International development aid and the politics of scale

Much international development assistance has been delivered in the form of statebuilding interventions over the past 20 years, especially in post-conflict or fragile states. The apparent failure of many international statebuilding interventions has prompted a ‘political economy’ turn in development studies. This article critically assesses the key approaches that have emerged to address the interrelations between interveners and recipients, and advances an approach that places the politics of scale at the core of the conflicts shaping the outcomes of international intervention. Different scales privilege different interests, unevenly allocating power, resources and political opportunity structures. Interveners and recipients thus pursue scalar strategies and establish socio-political alliances that reinforce their power and marginalise rivals. This approach is harnessed towards examining the uneven results of the Aceh Government Transformation Programme, financed by the World Bank-managed Multi Donor Trust Fund following the 2005 peace agreement and implemented by the UNDP and the Aceh provincial government

Rising Powers and State Transformation: The Case of China

Abstract This paper explores how the transformation of contemporary statehood is conditioning the "rise" of emerging powers, in terms of their internal policy formation and execution, and in terms of how their policies spur transformations of statehood beyond their borders. Many accounts of rising powers assume a timeless logic of rising and falling states. Comparisons drawn between Bismarck's Germany and today's China suggest these states are functionally identical and will thus behave similarly. This overlooks radical transformations in the nature of statehood since the nineteenth century, notably the emergence of regulatory states, decentralisation and multilevel and transnational modes of governance. We explore how these changes are conditioning the "rise" of China. Internal transformation leads to multiagency, multilevel contestation over policy, resulting in incoherent and externally provocative behaviour that is often misinterpreted as "Chinese aggression". Meanwhile, powerful forces within the Chinese state are increasingly promoting the transformation of other states in order to secure their transnational interests, notably in neighbouring areas of Asia

State Transformation and China’s Engagement in Global Governance:The Case of Nuclear Technologies

Debates over the implications of China’s rise for global governance have reached an impasse, since evidence exists to support both ‘revisionist’ and ‘status-quo’ intentions. This means that neither is strictly falsifiable and hence the debate, as currently structured, is irresolvable. However, contradictions are explicable if we recognise that China is not a unitary state. Since the beginning of the reform era, its international engagements have been shaped by the uneven transformation – fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation – of state apparatuses. Contradictory international actions thus may reflect not top-down strategic direction, but conflicts, disagreements and coordination problems within China’s transformed party-state. Our state transformation approach directs us away from evaluating China’s approach to global governance in toto – whether it is overall a revisionist or status quo power – towards a detailed analysis of particular policy domains. This is because in each issue-area we find different constellations of actors and interests, and varying degrees of party-state transformation. We demonstrate the centrality of state transformation analysis for explaining the co-existence of revisionist and status quo behaviours through the apparently hard test case of nuclear technologies. Even in this ‘high politics’ domain, state transformation dynamics help explain China’s inconsistent international behaviours

The Political Economy of Non-Traditional Security: Explaining the Governance of Avian Influenza in Indonesia

Given the common association of non-traditional security (NTS) problems with globalisation, surprisingly little attention has been paid to how the political economy context of given NTS issues shape how they are securitised and managed in practice. We argue that security and its governance are always highly contested because different modes of security governance invariably privilege particular interests and normative agendas in state and society, which relate directly to the political economy. Drawing on critical political geography, we argue that, because NTS issues are perceived as at least potentially transnational, their securitisation often involves strategic attempts by actors and coalitions to ‘rescale’ their governance beyond the national political and institutional arenas, into new, expert-dominated modes of governance. Such efforts are often resisted by other coalitions, for which this rescaling is deleterious. As evidenced by a case study of avian influenza in Indonesia, particular governance outcomes depend upon the nature of the coalitions assembled for and against rescaling in specific situations, while these coalitions’ make-up and relative strength is shaped by the political economy of the industries that rescaling would affect, viewed against the broader backdrop of state-society relations

Regulatory regionalism and anti-money-laundering governance in Asia

With the intensification of the Financial Action Task Force's (FATF's) worldwide campaign to promote anti-money-laundering regulation since the late 1990s, all Asian states except North Korea have signed up to its rules and have established a regional institution—the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering—to promote and oversee the implementation of FATF's 40 Recommendations in the region. This article analyses the FATF regime, making two key claims. First, anti-money-laundering governance in Asia reflects a broader shift to regulatory regionalism, particularly in economic matters, in that its implementation and functioning depend upon the rescaling of ostensibly domestic agencies to function within a regional governance regime. Second, although this form of regulatory regionalism is established in order to bypass the perceived constraints of national sovereignty and political will, it nevertheless inevitably becomes entangled within the socio-political conflicts that shape the exercise of state power more broadly. Consequently, understanding the outcomes of regulatory regionalism involves identifying how these conflicts shape how far and in what manner global regulations are adopted and implemented within specific territories. This argument is demonstrated by a case study of Myanmar

Probing the Links between Political Economy and Non-Traditional Security: Themes, Approaches, and Instruments

This is a pre-print of an article published in International Politics. The definitive publisher-authenticated version of: Hameiri, Shahar, and Lee Jones. "Probing the links between political economy and non-traditional security: Themes, approaches and instruments." International Politics (2015), is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/ip.2015.1In recent decades, the security agenda for states and international organisations has expanded dramatically to include a range of ‘non-traditional’, transnational security issues. It is often suggested that globalisation has been a key driver for the emergence or intensification of these problems, but, surprisingly, little sustained scholarly effort has been made to examine the link between responses to the new security agenda and the changing political economy. This curious neglect largely reflects the mutual blind-spots of the sub-disciplines of International Security Studies and International Political Economy, coupled with the dominance of approaches that tend to neglect economic factors. This special issue, which this article introduces, aims to overcome this significant gap. In particular, it focuses on three key themes: the broad relationship between security and the political economy; what is being secured in the name of security, and how this has changed; and how things are being secured – what modes of governance have emerged to manage security problems. In all of these areas, the contributions point to the crucial role of the state in translating shifting state-economy relations to new security definitions and practices