Globalization, Development, and Mobility of Technical Talent: India and Japan in Comparative Perspectives

international migration, technical talent, IT industry, innovation and development, 'brain bank', India, Japan

The International Mobility of Technical Talent: Trends and Development Implications

international migration, education, government policy, human capital, skills, information services, computer

Anglo-Indian Nostalgia: Longing for India as Homeland

This paper argues that the 'nostalgia' that the Anglo-Indian community exhibits in the telling of its (hi)stories can be seen as functioning to (re)claim India as homeland. The Anglo-Indians are the Indian-European minority community of India whose origins and history is inextricably interwoven with the politics of colonial India. Within the framework of post-independence Indian thought, the Community has been alienated from embodying the national identity and is made to feel unhomely. In his book Long-distance Nationalism Zlatko Skrbis defines nostalgia as 'a painful condition related to the homeland (Gr. nostos means 'to return home' and algia, 'a painful condition' (41). Roberta Rubenstein, in her book Home Matters, also describes nostalgia as a temporal separation (4). The recent nostalgic writings produced by the Anglo-Indian community remember, idealise and pine for the colonial past - a time when the Anglo-Indian community felt a sense of belonging in India. Some historians claim that nostalgia is 'perhaps the most dangerous ... of all the ways of using history' because it glosses 'over the past's iniquities and indignities'. However, Rubenstein points out that nostalgia can also 'fix' the past and recover it in 'narrative terms' (6). With this insight, I will argue that via nostalgic writing the Anglo-Indian community can revisit, and hence reclaim, India as home

Food from peace: breaking the links between conflict and hunger

"In this paper, Ellen Messer, Marc J. Cohen, and Jashinta D'Costa show how hunger is often a direct result of violence ... [and] how hunger can reciprocally cause conflict. ... The authors call for including conflict prevention in food security and development efforts, as well as new linkages between food security and development on the one hand, and emergency relief on the other" Foreword.Social conflict., Hunger., Conflict management.,

A Pseudo-Panel Approach to Estimating Dynamic Effects of Road Infrastructure on Firm Performance in a Developing Country Context

To overcome the absence of true firm-level data, we provide evidence that the use of pseudo-panels based on aggregated data can correctly identify production function parameters. We construct a pseudo-panel of Colombian manufacturing firms for the years of 2000 to 2009 to study the effects of transportation infrastructure on firm performance in a developing country and find elasticities of output with respect to road infrastructure ranging from 0.13 to 0.15 per cent. This confirms that roads are important for private output growth and, as our results are larger than those reported in the literature for developed countries, that transportation infrastructure is relatively more important for the economy of developing countries. We also identify a one-year time lag with which firms’ outputs react to road stock changes. This could be indicative of firms requiring time to adjust their production to road changes. We furthermore identify that the effect of road infrastructure is particularly large for heavy manufacturing industries. Moreover, we investigate the regional heterogeneity of the role of transportation infrastructure for firms’ output growth. Our results are robust to different econometric concerns. We additionally provide Monte Carlo simulations to support the validity of pseudo-panels in the context of firm-level data

Becoming Entangled: Queer Attachments with Hemiparasites

What is that queer plant that drapes itself chaotically over the top of trees and bushes? You know the one along the road on the way into town? Ah yes! You mean the one with no leaves, that looks like tangled yarn caught up in the branches?  Yes, it looks like its floating airborne on top of the canopy, smothering and embracing at the same time. Well, that's the one with the common name of snotty gobble or Dodder-Laurel!!! Dodder may look chaotic but that only demands on how you view it. I can’t stop thinking about it, Let’s find out what it’s doing. ‘Learning to be affected’ says Bruno Latour is to be 'moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or non-humans’(2004). And this is what happened to Down the Road Projects when we became intrigued with local plant parasites where we live in central Victoria, Australia.  This paper explores how we became ensnared by planty agencies. By charting our multispecies and human interactions in the course of developing the art project, Becoming Differently (2018), we trace how parasites came to be an important theme of the art, how they infiltrated the art works, how they changed our understanding of parasites, how they enticed us into the bush and developed our style of collaboration. We ‘queery’ what it means to be ‘drawn towards’ particular plants, we wonder who or what is ‘drawing’, and how these particular plants inflected our art and writing. We consider how we were moved towards different ways of figuring identity and belonging, and how we grappled with practices and modes of engagement with complex issues of identity, belonging and nature in a settler-colonial situation, and how this led to us to become differently entangled in the place where we live

Cascades Across An ‘Extremely Violent Society’: Sri Lanka

In the “Peacebuilding Compared” research project so far, violence is seen as cascading across space and time within and between war-torn societies. This article illustrates the cascade lens as a framework for hypothesis generation. Both violent actions and violent imaginaries cascade. The recent history of Sri Lanka is used to illustrate three cascade dynamics: crime cascades to war, war cascades to more war and to crime, and crime and war both cascade to state violence such as torture, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial execution. Sri Lanka is also a case that cascaded new technologies of crime-war globally, such as suicide bombing vests. These are not the only important cascade dynamics, just neglected ones. The implications of our cascade analysis are not most importantly about building positive peace with justice, participation, truth and reconciliation at the end of tragic cascades. They are more importantly about securing negative peace preventively at the font of cascades.

Exports, university-industry linkages, and innovation challenges in Bangalore, India

The success of the Indian software industry is now internationally recognized. Consequently, scholars, policymakers, and industry officials everywhere generally anticipate the increasing competitiveness of India in high technology activities. Using a structural framework, the author argues that Bangalore's (and India's) information technology (IT) industry is predicated on an Indian business model which does not encourage thick institutional linkages such as those encapsulated by the triple helix model. Under this institutional arrangement there is cross-fertilization of new ideas and new modes of institutional interaction between industry, academia, and government. Though there are several hundred IT businesses in a milieu of numerous engineering and science colleges and high-end public sector research institutes, the supposed thick institutional architecture is in reality quite thin. This is due to a particular type of an export-oriented model which is based on off-shore development of software services, targeted mainly to the United States. Neither domestic market nor non-U.S. markets such as East Asia are pursued aggressively by Indian firms, which offer alternative forms of learning. Consequently, Bangalore's dynamism in the IT industry stems from linear and extensive growth rather than nonlinear and intensive growth. The author argues that Bangalore has serious innovation challenges with weak university-industry linkages, lack of inter-firm collaboration, and the absence of cross-fertilization between the knowledge-intensive defense/public sector and the commercial IT industry. To strengthen Bangalore's and India's innovation system, the Indian business model must be reformed by diversifying geographical and product markets, stemming international and internal brain drain, and contributing to urban infrastructure.ICT Policy and Strategies,Technology Industry,Tertiary Education,Information Technology,Educational Technology and Distance Education

Transnational feminism: political strategies and theoretical resources

Despite sharing many successes at promoting international collaboration, enabling effective responses to politically powerful states, increasing awareness of formerly invisible violations of the human rights of women, and gaining ground in many countries and in international law, women’s human rights activists have many differences among them—in resources, location, issue-focus and strategies. It is appropriate to pay attention to these differences, particularly as they create challenges to the movement for women’s rights. However, we argue that the women’s human rights discourse—as developed and deployed by women’s human rights activists—can be a resource for addressing these challenges internal to the movement while facing current challenges from outside the movement. Attentive to the politics of defining a movement and its spokespeople, the article includes an extensive methodological discussion. We arrive at our conclusions after observing a broad range of women’s activism and interpreting the reflections of a wide range of activists. Taken together, they offer a view of human rights as indivisible and of the rights of all humans as interrelated. This view is useful for self-reflection within women’s movements and for the ability of participants of various women’s movements to use the women’s human rights framework for meeting contemporary challenges.This report was commisioned by International Relation