Lugares

En resumen, buscamos entender los archipiélagos: preguntar cómo quienes los habitan contemplan sus espacialidades y formas topográficas; cómo ven, representan, hablan y escriben o viven la disyuntiva, conexión o entrelazamiento en y entre islas. Al hacerlo, suponemos primero, a priori, para luego mapear la existencia, implicaciones y efectos de las relaciones archipelágicas. (p. 502

Aid on Demand: African Leaders and the Geography of China's Foreign Assistance

This article investigates whether China’s foreign aid is particularly prone to political capture by political leaders of aid-receiving countries. Specifically, we examine whether more Chinese aid is allocated to the political leaders’ birth regions and regions populated by the ethnic group to which the leader belongs, controlling for indicators of need and various fixed effects. We have collected data on 117 African leaders’ birthplaces and ethnic groups and geocoded 1,650 Chinese development finance projects across 3,097 physical locations committed to Africa over the 2000-2012 period. Our econometric results show that current political leaders’ birth regions receive substantially larger financial ows from China than other regions. On the contrary, when we replicate the analysis for the World Bank, our regressions with region-fixed effects show no evidence of such favoritism. For Chinese and World Bank aid alike, we also find no evidence that African leaders direct more aid to areas populated by groups who share their ethnicity, when controlling for region-fixed effects

A preliminary Theory of Dark Network Resilience

A crucial contemporary policy question for governments across the globe is how to cope with international crime and terrorist networks. Many such “dark” networks—that is, networks that operate covertly and illegally—display a remarkable level of resilience when faced with shocks and attacks. Based on an in-depth study of three cases (MK, the armed wing of the African National Congress in South Africa during apartheid; FARC, the Marxist guerrilla movement in Colombia; and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, LTTE, in Sri Lanka), we present a set of propositions to outline how shocks impact dark network characteristics (resources and legitimacy) and networked capabilities (replacing actors, linkages, balancing integration and differentiation) and how these in turn affect a dark network's resilience over time. We discuss the implications of our findings for policymakers