenced by a number of different local contextual factors, including how the parties were established, how they evolved and the ways in which their civil wars ended. Thus, the article provides an analysis of how local context matters in understanding donor–recipient aid relationships, and how the ruling party in Rwanda (the RPF) and in Burundi (the CNDD–FDD) emerged from their respective conflicts with different relationships with international donors.
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| 2 |
ID:
190360
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| Summary/Abstract |
Strategic and security analysis of the Horn of Africa systematically portrays the roots of instability as external. However, the region’s stability or instability is largely determined by local actors and conditions. Local agency and context largely set the conditions for the involvement of external actors. This article discusses how state and nonstate actors have conducted their engagement with outside powers, especially the Gulf states, at a time of increasing rivalry for influence in the Horn of Africa, with examples ranging from Ethiopia to Somalia, and from Djibouti to Somaliland.
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| 3 |
ID:
140276
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Ethnic armed conflict has plagued southeast Myanmar for over sixty-five years, and has been the cause of significant and repeated episodes of forced migration. The dynamics of forced migration have undergone profound changes in the region since 2012, following the signing of bilateral ceasefire agreements between the government and several Ethnic Armed Groups (EAGs). Within this context, this article describes and analyses the decision-making processes and approaches to return, resettlement and rehabilitation of forced migrants — Internally Displaced People (IDPs) and refugees. In relation to academic and policy literatures on local agency and humanitarian protection, we argue that forced migrants in and from Myanmar demonstrate great resilience and significant capacities for self-protection and that external support should be geared towards supporting local coping strategies and attempts to achieve dignified and “durable solutions” to their plight. This approach requires an in-depth exploration of local contexts, and forced migrants’ decision-making processes. We present a typology of conflict-induced forced migrants in and from southeast Myanmar, followed by an analysis of five main factors that influence their decisions, and help to explain some of the key differences between different types.
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| 4 |
ID:
180349
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| Summary/Abstract |
Transitional justice (TJ) is undergoing a legitimacy crisis. While recent critical TJ scholarship has touted the transformative potential of locally rooted mechanisms as a possible means to emancipate TJ, this burgeoning literature rests on shaky assumptions about the purported benefits of local TJ and provides inadequate attention to local-national power dynamics. By taking these factors into consideration, this article contends that local TJ efforts can be used to deflect justice in manners that paradoxically allow ruling parties to avoid human rights accountability and to conceal the truth about wartime violations. It further argues that the principal method by which justice is subverted is not through overt manipulation by abusive governments, but rather, through subtle and indirect ‘distortional framing’ practices, which ruling parties use to set discursive limits around discussions of conflict-related events and to obfuscate their own serious crimes. After developing this argument theoretically, the case study of Cambodia is considered in detail to reveal and to trace the processes by which distortional framing has been used as a technique to deflect justice.
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| 5 |
ID:
164764
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| Summary/Abstract |
Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has exacerbated a longstanding concern about the power shift from the West to China. The existing debate, however, is both motivated by, and fixated on, the strategic concerns of and about great powers (and to a lesser extent, middle powers). What is often overlooked is the concerns and voices of smaller countries and contested regions where some of the power-shift symptoms allegedly unfold, such as the South Pacific. To traditional donors such as Australia, the power dynamism in the South Pacific is largely a linear, two-way model of power shift from Western donors to Beijing. Challenging this model, this article proposes a complex, three-way model to bring small and seemingly passive actors into the power shift equation. To illustrate, the article uses Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) perceptions of China’s aid vis-à-vis Australia’s aid as a case study. Relying mostly on primary (interview) sources, this study not only reveals some nuanced attitudes of local actors toward the great-power interactions, but also highlights the hitherto neglected role and agency of Pacific Island nations and their domestic politics in the inherently complex power shifts.
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| 6 |
ID:
139228
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article is a literature review of the current local turn in peacebuilding. After a short introduction on the origins of ‘the local’ in peacebuilding, it gives an overview of current research and policy debates on the issue along two different lines. First, it emphasises the local in peacebuilding as a measure to increase peacebuilding effectiveness, as explored in the literature on the benefits of decentralisation and local governments for peace, as well as in the debates on local capacity and ownership as essential parts of peacebuilding policy. Second, it focuses on the local in peacebuilding as a means of emancipation and inclusion of local agency, expressed partly through the emphasis on voices from below and partly within the critical approaches to how the local has been interpreted in peacebuilding so far, arguing for a peacebuilding that is essentially local.
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| 7 |
ID:
171766
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| Summary/Abstract |
Recent years have witnessed a “local turn” in the study and practice of peacebuilding, international development, and transitional justice (TJ) that has emphasized the importance of local-level knowledge and initiatives. The proliferation of customary, locally rooted TJ processes in states that have experienced violence is a part of this trend. While most studies have taken a sanguine view of the cultural and practical advantages of local TJ, this article contends that existing scholarship neglects the influence of asymmetric power relations and political motivations that have the potential to distort these processes. This article invites a more nuanced discussion of local TJ, rooted in systematic and comparative scholarship of how these processes actually operate on the ground, in order to improve understandings of their promise and perils.
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| 8 |
ID:
144696
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| Summary/Abstract |
In the historical transformation of the state, benzhu worship in the Erhai lake basin, northwest Yunnan, an esoteric Buddhist practice developed in the period of Nanzhao Kingdom, has been continually reconstructed by the state and local agencies. As a result, social boundaries between the Han Chinese and the ethnic ‘others’ living in this multi-ethnic southwestern frontier of China have been constantly remade. This paper, through a review of the state’s interpretations and local agencies’ negotiations and contentions of the meaning and practice of the worship, is mainly intended to revisit the social and cultural consequences incurred by the transformation of the state, and highlight, among other things, how local agencies, average villagers in particular, have cautiously yet ingeniously exercised their agency since the 1950s by appropriating or recasting national and international discourses on ethnicity and diversity to serve their own ends.
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| 9 |
ID:
124889
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Models, pilots and experiments are considered distinctive features of the Chinese policy process. However, empirical studies on local modelling practices are rare. This article analyses the ways in which three rural counties in three different provinces engage in strategies of modelling and piloting to implement the central government's "Building a New Socialist Countryside" (shehuizhuyi xinnongcun jianshe) programme. It explains how county and township governments apply these strategies and to what effect. It also highlights the scope and limitations of local models and pilots as useful mechanisms for spurring national development. The authors plead for a fresh look at local modelling practices, arguing that these can tell us much about the realities of governance in rural China today.
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