Suchergebnisse

Tutkimuksen ensimmäinen osa koostuu kolmesta esseestä, joissa käsitellään haitallisten hyödykkeiden verotusta. Haitallisilla hyödykkeillä tarkoitetaan tutkimuksessa hyödykkeitä, joiden kulutuksella on negatiivisia vaikutuksia kuluttajan hyvinvointiin tulevaisuudessa - esimerkkejä ovat epäterveellinen ruoka, alkoholi ja tupakka. Jos kuluttajat eivät ota riittävästi huomioon tulevaisuudessa koituvia haittoja, he kuluttavat oman hyvinvointinsa kannalta liikaa tällaisia hyödykkeitä. Verotuksella voi tällöin olla kulutusvalintoja korjaava vaikutus. Tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan haitallisten hyödykkeiden verotusta teoreettisten mallien avulla kolmesta näkökulmasta. Ensin tarkastellaan, millaiset hyvinvointivaikutukset verotuksella on eri väestöryhmissä, kun otetaan huomioon sekä verotuksen tulonjako- että terveysvaikutukset. Tutkimuksen tulosten perusteella voidaan arvioida esimerkiksi ajankohtaista keskustelua elintarvikeveron alentamisesta. Toisen esseen näkökulma on poliittinen: Esseessä pohditaan, onko esimerkiksi riittävän korkeille alkoholi- ja tupakkaveroille mahdollista saada poliittista kannatusta. Kolmas essee tuo tarkasteluun kansainvälisen ulottuvuuden: Esseessä käsitellään sitä, miten kansainvälinen verokilpailu heikentää mahdollisuuksia alentaa esimerkiksi alkoholin kulutusta korkean verotuksen avulla. Tutkimuksen tulosten perusteella minimivero on kansainvälistä veroharmonisointia parempi keino vähentää verokilpailun haittoja. Ensimmäisessä esseessä tarkastellaan haitallisten hyödykkeiden verotuksen hyvinvointivaikutusten jakautumista. Tutkimuksen kohteena olevat hyödykkeet ovat tyypillisesti sellaisia, joihin pienituloiset henkilöt käyttävät suuremman osan tuloistaan kuin suurituloiset. Näiden hyödykkeiden korkean verotuksen onkin katsottu vahingoittavan erityisesti pienituloisia; elintarvikeverotus on tästä hyvä esimerkki. Kun huomioidaan myös verotuksen terveysvaikutukset, arvio verotuksen vaikutuksesta eri tuloryhmien hyvinvointiin saattaa kuitenkin muuttua. On todennäköistä, että pienituloisten kysyntä reagoi veromuutoksiin enemmän kuin suurituloisten. Mikäli näin on, haitallisten hyödykkeiden korkean verotuksen myönteiset terveysvaikutukset olisivat suurimpia juuri pienituloisille. Esimerkiksi elintarvikkeiden verokohtelua mietittäessä saattaakin olla järkevää porrastaa verotusta elintarvikkeiden terveysvaikutusten perusteella. Toisessa esseessä tarkastellaan tilannetta, jossa haitallisten hyödykkeiden kulutus aiheuttaa ongelmia vain osalle kuluttajista, kun taas osa kuluttajista ottaa täysimääräisesti huomioon kulutuksen haitat. Haitallisten hyödykkeiden korkeasta verotuksesta on hyötyä nimenomaan ongelmakäyttäjille, mikäli verotus auttaa heitä vähentämään kulutustaan; muiden kulutusvalintoja korkea verotus rajoittaa turhaan. Esseessä osoitetaan, että riittävän korkeiden verojen on vaikea saada poliittista kannatusta, koska muut äänestäjät eivät ota huomioon ongelmakuluttajille koituvia hyötyjä. Myös verotulojen keräämiseen liittyvät motiivit voivat johtaa liian alhaiseen verotukseen: Jotkin hyödykkeet ovat niin haitallisia, että olisi järkevää asettaa verojen taso niin korkeaksi, että kulutus olisi hyvin vähäistä. Tällöin kuitenkin myös verotulot olisivat hyvin pienet. Kolmannessa esseessä tarkastellaan verokilpailun vaikutusta haitallisten hyödykkeiden, kuten alkoholin verotukseen. Esimerkiksi Euroopan Unionissa kuluttajat voivat vapaasti ostaa kotimaassa korkeasti verotettua tuotetta ulkomailta. Tutkimuksen johtopäätösten mukaan verotuksen terveysvaikutuksia ei kuitenkaan tällöinkään pitäisi sivuuttaa: Kotimaan korkean verotuksen vaikutus ulkomailta tuodun alkoholin määrään on pienempi kuin vähennys kotimaasta ostetun alkoholin määrässä. Verotuksella voidaan siis vähentää kulutuksen haittoja verokilpailusta huolimatta. Verokilpailun aiheuttamia ongelmia voidaan korjata koordinoimalla verojen tasoa esimerkiksi Euroopan Unionin jäsenmaiden kesken. Tutkimuksen tulosten perusteella on kuitenkin parempi asettaa haitallisille hyödykkeille riittävän korkea minimivero, kuin pyrkiä pelkästään verojen harmonisointiin. Veroharmonisointi poistaisi kuluttajien kannustimet ostaa haitallisia hyödykkeitä ulkomailta, mutta ei välttämättä poistaisi liian alhaisen verotuksen ja korkeiden terveyshaittojen tuomia ongelmia. Tutkimuksen toinen osa koostuu yhdestä itsenäisestä esseestä, jossa tarkastellaan teoreettisen mallin avulla sääntelyn vaikutuksia investointikannustimiin ja kilpailuun telekommunikaatiomarkkinoilla. Markkinoita sääntelevä viranomainen voi velvoittaa televerkkoyrityksen vuokraamaan verkkokapasiteettia muille operaattoreille, jotta telepalveluiden markkinoille syntyisi kilpailua vaikka televerkko pysyisikin monopolina. Tutkimuksen tulosten perusteella sääntely kuitenkin heikentää verkkoyrityksen kannustimia tehdä verkon laatua ja palvelujen kysyntää parantavia investointeja. Mikäli investoinnit hyödyttäisivät kilpailijoita enemmän kuin verkkoyritystä itseään, sääntely voi jopa johtaa kilpailijoiden aseman huononemiseen, vaikka sen alkuperäinen tarkoitus on edistää kilpailua. ; This thesis consists of two parts the first part comprises three essays that analyse different aspects of taxation of harmful goods in a situation where consumers have self-control problems. The second part, which consists of a single essay, examines the effect of access price regulation on investment and entry in telecommunications markets. The first part therefore explores a rationale for government intervention which has traditionally been controversial among economists, but has recently received more attention and also increasing acceptance within the profession: When we recognise that individuals can make errors in decision-making and may therefore fail to maximise their own welfare, there may be scope for government intervention that increases welfare. The intervention analysed in this thesis are taxes on harmful goods, or so called sin taxes. On the other hand, the second part of the thesis analyses a more traditional rationale for government involvement in the economy, namely distortions caused by market power. In the first part of the thesis, we extend the literature on the taxation of harmful goods in the presence of self-control problems in three main ways. In the first essay, we leave the question of optimal sin taxes aside, and analyse the factors that affect their incidence. We derive an incidence measure for taxes on harmful goods, as well as a condition for the case where sin taxes improve individual welfare. Secondly, we examine how taxes on harmful goods are determined in political equilibrium, and compare the equilibrium tax with the socially optimal level. The previous literature has focused on optimal sin taxes, and therefore our analysis of equilibrium taxes is an important extension to the literature. We also extend the previous literature by providing an explicit formula for the optimal sin tax in a second-best situation where consumers differ in their degree of self-control problems but a uniform tax is applied, and by comparing the optimal sin tax with the marginal distortion in consumption. Thirdly, we extend the analysis of sin taxes to an international context. More specifically, we examine a country whose government attempts to use taxation to reduce the consumption of a harmful good, and analyse the extent to which cross-border shopping and tax competition undermine the feasibility of this type of taxation. We also analyse whether policy coordination in the form of minimum tax rates or tax harmonisation can improve welfare. The practical implications of our findings can be summarised as follows. Firstly, considering tax incidence, we show that taxes on goods such as unhealthy food may be progressive. This is contrary to the common counter-argument against heavy VAT rates on necessities, which are usually regarded as regressive. The intuition for this result is that the self-control benefits of taxation depend importantly on the demand elasticity, and demand is typically more elastic for low income individuals. Therefore, when one considers for example lowering the VAT rate on food for redistributive reasons, it is important to note that in such exercises it is likely not to be optimal to treat all types of food equally. Secondly, we show that when consumers differ in their degree of self-control problems, equilibrium tax rates on harmful goods are likely to be too low from a social point of view. The intuition is that taxation has a large benefit for consumers with a severe self-control problem, and only a small negative impact on consumers with no self-control problems (whose consumption of highly harmful substances is low even in the absence of taxation - taxes therefore only impose a small distortion for these individuals). Individuals do not take this asymmetry into account in their voting decisions, and equilibrium sin taxes therefore cannot achieve the socially optimal outcome. There may thus be a case for quantity restrictions on some highly harmful substances. Thirdly, turning to the implications of international tax competition, we show that such competition should not lead governments to disregard paternalistic objectives of taxation completely: Taxation can still be used to lower harmful consumption. The intuition is that even if higher taxes at home lead consumers to buy harmful goods such as alcohol abroad, the increase in cross-border shopping is smaller than the corresponding reduction in domestic consumption. Regarding policy coordination, we show that countries should aim at implementing minimum tax rates on harmful goods, rather than at harmonising tax rates at some intermediate level between the original tax rates. This is because the problems associated with tax competition (both from the point of view of reducing harm from consumption and raising revenue) are caused by tax rates being too low, not by tax rate differentials per se. In the second part of the thesis, we analyse the effect of access price regulation on investment incentives and competition in telecommunications markets. We consider a model with a vertically integrated monopolist network provider who faces rival operators in the retail market. We examine the network operator s incentives for infrastructure investment. We find that investments are below the social optimum even when there is no regulation, and access price regulation further reduces investment incentives. We show that the underinvestment problem may have negative effects on the viability of competition. Access price regulation does not necessarily reduce the likelihood of foreclosure, and in the presence of regulation, rivals are most likely to be foreclosed when they would bring highest benefits to consumers.

This research aims to know the potential effect of Intellectual Capital Performance (ICP) to the intensity of Intellectual Capital Disclosure (ICD). The independent variables used in this research are the components of ICP that consists of Value Added Human Capital (VAHU), Value Added Capital Employed (VACA), and Structural Capital Value Added (SCVA) that is measured by using the Value Added Intellectual Coefficient (VAIC™). While, the dependent variable used in this research is ICD that measured by a disclosure index and relevant scoring system. Company size and leverage are also used in the regression model as moderating variables. One year annual reports (2017) of banking sector companies registered on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) are analyzed in quantitative research type. The samples that listed on the IDX in 2017 are selected by using purposive sampling method with certain criteria and 33 banking sector companies are obtained. The analysis is made by multiple regression analysis and the data testing is conducted by using SPSS 22 and Eviews 9 which previously has been carried out the classic assumption test first. Results of this study indicate that: (1) Simultaneously, ICP component significantly affect ICD. However, each component of VAHU and SCVA does not significantly affect the ICD, only VACA significantly affects the ICD; (2) Simultaneously, with the moderation of company size, ICP does not significantly affect the ICD. Similarly, each component of VAHU, VACA and SCVA does not significantly affect ICD; and (3) Simultaneously, with the moderation of company leverage, ICP significantly affects ICD. 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Textual analysis of 14,270 NBER Working Papers published during 1999–2016 is done to assess the effects of the 2008 crisis on the economics literature. The volume of crisis-related WPs is counter-cyclical, lagging the financial-instability-index. WPs by the Monetary-Economics, Asset-Pricing, and Corporate-Finance program members, hardly refer to "crisis/crises" in the pre-crisis period. As the crisis develops, however, their study-efforts of crisis-related issues increase rapidly. In contrast, WPs in macroeconomics-related programs refer quite extensively in the pre-crisis period to "crisis/crises" and to crises-related topics. Overall, our findings are consistent with the claim that economists were not engaged sufficiently in crises studies before the 2008 crisis. However, counter to the popular image, as soon as the crisis began to unravel, the NBER affiliated economists responded dramatically by switching their focus and efforts to studying and understanding the crisis, its causes and its consequences.

The White House released its budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2025 on March 11th, and the news was depressingly familiar: $895 billion for the Pentagon and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. After adjusting for inflation, that's only slightly less than last year's proposal, but far higher than the levels reached during either the Korean or Vietnam wars or at the height of the Cold War. And that figure doesn't even include related spending on veterans, the Department of Homeland Security, or the additional tens of billions of dollars in "emergency" military spending likely to come later this year. One thing is all too obvious: a trillion-dollar budget for the Pentagon alone is right around the corner, at the expense of urgently needed action to address climate change, epidemics of disease, economic inequality, and other issues that threaten our lives and safety at least as much as, if not more than, traditional military challenges.Americans would be hard-pressed to find members of Congress carefully scrutinizing such vast sums of national security spending, asking tough questions, or reining in Pentagon excess — despite the fact that this country is no longer fighting any major ground wars. Just a handful of senators and members of the House do that work while many more search for ways to increase the department's already bloated budget and steer further contracts into their own states and districts.Congress isn't just shirking its oversight duties: these days, it can't even seem to pass a budget on time. Our elected representatives settled on a final national budget just last week, leaving Pentagon spending at the already generous 2023 level for nearly half of the 2024 fiscal year. Now, the department will be inundated with a flood of new money that it has to spend in about six months instead of a year. More waste, fraud, and financial abuse are inevitable as the Pentagon prepares to shovel money out the door as quickly as possible. This is no way to craft a budget or defend a country.And while congressional dysfunction is par for the course, in this instance it offers an opportunity to reevaluate what we're spending all this money for. The biggest driver of overspending is an unrealistic, self-indulgent, and — yes — militaristic national defense strategy. It's designed to maintain a capacity to go almost everywhere and do almost anything, from winning wars with rival superpowers to intervening in key regions across the planet to continuing the disastrous Global War on Terror, which was launched in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and never truly ended. As long as such a "cover the globe" strategy persists, the pressure to continue spending ever more on the Pentagon will prove irresistible, no matter how delusional the rationale for doing so may be.Defending "the Free World"?President Biden began his recent State of the Union address by comparing the present moment to the time when the United States was preparing to enter World War II. Like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941, Joe Biden told the American people that the country now faces an "unprecedented moment in the history of the Union," one in which freedom and democracy are "under attack" both at home and abroad. He disparaged Congress's failure to approve his emergency supplemental bill, claiming that, without additional aid for Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin will threaten not just that country but all of Europe and even the "free world." Comparing (as he did) the challenge posed by Russia now to the threat that Hitler's regime posed in World War II is a major exaggeration that's of no value in developing an effective response to Moscow's activities in Ukraine and beyond.Engaging in such fearmongering to get the public on board with an increasingly militarized foreign policy ignores reality in service of the status quo. In truth, Russia poses no direct security threat to the United States. And while Putin may have ambitions beyond Ukraine, Russia simply doesn't have the capability to threaten the "free world" with a military campaign. Neither does China, for that matter. But facing the facts about these powers would require a critical reassessment of the maximalist U.S. defense strategy that rules the roost. Currently, it reflects the profoundly misguided belief that, on matters of national security, U.S. military dominance takes precedence over the collective economic strength and prosperity of Americans.As a result, the administration places more emphasis on deterring potential (if unlikely) aggression from competitors than on improving relations with them. Of course, this approach depends almost entirely on increasing the production, distribution, and stockpiling of arms. The war in Ukraine and Israel's continuing assault on Gaza have unfortunately only solidified the administration's dedication to the concept of military-centric deterrence.Contractor Dysfunction: Earning More, Doing LessIronically, such a defense strategy depends on an industry that continually exploits the government for its own benefit and wastes staggering amounts of taxpayer dollars. The major corporations that act as military contractors pocket about half of all Pentagon outlays while ripping off the government in a multitude of ways. But what's even more striking is how little they accomplish with the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars they receive year in, year out. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), from 2020 to 2022, the total number of major defense acquisition programs actually declined even as total costs and average delivery time for new weapons systems increased.Take the Navy's top acquisition program, for example. Earlier this month, the news broke that the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine is already at least a year behind schedule. That sub is the sea-based part of the next-generation nuclear (air-sea-and-land) triad that the administration considers the "ultimate backstop" for global deterrence. As a key part of this country's never-ending arms buildup, the Columbia is supposedly the Navy's most important program, so you might wonder why the Pentagon hasn't implemented a single one of the GAO's six recommendations to help keep it on track.As the GAO report made clear, the Navy proposed delivering the first Columbia-class vessel in record time — a wildly unrealistic goal — despite it being the "largest and most complex submarine" in its history.Yet the war economy persists, even as the giant weapons corporations deliver less weaponry for more money in an ever more predictable fashion (and often way behind schedule as well). This happens in part because the Pentagon regularly advances weapons programs before design and testing are even completed, a phenomenon known as "concurrent development." Building systems before they're fully tested means, of course, rushing them into production at the taxpayer's expense before the bugs are out. Not surprisingly, operations and maintenance costs account for about 70% of the money spent on any U.S. weapons program.Lockheed Martin's F-35 is the classic example of this enormously expensive tendency. The Pentagon just greenlit the fighter jet for full-scale production this month, 23 years (yes, that's not a misprint!) after the program was launched. The fighter has suffered from persistent engine problems and deficient software. But the official go-ahead from the Pentagon means little, since Congress has long funded the F-35 as if it were already approved for full-scale production. At a projected cost of at least $1.7 trillion over its lifetime, America's most expensive weapons program ever should offer a lesson in the necessity of trying before buying.Unfortunately, this lesson is lost on those who need to learn it the most. Acquisition failures of the past never seem to financially impact the executives or shareholders of America's biggest military contractors. On the contrary, those corporate leaders depend on Pentagon bloat and overpriced, often unnecessary weaponry. In 2023, America's biggest military contractor, Lockheed Martin, paid its CEO John Taiclit $22.8 million. Annual compensation for the CEOs of RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Boeing ranged from $14.5 and $22.5 million in the past two years. And shareholders of those weapons makers are similarly cashing in. The arms industry increased cash paid to its shareholders by 73% in the 2010s compared to the prior decade. And they did so at the expense of investing in their own businesses. Now they expect taxpayers to bail them out to ramp up weapons production for Ukraine and Israel.Reining in the Military-Industrial ComplexOne way to begin reining in runaway Pentagon spending is to eliminate the ability of Congress and the president to arbitrarily increase that department's budget. The best way to do so would be by doing away with the very concept of "emergency spending." Otherwise, thanks to such spending, that $895 billion Pentagon budget will undoubtedly prove to be anything but a ceiling on military spending next year. As an example, the $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan that passed the Senate in February is still hung up in the House, but some portion of it will eventually get through and add substantially to the Pentagon's already enormous budget.Meanwhile, the Pentagon has fallen back on the same kind of budgetary maneuvers it perfected at the peak of its disastrous Afghan and Iraq wars earlier in this century, adding billions to the war budget to fund items on the department's wish list that have little to do with "defense" in our present world. That includes emergency outlays destined to expand this country's "defense industrial base" and further supersize the military-industrial complex — an expensive loophole that Congress should simply shut down. That, however, will undoubtedly prove a tough political fight, given how many stakeholders — from Pentagon officials to those corporate executives to compromised members of Congress — benefit from such spending sprees.Ultimately, of course, the debate about Pentagon spending should be focused on far more than the staggering sums being spent. It should be about the impact of such spending on this planet. That includes the Biden administration's stubborn continuation of support for Israel's campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza, which has already killed more than 31,000 people while putting many more at risk of starvation. A recent Washington Post investigation found that the U.S. has made 100 arms sales to Israel since the start of the war last October, most of them set at value thresholds just low enough to bypass any requirement to report them to Congress.The relentless supply of military equipment to a government that the International Court of Justice has said is plausibly engaged in a genocidal campaign is a deep moral stain on the foreign-policy record of the Biden administration, as well as a blow to American credibility and influence globally. No amount of airdrops or humanitarian supplies through a makeshift port can remotely make up for the damage still being done by U.S.-supplied weapons in Gaza.The case of Gaza may be extreme in its brutality and the sheer speed of the slaughter, but it underscores the need to thoroughly rethink both the purpose of and funding for America's foreign and military policies. It's hard to imagine a more devastating example than Gaza of why the use of force so often makes matters far, far worse — particularly in conflicts rooted in longstanding political and social despair. A similar point could have been made with respect to the calamitous U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost untold numbers of lives, while pouring yet more money into the coffers of America's major weapons makers. Both of those military campaigns, of course, failed disastrously in their stated objectives of promoting democracy, or at least stability, in troubled regions, even as they exacted huge costs in blood and treasure.Before our government moves full speed ahead expanding the weapons industry and further militarizing geopolitical challenges posed by China and Russia, we should reflect on America's disastrous performance in the costly, prolonged wars already waged in this century. After all, they did enormous damage, made the world a far more dangerous place, and only increased the significance of those weapons makers. Throwing another trillion dollars-plus at the Pentagon won't change that.This article was republished with permission from TomDispatch.

The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) learned with immense shock and sadness of the passing on of Professor Samir Amin on Sunday, 12th August 2018. Subsequently, Prof. Samir Amin's body was interned at Père Lachaise in Paris on 1st September 2018 at a site provided by the French Communist Party. The Council was represented at the burial by Prof. Fatow Sow and Dr. Cherif Sy; two members of the CODESRIA community who have worked with Samir Amin for a while.
For CODESRIA, this marks nothing less than the end of an era in the history of African social research given the many pioneering roles the late Professor Amin played as a scholar, teacher, mentor, friend, and revolutionary. Samir was many things to us as a Council; for the younger members of the community, it meant much more to be in his company at the numerous CODESRIA meeting he attended. A model for three generations of African and, indeed, radical scholars globally, Samir was that giant Baobab tree whose grandeur of intellect and spirit made him a worthy role model. While serving as Director of the United Nations African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP), he hosted the initial scaffolding of the CODESRIA at IDEP, brought together and nurtured new talent that laid the foundations which launched Council on a path of growth and resilience to what it is to-date. As the final note on his reflections contained in this Bulletin illustrates, while serving as CODESRIA's founding Executive Secretary, Samir worked very closely with Abdalla Bujra and later Thandika Mkandawire, to shape the initial years of CODESRIA's intellectual identity and trajectory.
After CODESRIA relocated from the premises of IDEP to a new home in the Fann Residence part of Dakar, Samir Amin remained engaged with Council and its community of scholars, participating actively and effectively in all its activities. This 15th General Assembly of CODESRIA is perhaps the first Assembly without Samir Amin presence. In all previous General Assemblies, Samir has been a notable presence even giving the Cheikh Anta Diop Lecture at the 10 Assembly in Kampala, Uganda. It is at the General Assembly that many young academics interacted with Samir, often for the first time and indeed experiencing the awe of his presence. Though Samir is absent at the current Assembly, there is no doubt that his intellectual and revolutionary spirit is definitely present just as the thoughts and ideas that he shared so generously and to the very end will continue to inspire reflection and debate.
Samir Amin's intellectual journey was a long and illustrious one. It was a journey marked by commitments that distinguished him as a scholar of unparalleled convictions. He died still an unapologetic socialist academic or, as the title of his memoir reads, 'an independent Marxist' whose work was driven by an unshakeable conviction to confront and oppose totalizing economic orthodoxies. He treated this confrontation and opposition as a prelude to social transformation. He was steadfast in his belief that the world must shift away from capitalism and strive to build new 'post-capitalist' societies. He described capitalism as a small bracket in the long history of human civilization. His works identify and record the multiple crises of capitalism, a system he described as senile and obsolete. In its place, Samir Amin formulated a political alternative that he envisioned would proceed by i) socializing the ownership of monopolies, ii). definancializing the management of the economy and iii) deglobalising international relations [cited in Campbell, 2015: 286]. For him, these three directions provided the basis of an active politics of dismantling capitalism; a politics he committed his skill and energy mobilizing for. Even as he grew older, he mustered fresh bursts of energy to continue the struggle and to the very last days when he was in Dakar, he was apart of the team of scholar/ activists gathered together by International ENDA Third World Network to draft the Alternative Report on Africa (Dakar, 2018). CODESRIA was apart of this process and the Report will by shared at this General Assembly.
Many of Samir Amin's writings make the point repeatedly on the urgent necessity to dismantle the 'obsolete system' known as capitalism. However, none was as emphatic in rethinking the underlying cultural underpinning of the 'obsolete system' like Eurocentricism. In that engaging publication, he provided a rggesounding critique of world history as is centered around Eurocentric modernity and invites us to understand modernity as an incomplete process that, to survive its current crises, will need 'economic, social and political reconstruction of all societies in the world.' Embedded in this argument is a long held position about the importance of the Bandung moment (1955) as a moment of an alternative globalization based on Afro-Asian solidarity. It is from this perspective that one understands why Samir Amin emphasized the importance of China [see tribute by Sit Tsui and Yan Xiaohui in this bulletin]. Afro-Asian solidarity was the basis upon which Samir Amin located his alternative politics which also defined his towering global outlook and presence.
There is no doubt that Samir Amin's intellectual presence was defined by depth of knowledge, complexity of thought and fidelity to Marxist organising principles. There is no way of summarizing the corpus of work he produced, the revolutionary engagements he undertook and the transformative potential that led him to remain steadfast even when many others were only too happy to find a good reason to backtrack and conform. His work is enormous in volume but also in the depth of its knowledge and relevance to society. He provoked and joined debates across the globe but more importantly with comrades in Latin America and Asia, those of the dependency and underdevelopment school but also later from a South-South perspective. In CODESRIA's flagship journal Africa Development alone, Samir Amin published twenty articles. A biodata document he shared with the Council has 24 books in English and 41 in French. He is published in English, French, Arabic, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish to name but these few languages. In all these publications and in the various languages, Samir Amin articulated his belief in alternatives, and as indicated above, this belief remained strong even to the last month of his life on earth.
Born to an Egyptian father and French mother on 3rd September 1931 in Cairo, Egypt, Samir Amin's convictions owe much to the context of his childhood all the way from Port Said in northern Egypt to Cairo where he schooled. He spent his early life in Egypt where he attended his formative schooling before proceeding to France to pursue higher education at Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris ("Sciences Po"). Here, he earned a diploma in 1952 and later a PhD in 1957 at the Sorbonne. Samir later earned another diploma in mathematical statistics from L'institut national de la statistique et des etudes economiques. He had always been interested in radical thought and action from early on, noting in an interview that he already considered himself a communist in Secondary School. Even though he and his cohort did not know what communism really meant in their early childhood, they assumed it meant "equality between human beings and between nations, and it meant that this has been done by the Russian revolution." It is not surprising that with this pedigree, Samir Amin focused in his graduate research on "The origins of underdevelopment – capitalist accumulation on a world scale" and emphasized in his work that underdevelopment in the periphery was, in large measure, due to the working of the capitalist system. He consequently underscored the need to search for socialist alternatives to liberal globalisation.
Samir Amin returned to Cairo in 1957, worked briefly in Gamal Abdel Nasser's Institute for Economic Management (1957–1960) before heading to work as an adviser in the Ministry of Planning in Mali (1960- 1963). Subsequently, Samir Amin's intellectual life became largely internationalist in orientation, and anchored principally on the question of accumulation as key to understanding underdevelopment. He maintained the sojourn between France where he took up a Professorship in 1966 and Dakar, Senegal his adopted home where he worked for ten years, from 1970 to 1980 at IDEP. Later in 1980, he founded the Third World Forum, originally hosted at the CODESRIA Secretariat, and lent his considerable weight to the institutionalisation of ENDA and the World Forum for Alternatives. His support for revolutionary politics is marked not just in the books and papers he published but also in the lecture circuit where he spoke to audiences about the undeniable relevance of radical politics.
Samir Amin's thinking was in large measure defined by the solidarity built around the Bandung Confer- ence of 1955. This remained a critical touchstone in his work in which non-western civilisations and his- tories played an important role. Bandung, for him, inaugurated a different pattern of globalisation, the one he called 'negotiated globalisation.' Though not asufficientbasisforcomplete"de-linking"from'ob- solescent capitalism', Samir Amin saw in Afro-Asian solidarity possibilities and pathways to that delinking; the process, as he explained, by which you submit "ex- ternal relations to the needs of internal progressive so- cial changes and targets." The notion of 'delinking' oc- cupied a major place in Samir Amin's thinking and is positioned in contrast to 'adjustment' that was the pre- ferred approach of the Bretton Woods Institutions. As Mamdani shows elsewhere in this Bulletin, there are major problematic elements of this notion that Samir Amin continued to grapple with. But ultimately, Samir Amin noted that delinking is in fact a process that, de- pending on the societies implementing it, can be used to install graduated level of autonomous development instead of countries in the periphery remaining locked into and merely adjusting to the trends set by a funda- mentally unequal capitalist system.
In Samir Amin, we found the true meaning of praxis; a thinker who insisted that his work has immediate relevance to society. His departure deprives us of the practical energy he brought to our meetings and debates; and denies radical thinkers a model around whom they found the compass that enabled them to navigate the treacherous, indeed murderous, waters of capitalism. We however are lucky to have lived in his company, to have learned from his fountain of knowledge and to have shared in the passion of his convictions. The Council plans to invigorate the value of his legacy by celebrating him during this 15th General Assembly but also beyond the confines of the Assembly.
Thus, this edition of the Bulletin contains two intertwined sets of essays; all organised around Samir Amin. In the one instance, we have a selection of messages in his memory. One the other, we have a selection of essays he authored. Separately, we will re-publish all the essays he published in Africa Development in a special issue of the journal to provide them in one collection for posterity. But whichever way, and as his own reflection in the essay published in this volume and his memoirs show, CODESRIA is an inheritance that Samir Amin bequeathed the African social science community. As such, it is fitting that the Bulletin designed for the 15th CODESRIA General Assembly is also a Bulletin that publishes essays in his honour.
The choice of theme for the General Assembly predates the passing on of Samir Amin. But the theme itself is one that was dear to Samir Amin. It is our pleasure therefore to present the essays contained here as essays that shed light on a life lived fully but also that open up a space to explore the unfulfilled promises of globalisation. We hope that at the end of it, this will be a fitting study in honour of our departed icon but also a commentary on the key issues the 15th General Assembly explored.

Batı Afrika'nın ekonomik büyümesini hızlandırmak ve Euro'nun tek bir para birliği olarak elde ettiği başarı, Batı Afrika Devletleri Ekonomik Topluluğu'na (ECOWAS) üye devletler için ortak bir para birimi olarak hizmet etmek üzere "eko" önermesine ilham verdi. Bu tez, önerilen para birimi Birliğini ve yaratılmasının bölgenin ekonomik büyümesini nasıl etkileyeceğini inceledi. Tez, para birliği teorileri doğrultusunda betimsel bir istatistiksel analiz uygulamış ve aynı zamanda ortak bir para birliğinin öncü olan Avrupa da dikkate alınmıştır. Üye ülkeler arasında GSYİH, enflasyon oranı, faiz oranı ve ticaretler arası para birliği tesis eden faktörler göz önünde bulundurulmuştur. Şu ana kadar bazı ülkeler düşük enflasyon, düşük faiz ve döviz kuru gibi bazı yakınsama kriterleri elde edebilmişlerdir. Bir para birliği alanı oluşturmak için gereken ekonomik eğilimleri ve diğer kriterleri inceledikten sonra, Batı Afrika Devletleri Ekonomik Topluluğu önerilen eko para birliğiyle devam etmemeli ve mevcut dengesizlikleri gidermek için döviz kurunu, ticaret gelişimini, ve ayrica para birliğinin parasal egemenliğini ele geçirmeye çalışan Fransa meselesini dikkate almalıdır.to me İÇİNDEKİLER Teşekkür…………………………………………………………………………………………i Özet ………………………………………………………………………………………….….ii Özet …………………………………………………………………………………………….iii Şekiller Listesi………………………………………………………………………………….ix Tablolar Listesi ………………………………………………………………………………….xi Önsöz ………………………………………………………………………………………….xvi BÖLÜM 1 ……………………………………………………………………………………….6 1. Giriş ……………………………………………………………………………………….….1 1.1 Arka Plan …………………………………………………………………………………….1 1.2 Problemin Açıklaması ………………………………………………………………….…….2 1.3 Araştırma Hedefleri …………………………………………………………………….……3 1.4 Araştırma Hipotezi ……………………………………………………………………….….5 1.5 Analiz Yaklaşımı………………………………………………………………………….….5 BÖLÜM 2 ……………………………………………………………………………………….6 2.1 Optımum Para Alanı …………………………………………………………………………6 2.1.1 R. Mundell'in Perspektifi …………………………………………………………….……8 2.1.2 R.I. McKinnon'in Perspektifi ……………………………………………………….……10 2.1.3 Y.Ishiyama'in Perspektifi………………………………………………………………….11 2.1.4 Y.Ishiyama'nın Perspektifi …………………………………………….………………….13 2.1.5 G.S. Tavlas'ın Optimum Para Birliğinin 'Yeni' Teorisine Bakış Açısı………………. 25 2.2 Avrupa Birliği ……………………………………………………………… . ……….28 2.2.1 AB Tarihi …………………………………………………………………………………27 2.2.2 Maastrıcht Anlaşması……………………………………………………………………. 33 2.2.3 Avrupa Para Sistemi Krizi………………………………………………………………. 35 2.2.4 Neden Bazı Ülkeler Euro Kullanmıyor?. 36 2.2.5 Euro'nin Avantajları………………………………………………………………………37 2.2.5.1 Çeşitli Makroekonomik Faydalar …………………………………………………….37 2.2.5.2 Döviz Kuru İstikrarı……………………………………………………………………. 37 2.2.5.3 Daha Düşük Faiz Oranı………………………………………………………………….37 2.2.5.4 Yatırım ve Ticaret……………………………………………………………………….39 2.2.5.5 Uluslararası Para Birimi Olarak Hizmet Etmek………………………………………. 39 2.2.5.3 Daha Düşük Faiz Oranı………………………………………………………………….39 2.2.5.6 AB'de İstikrar, Hareketlilik ve Büyüme……………………………………………….39 2.2.5.7 Şeffaf ve Demokratik Kurumların Oluşturulması,……………………………………. 39 2.2.5.8 Ticareti Geliştirme, İnsani Yardım, Diplomasi ve Güvenlik…………………………. 40 2.2.6. Euro dezavantajları……………………………………………………………………….41 2.2.6.1 Teminat Para Birimi Olarak Euro…………………………………………………….41 2.2.6.2 Bazı Ülkeleri Avantajlı Bir Konumda Yerleştirmek…………………………………. 41 2.2.6.3 Avrupa İçi Ticaretin Düşüşü…………………………………………………………….42 2.2.6.4 Transfer Ödemelerindeki Düzensizlikler……………………………………………….43 2.2.6.5 Euro'nun Maliye Politikasını Kullanamaması………………………………………….43 2.2.6.6 Finansal İstikrarsızlık………………………………………………………………….44 2.2.7 Avrupa Bir Optımum Para Alanı mı?. 44 2.2.7.1 Enflasyon ……………………………………………………………………………….44 2.2.7.2. Döviz Kuru …………………………………………………………………………….46 2.2.7.3 Ticarette Açıklık………………………………………………………………………. 47 2.2.7.4 Ücretler ve Fiyat Esnekliği……………………………………………………………. 52 2.2.7.5 İşgücü Hareketliliği (Euro)……………………………………………………………. 53 2.2.7.6 Seçilmiş Euro Bölgesi Ülkelerinde GSYH'nin Payı Olarak Cari Açıklar…………….54 2.2.7.7 Seçilmiş Euro Bölgesi Ülkelerinde İşsizlik Oranları……………………………………54 2.2.8 Avrupa Birliğinde Dört Özgürlük……………………………………………………….55 2.2.8.1 Malların Serbest Dolaşımı………………………………………………………………55 2.2.8.2 Hizmetlerin Serbest Dolaşımı………………………………………………………….56 2.2.8.3 Euro Bölgesinde İşçilerin Serbest Dolaşımı…………………………………………….57 2.2.8.4 Sermayenin Serbest Dolaşımı 57 2.3 BATI AFRİKA DEVLETLERİ EKONOMİK TOPLULUĞU (ECOWAS)………………59 2.3.1 ECOWAS'a Genel Bakış………………………………………………………………….59 2.3.2 ECOWAS'nin Amaçları ve Hedefleri…………………………………………………….62 2.3.3 ECOWAS ün Temel Prensipleri………………………………………………………….64 2.3.4 ECOWAS'in İşlevleri…………………………………………………………………….65 2.3.5 ECOWAS'nın Başarıları………………………………………………………………….66 2.3.5.1 Siyasi İşler, Barış ve Güvenlik………………………………………………………….67 2.3.5.2 Gine Bissau'de Ekova'nın Rolü………………………………………………………….67 2.3.5.3 Fildişi Sahili'nde ECOWAS'ın Rolü…………………………………………………….68 2.3.5.4 Mali'de ECOWAS'ın Rolü………………………………………………………………69 2.3.5.5 Liberya'da ECOWAS'ın Rolü………………………………………………………….71 2.3.5.6 ECOWAS Yakınsama Konseyi Tarafından Makroekonomik Yakınsama Raporunun Kabulü……………………………………………………………………………………………73 2.3.5.7 ECOWAS Para Enstitüsü'nün kurulması (EMI).……………………………………….74 2.3.5.8 Tüm Devlet Mali İşlemlerinin Geçmiş Kayıtlarının Tutulması İçin Bir Kılavuzun Sağlanması . . .74 2.3.5.9 Sahel Bölgesinde Bölgesel Güvenliği Artırmak İçin Bir Eylem Planının Uygulanması.75 2.3.5.10 Tekdüzen Ticaret Geliştirme Stratejisine Giriş ………………………… …………….75 2.3.5.11 Ekonomik Kalkınma Belgesinin İmzalanması…………………………………………76 2.3.5.12 Ortak bir Dış Tarife Oluşturmak ……………………………. …………… ………….76 2.3.5.13 ECOWAS vatandaşlarının Bölgesel Güvenliği Artırmak ve Serbest Dolaşımını Kolaylaştırmak için Biyometrik Kart Tanıtımı………………………………………………….76 2.3.5.14 Sınır Yönetiminde Kılavuz Olarak Hizmet Verecek Bir El Kitabının Sağlanması……77 2.3.5.15 Ecolink 78 adlı Bölgesel Bağlantı Projesinin Başlatılması……………………………78 2.3.5.16 Tüm Finansal İşlemlerin Kaydını Tutmak için Entegre Finansal Yönetim Sisteminin Başlatılması . . .78 2.3.5.17 Üye Devletlerde Kalkınma için Çevre Yönetişimini, Genel Çevre Korumasını, Kapasite Oluşturmayı ve Sürdürülebilir Kaynak Yönetimini Geliştirmeye Yönelik Yenilenen Çabalar…79 2.3.5.18 Seme-Krake Ortak Sınır Karakolu İnşaatı Sözleşmesinin Yeniden İmzalanması (Benin - Nijerya)………………………………………………………………………………………….79 2.3.5.19 Nijerya ile Kamerun Arasındaki Bemenda Yolu ve Bir Joınt Sınır Karakolu (JBP) ve Mfum Sınırında Bir Sınırın İnşası……………………………………………………………….79 2.3.5.20 Batı Afrika Doğalgaz Boru Hattı Şebekesi Fizibilite Çalışması Sonuçlandı………….80 2.3.5.21 Düzenleyici ve Ekonomik Ortamın Düzenlenmesi İle Bölgesel Elektrik Piyasasının Gelişimi………………………………………………………………………………………….80 2.3.5.22 Yenilenebilir Enerji ve Enerji Verimliliği Teknolojileri ve Hizmetlerinin Teşviki….80 2.3.5.23 ECOWAS Üye Devletinde Enerji Verimliliği Binalarını Teşvik Etmeyi Amaçlayan Enerji Verimliliği Binası (EEB) Üzerine Bir ECOWAS Direktifi Ecree Tarafından Geliştirildi.81 2.3.5.24 Bölgesel Hastalık Merkezinin Kurulması…………………………………………….81 2.3.5.25 Bölgesel Güvenliği Güçlendirmek İçin Bir Eylem Planının Hazırlanması……………81 2.3.5.26 Ortak Pazar, Ticaret Liberalizasyon Şeması (TIS) ve Kişilerin, Malların ve Hizmetlerin Serbest Dolaşımı Protokolünün Uygulanmasının Konsolide Edilmesi………………………….81 2.3.5.27 Dakar-Abidjan Koridoru İçin Yardımcı Kanunun İmzalanması ve Bölgesel Elektrik Projesi için İlk Taşın Döşenmesi. Proje Cote D'ivoire, Gine, Liberya ve Sierra Leone'yi kapsıyor ……………………………………………………………………………………………………81 2.3.5.28 Abidjan-Lagos Koridor Otoyolu Uygulama Birimi……………………………………83 2.3.6. ECOWAS'ün Zorlukları………………………………………………………….………83 2.3.6.1 Ticaret Faktörü ve Üye Devletlerin Ekonomisi…………………………………………83 2.3.6.2 Mali Sektör Eşitsizlikleri ve Kötü Ödeme Sistemi…………………………………….84 2.3.6.3 Altyapı ve Düzenleyici Rejimin Zorlukları…………………………………………….84 2.3.6.4 Siyasi İrade Eksikliği……………………………………………………………………85 2.3.6.5 Yolsuzluk ve Siyasi İstikrarsızlık……………………………………………………….86 2.3.6.6 Koloni Aşılamasından Kaynaklanan Zorluklar…………………………………………86 2.3.7 EKO PARA BİRLİĞİNİN……………………………………………………………….87 2.3.8 FRANSA VS. ECO……………………………………………………………………….89 2.3.9 ECOWAS EKONOMİK GÖRÜNÜM……………………………………………………90 2.3.9.1 GSYİH………………………………………………………………………………….90 2.3.9.1.1 ECOWAS Bütçe Fazlası (+) Veya Açığı (-)………………………………………….92 2.3.9.2 Enflasyon……………………………………………………………………………….93 2.3.9.3 Faiz Oranı……………………………………………………………………………….94 2.3.9.4 Döviz Kurları……………………………………………………………………………96 2.3.9.5 Ticaret………………………………………………………………………………….97 2.3.9.6 Ecowas İstihdam Durumu…………………………………………………………….104 2.3.9.6.1 İstihdam………………………………………………………………………………104 2.3.9.6.2 İşsizlik……………………………………………………………………………….106 2.3.10 Eko ve Optimum Para Alanı……………………………………………………………107 3.BÖLÜM…………………………………………………………………………………….109 3. SONUÇ VE POLİTİKA ÖNERİLERİ…………………………………………………….109 REFERANSLAR………………………………………………………………………………112 --- In an attempt to accelerate the economic growth of West Africa, and the success made by the euro as a single currency inspired the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to propose "the eco" to serve as a common currency for member states. This thesis looked into the proposed currency Union and how its creation will impact on the economic growth of the region. The thesis applied a descriptive statistical analysis in line with the theories of the currency union, and also Europe being the pioneer of a common currency was also taken into consideration. Factors for establishing a currency union such as GDP, inflation rate, interest rate, and inter-trade between member countries were considered. So far, some countries have been able to achieve some convergence criteria like low inflation, low interest and exchange rate. After reviewing the economic trends and other criteria needed for establishing a currency union area, the Economic Community of West African States should not proceed with the proposed eco currency and should consider the exchange rate and trade development to remove the imbalances that exist and also should address the issue of France who is trying to hijack the monetary sovereignty of the currency. CONTENTSAcknowledgementsiAbstractiiÖzetiiiList Of FiguresixList Of TablesxiiPrefacexviiCHAPTER 171.Introductioni1.1 Background 11.2 Statement of the Problem 21.3 Research Objectives 31.4 Research Hypothesis 51.5 Analysis Approach 5CHAPTER 262.1Optımum Currency Area62.1.1 Perspective of R. Mundell……………………………………………………………….82.1.1 Perspective of R. I. McKinnon…………………………………………………….……102.1.1 Perspective of Kenan: An Electic View.…………………………………………………112.1.4 Perspective of Y.Ishiyama 132.1.5 Perspective of G.S. Tavlas On The 'New' Theory Of Optimum Currency Union 252.2 The European Union……………………………………………………………….……….282.2.1 History of the EU 282.2.2 The Maastrıcht Treaty 332.2.3 The European Monetary System Crisis 352.2.4 Why Some Countries are not Using Euro? 362.2.5 Advantages of Euro 372.2.5.1 Diverse Macroeconomic Benefıts 372.2.5.2 Exchange Rate Stability 372.2.5.3 Lower Interest Rate 372.2.5.4 Investment and Trade 392.2.5.5 Serving as an International Currency 392.2.5.3 Lower Interest Rate 392.2.5.6 Stability, Mobilıty And Growth Within the EU 392.2.5.7 Establishment of Transparent and Democratic Institutions 392.2.5.8 Trade Promotion, Humanitarian Aid, Diplomacy and Security 402.2.6. Disadvantages of the Euro 412.2.6.1 Euro As A Fiduciary Currency 412.2.6.2 Placing Some Countries in an Advantaged Position 412.2.6.3 The Decline of Intra-European Trade 422.2.6.4 Irregularities in Transfer Payments 432.2.6.5 Failure of the Euro to the use of Fiscal Policy 432.2.6.6 Financial Instability 442.2.7 Is Europe An Optımum Currency Area? 442.2.7.1 Inflation 442.2.7.2. Exchange Rate 462.2.7.3 Trade Openess 472.2.7.4 Wages And Price Flexibility 522.2.7.5 Labour Mobılıty (Euro) 532.2.7.6 Current Account Deficits as a Share of GDP in Selected Euro Area Countries 542.2.7.7 Unemployment Rates in Selected Euro Area Countrıes 542.2.8 Four Freedoms in the European Union 552.2.8.1 Free Movement of Goods 552.2.8.2 Free Movement of Servıces 562.2.8.3 Free Movement of Workers in the Eurozone 572.2.8.4 Free Movement of Capital 572.3 ECONOMIC COMMUNITY OF WEST AFRICAN STATES (ECOWAS) 592.3.1 Overview Of ECOWAS 592.3.2 Aims and Objectives Of ECOWAS 622.3.3 Fundamentals Prıncıples Of ECOWAS 642.3.4 Functions of ECOWAS 652.3.5 Achievements of ECOWAS 662.3.5.1 Political Affairs, Peace and Security 672.3.5.2 The Role Of Ecowas in Guinea Bissau 672.3.5.3 The Role of ECOWAS in Ivory Coast 682.3.5.4 The Role of ECOWAS in Mali 692.3.5.5 The Role of ECOWAS in Liberıa 712.3.5.6 The Adoption of the Macroeconomic Convergence Report by the ECOWAS Convergence Council 732.3.5.7 Establishment of the ECOWAS Monetary Institute (EMI) 742.3.5.8 Provision of a Guide to Keep a Track Record of all Government Financial Transactions.742.3.5.9 Implementation of an Action Plan to Boost Regional Security in the Sahel Region 752.3.5.10 Introduction of a Uniform Trade Development Strategy………………………….752.3.5.11 Signing of the Economic Development Document 762.3.5.12 Establishing a Common External Tariff…………………………….……………. 762.3.5.13 Introducing a Biometric Card to Boost Regional Security and Smooth the Free Movement of ECOWAS citizens……………………………………………………………762.3.5.14 Provision of a Manual to Serve as a Guide in Border Management 772.3.5.15 Launching of the Regional Link Project called Ecolink 782.3.5.16 Launching of an Integrated Financial Management System to Keep Record of all Financial Transactions.782.3.5.17 Renewed Efforts to Enhance Envıronment Governance, General Environmental Protection, Capacity Building as Well as Sustainable Resource Management for Development in the Member States 792.3.5.18 Re-Award of the Contract for the Construction of the Seme-Krake Joint Border Post (Benin – Nigeria) 792.3.5.19 Bemenda Road Between Nigeria and Cameroon and the Construction of a Joınt Border Post (JBP) and a Border at Mfum Border 792.3.5.20 Feasibility Study for the West African Gas Pipeline Network Concluded 802.3.5.21 Development Of Regıonal Power Market With the Settıng Up of Regulatory and Economic Environment 802.3.5.22 Promotion of Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Technologies and Services 802.3.5.23 An ECOWAS Directive On Energy Efficıency Building (EEB) Aimed at Promotıng Energy Efficency Buildings in the ECOWAS Member State has Been Developed By Ecree 812.3.5.24 Establishment of a Regional Centre for Disease 812.3.5.25 Provision of an Action Plan to Strengthen Regional Security 812.3.5.26 Consolidating the Implementation of the Common Market, Trade Lıberalızatıon Scheme (TIS) and the Protocol on Free Movement of Persons, Goods and Services 812.3.5.27 Signing of the Supplemantary Act on Dakar-Abidjan Corridor, and Laying of the Fırst Stone for the Regional Electrıcıty Project. The Project Covers Cote D'ivoire, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone 812.3.5.28 Implementation Unit of the Abidjan-Lagos Corridor Highway 832.3.6. Challenges of ECOWAS 832.3.6.1 The Trade Factor and the Economy of Member States 832.3.6.2 Financial Sector Disparities and Poor Payment System 842.3.6.3 Challenges of Infrastructure and Regulatory Regime 842.3.6.4 Lack of Political Will 852.3.6.5 Corruption And Polıtical Instability . 862.3.6.6 Challenges Emanating from Colonıal Hang-Over 862.3.7 ECO CURRENCY 872.3.8 FRANCE VS. THE ECO 892.3.9 ECOWAS ECONOMIC OUTLOOK 902.3.9.1 GDP 902.3.9.1.1 ECOWAS Budget Surplus (+) Or Deficit (-) 922.3.9.2 Inflation 932.3.9.3 Interest Rate 942.3.9.4 Exchange Rates 962.3.9.5 Trade 972.3.9.6 Ecowas Employment Status 1042.3.9.6.1 Employment 1042.3.9.6.2 Unemployment 1062.3.10 Eco and the Optimum Currency Area 107CHAPTER 31093. CONCLUSION AND POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS109REFERENCES113

Germany is a country of immigration. This has de facto been the case since the beginning of 'guest worker' recruitments in the 1950s, but Germany only legally acknowledged that it was incorrect to maintain that 'Germany is not a country of immigration' ('Deutschland ist kein Einwanderungsland') only 16 years ago, with a shift in migration policy that affected both the political and the social discourse on immigration and integration. Since 2000, a new Citizenship Act has granted citizenship based on place of birth ('Ius Soli') rather than on descent only ('Ius Sanguini'). In 2005, a new Immigration Act took effect and ad-dressed matters of integration at the federal level (Castro Varela & Mecheril 2010: 25). Debates on successful integration became prevalent in the political discourse, and a national action plan on integration ('Nationaler Integrationsplan' 2006, 2007; 'Nationaler Aktionsplan Integration' 2012) declared measures to improve the situation of migrants in Germany. Among other issues, the plan aims to ease the entrance of highly skilled migrants to the German labour market (National Action Plan on Integration 2012: 20). Through the 2005 Immigration Act, Germany started to foster immigration of highly skilled migrants for the first time since the end of 'guest worker' recruitments in 1973, a series of contracts that encouraged migration to post-war Germany. 'Guest workers' helped to rebuild the German economy and formed the first big migration wave to Germany in the 20th century (Castro Varela & Mecheril 2010), but they were expected to leave after a short period of work and their integration did not form part of the 'guest worker' recruitment. Besides, few of them worked in the highly skilled sector. With the implementation of the new Immigration Act, Germany now invests in the acquisition of knowledge via immigration (Act on the Residence, Economic Activity and Integration of Foreigners in the Federal Territory, Sections 19, 19a & 21), and thereby tries to address the skills shortage (The Federal Government 2014). However, many highly skilled migrants living in Germany did not immigrate as part of the initiative to reduce the skills shortage, but came as refugees, ethnic German repatriates or for family reunification. Although there have been recent initiatives to improve the acknowledgement of their degrees and certificates, various studies prove that their professional potential is not tapped, and that they too often face deskilling (Henkelmann 2012; Nohl, Ofner & Thomsen 2010). This is contrary to research that finds professional integration a relevant criterion for satisfactory integration into society (Peirce 1995; Nohl, Schit-tenhelm & Schmidtke 2014; Pätzold 2010; Brizić 2013). Despite increasing skills shortages in fields such as engineering (e.g. The Association of German Engineers VDI 2016), the knowledge and qualifications of highly skilled migrants seem to have lost significance on the German labour market (Flam 2007: 118). This situation frames the qualitative study at hand. To reveal perspectives on professional skills and career paths after migration to Germany, 17 semi-structured interviews were conducted with immigrant graduates who participated in a requalification project. As part of the project, all participants had enrolled at the University of Duisburg-Essen to obtain a German university degree with a view to enhancing their chances on the labour market. Since they had migrated to Germany 2–20 years before, none of the participants had been able to work in the fields they obtained their degrees in. Experiences of immigrant graduates in the context of their 'insufficient incorporation' (Nohl, Schittenhelm & Schmidtke 2014: 4) into the German labour market have been subject to recent studies (e.g. Nohl, Ofner & Thomsen 2007; Ofner 2011; Henkelmann 2012; Nohl, Schittenhelm, Schmidtke & Weiß 2014; Jacoby 2011), but more research is required on how participation in professional communities is assessed by migrant graduates in the context of their deskilling. Through examining how ideas on professional participation and agency are verbalised in interviews, the study at hand addresses this desideratum. 'Agency' and 'participation' are main factors in the analysis of the data presented in this thesis, and their definition builds on the assumption that '"doing" is at the heart of identity formation', linking action to processes of identity formation (Pratt 2012: 26). The present study suggests that expressions of agency and participation reveal how professional identities are discursively constructed in interviews. This leads to two research questions: 1. What kind of strategies did the interviewees use to support the discursive con-struction of their professional identities? 2. How did the respondents demonstrate agency in discursive constructions of professional identities? To analyse the data for strategies of identity construction, a qualitative content analysis (Mayring 2010, 2014; Kuckartz 2014, 2014; Schreier 2012) was carried out. Thus, the data was structured according to the aforementioned research questions (Mayring 2010). This was achieved by assigning text units to categories that were formed deductively from research about the notion of professional identity and its construction (Turner 1991; Pratt 2012; Ashforth, Kreiner, Clark & Fugate 2007; Caza & Creary 2016), as well as inductively from interview data. Hence, the result of the coding procedure was a number of text units that were filtered with the help of categories and that showed different types of strategies for the construction of professional identities. The filtered text units were then examined according to how agency was demonstrated within them. The analysis showed that various types of discursive strategies were located. These strategies helped to construct, deconstruct or maintain professional identities. The strategies involved agency to different ex-tents. Whereas resigning and adapting strategies showed only little or no agency on the part of the interviewees, regaining and disclosing strategies involved more agency in the construction of professional identities. These findings are discussed with regards to two aspects. The first aspect is how the typol-ogy of discursive strategies relates to the theoretical framework of the study. It can be shown that participation in professional communities increases agency and supports the construction of professional identities, while unsatisfactory participation is reflected in a lack of identification as a professional. The construction of professional identities is clearly linked to participation in actual or imagined professional communities. The validation of these actions contributes to the construction of confident professional identities (Pratt 2012: 26). Moreover, comparing and contrasting (Kelle & Kluge 2010) discursive strategy types shows how metaphorical references to power (Lakoff & Johnson 1980) support the processes of constructions of professional identities. The second aspect is the validity of the findings. It will be demonstrated that although the qualitative approach of this research project includes the subjective perspective of the researcher, there are certain quality criteria such as the transparency of the analysis process and a second analysis procedure at a different point of time that ensure a satisfactory level of internal validity (Malterud 2001: 484). The transferability of the findings to other contexts is outlined in the conclusion. More specifically, the findings can be transferred and applied to further research in two different ways. Firstly, a similar analysis should be conducted with the same participants at a different point of time. The hypothesis that professional participation enhances the construction of professional identities could then be re-evaluated after a longer period of employment in the field of graduation. Secondly, this hypothesis could be transferred to a different migration setting, for instance to Australia, to test whether the construction of professional iden-tities changes according to the context of another immigration country. ; Deutschland ist ein Einwanderungsland. Faktisch ist es das seit Beginn der Anwerbung von sogenannten "Gastarbeitern" in den 50er Jahren. Juristisch gesehen ist die Aussage, Deutschland sei kein Einwanderungsland, erst vor 16 Jahren durch eine Veränderung der Migrationspolitik wiederlegt worden. Die Auswirkungen dieser Veränderung betrafen sowohl den politischen als auch den gesellschaftlichen Diskurs um Migration und Integration. Nach dem neuen Einbürgerungsgesetz aus dem Jahr 2000 wird die deutsche Staatsbürgerschaft nun unabhängig von der Staatsangehörigkeit der Eltern an Kinder vor allem aufgrund des Geburtsorts verliehen ("Ius Soli"), und nicht mehr ausschließlich basierend auf Abstammung ("Ius Sanguini"). Die Verabschiedung eines neuen Einwanderungsgesetzes im Jahr 2005 bedeutet gleichzeitig die erstmalige Verwendung des Begriffs Integration auf Gesetzesebene und die Einführung des Diskurses darum auf Bundesebene (Castro Varela & Mecheril 2010: 25). Damit wurde im politischen Diskurs die Debatte um erfolgreiche Integration vorrangig, und in der Folge wurden in einem Nationalen Aktionsplan Integration (2012) bzw. dem Nationalen Integrationsplan (2006) Vereinbarungen zur Verbesserung der Situation der Migranten in Deutschland erklärt (Nationaler Aktionsplan Integration: 2012). Durch das neue Einwanderungsgesetz begann Deutschland zum ersten Mal seit dem Ende des Anwerbungsstopps der "Gastarbeiter" 1973, gezielt Fachkräfte anzuwerben. Die Anwerbung der "Gastarbeiter" war durch eine Reihe von Anwerbeverträgen erfolgt, die zur Migration in das Nachkriegsdeutschland motivierten. Die "Gastarbeiter" trugen dort maßgeblich zum Wiederaufbau der deutschen Wirtschaft bei und formten damit die erste große Einwanderungswelle, die Deutschland im 20. Jahrhundert erreichte (Castro Varela & Me-cheril 2010). Nichtsdestotrotz wurde erwartet, dass sie nach einer kurzen Arbeitsphase das Land wieder verließen, weshalb nur wenig zu ihrer Integration beigetragen wurde. Außerdem arbeiteten sie zumeist nicht im Hochqualifiziertensektor. Mit der Verabschiedung des neuen Einwanderungsgesetzes investiert Deutschland nun erstmalig gezielt in die Anwerbung von Wissen durch Einwanderung (Gesetz über den Aufenthalt, die Erwerbstätigkeit und die Integration von Ausländern im Bundesgebiet, §§ 19, 19a & 21), und begegnet damit dem Fachkräftemangel (Die Bundesregierung 2014). Viele hochqualifizierte Migrantinnen und Migranten, die in Deutschland leben, sind jedoch nicht im Rahmen der Initiative zur Reduzierung des Fachkräftemangels, sondern als Flüchtlinge, Spätaussiedler oder aufgrund einer Familienzusammenführung eingewandert. Obwohl es seit einiger Zeit Bemühungen zur verbesserten Anerkennung ihrer Abschlüsse und Zertifikate gibt, belegen zahlreiche Studien, dass die beruflichen Potenziale von Mig-rantinnen und Migranten nicht ausgeschöpft werden, und dass sie sich oft der Dequalifizierung ausgesetzt sehen (Henkelmann 2012; Nohl, Ofner & Thomsen 2007). Dies konterkariert Erkenntnisse, die darlegen, dass berufliche Integration maßgeblich zu einer erfolgreichen Integration in die Gesellschaft beiträgt. Trotz des steigenden Fachkräftemangels beispielsweise in den ingenieurwissenschaftlichen Bereichen (vgl. Verband deutscher Ingenieure VDI 2016) scheinen das Wissen und die Fertigkeiten von hochqualifizierten Migranten auf dem deutschen Arbeitsmarkt an Bedeutung zu verlieren (Flam 2007: 118). Dies bildet den situativen Rahmen der vorliegenden Arbeit. Zur Darlegung verschiedener Perspektiven wurden 17 Interviews mit eingewanderten Akademikerinnen und Akademikern über deren wahrgenommene berufliche Fertigke-ten und Karrierewege nach ihrer Migration nach Deutschland geführt. Alle Interviewteilnehmenden waren gleichzeitig Stipendiaten eines Nachqualifizierungsprojektes. Im Rahmen dieses Projektes hatten sich alle Teilnehmenden an der Universität Duisburg-Essen eingeschrieben, um einen deutschen Universitätsabschluss zu erwerben und damit einen besseren Einstieg auf dem Arbeitsmarkt zu erwirken. Seit ihrer Einwanderung, die zwischen zwei und zwanzig Jahren zurücklag, war es keinem der Teilnehmenden möglich ge-wesen, in ihrem Fachbereich eine entsprechende Anstellung zu finden. "Handlungsfähigkeit" und "Teilhabe" werden deshalb in der Analyse der vorliegenden Arbeit als Hauptfaktoren betrachtet, die auf Basis der Annahme "doing is at the heart of identity formation" (Pratt 2006: 26) definiert sind, und somit den Prozess der Identitätsbildung mit konkreten Handlungsmöglichkeiten verbinden. Die vorliegende Forschungsarbeit geht davon aus, dass Äußerungen zu Handlungsfähigkeit und Teilhabe darlegen, wie professionelle Identitäten diskursiv in Interviews gestaltet werden. Das führt zu zwei Forschungsfragen: 1. Welche Strategien wurden von den Interviewteilnehmenden eingesetzt, um die diskursive Konstruktion ihrer professionellen Identitäten zu unterstützen? 2. Wie haben die Interviewteilnehmenden ihre Handlungsfähigkeit innerhalb ihrer diskursiven Konstruktion beruflicher Identitäten dargestellt? Um die Interviewdaten mit Blick auf Strategien von Identitätskonstruktionen angemessen auswerten zu können, wurde eine Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse (Mayring 2010, 2014; Kuckartz 2014, 2014; Schreier 2012) durchgeführt. Somit konnten die Daten mit Bezug auf die genannten Forschungsfragen strukturiert werden. Bei diesem Schritt wurden Textbestandteile Kategorien zugeordnet (Mayring 2010), die sowohl deduktiv von Forschungen zu beruflicher Identität und ihrer Konstruktion (vgl. Turner 1991 Pratt 2000; Ashforth, Kreiner, Clark & Fugate 200; Caza & Creary 2016), als auch induktiv aus dem Interviewmaterial heraus entwickelt wurden. Aus der Kodierung ergaben sich eine Reihe von Textstellen, die durch die Anwendung der Kategorien aus den Interviews herausgefiltert worden waren und die verschiedene Strategietypen zur Konstruktion von professionellen Identitäten aufwiesen. Diese herausgefilterten Textstellen wurden dann in Bezug auf die Darstellung von "agency" untersucht. Es konnten verschiedene Strategietypen lokalisiert werden, die zur Konstruktion, dem Verwerfen und dem Aufrechterhalten von professionellen Identitäten dienten. "Agency" wurde hierbei in unterschiedlicher Ausprägung gezeigt. So war "agency" in resignierenden und anpassenden Strategietypen gar nicht oder nur in sehr geringem Maße repräsentiert, während die aufdeckenden und aufholenden Strategietypen einen deutlich höheren Anteil von "agency" an der Konstruktion professioneller Identitäten seitens der Interviewteilnehmenden aufwiesen. Diese Ergebnisse werden mit Blick auf zwei Aspekte diskutiert. Der erste Aspekt betrifft den theoretischen Rahmen der Arbeit und die Frage, wie dieser sich in deren empirischen Ergebnissen wiederfindet. Es wird deutlich, dass die Teilhabe in professionellen communities den Faktor "agency" erhöht damit die Konstruktion professioneller Identitäten unter-stützt, während sich unzureichende Teilhabe in einem Mangel an professioneller Identität wiederspiegelt. Damit ist die Konstruktion professioneller Identitäten klar an Teilhabe in tatsächlichen oder imaginären professionellen communities gebunden. Die Bestätigung solcher Teilhabe trägt ebenfalls eindeutig zur Konstruktion selbstbewusster professioneller Identitäten bei (Pratt 2012: 26). Darüber hinaus zeigt der Vergleich und die Gegenüberstel-lung der diskursiven Strategietypen (Kelle & Kluge 2010), wie metaphorische Verweise Machtverhältnisse (Lakoff & Johnson 1980) die Konstruktionsprozesse professioneller Identitäten unterstützen. Der zweite Aspekt ist die Validität der Forschungsergebnisse. Es wird gezeigt werden, dass obwohl die qualitative Ausrichtung des Forschungsvorhabens die Subjektivität der Forscherin in den Forschungsprozess mit einbezieht, ein zufriedenstellendes Maß an Validität innerhalb der Arbeit (Malterud 2001: 484). Durch die Anwendung verschiedener Qualitätskriterien wie der Offenlegung des Analyseprozesses und einem zweiten, zeitlich verschobenen Kodiervorgang erreicht werden konnte. Die Übertragbarkeit der Ergebnisse der vorliegenden Studie in einen anderen Kontext wird im Schlussteil der Arbeit aufgezeigt werden. Die Ergebnisse können mit Blick auf zukünftige Forschungsvorhaben vor allem in zweierlei Hinsicht übertragen werden: Zunächst kann eine Analyse mit einem ähnlichen Kodierrahmen von Strategietypen anhand von Interviews mit den gleichen Teilnehmenden zeigen, ob die Hypothese der professionellen Teilhabe als konstituierender Teil der professionellen Identitätsbildung bestätigt werden kann, wenn bereits eine längere Beschäftigung auf Niveau des Hochschulabschlusses besteht. Des Weiteren kann diese Hypothese auf andere Migrationssettings übertragen werden. Ein Vergleich beispielsweise mit Australien könnte darlegen, ob die Konstruktion professioneller Identitäten in anderen Einwanderungsländern divergiert.

Cambodia continues to enjoy robust growth, albeit at a slightly slower pace. Real growth in 2014 is estimated to have reached 7.0 percent. The garment sector, together with construction and services, in particular finance and real estate, continues to propel growth. However, there are signs of weaknesses in garment and agricultural production that are slightly slowing growth. Overall macroeconomic management remains appropriate. Fiscal consolidation continues with further improvements in revenue collection resulting from enhanced administration. Poverty continues to fall in Cambodia (poverty headcount rate in 2012 was 17.7 percent) although the pace of poverty reduction has declined significantly. Cambodia's real growth rate is expected to moderate to 6.9 percent in 2015 and 2016, as it confronts stronger competition in garment exports, continued weak agriculture sector growth, and softer growth in the tourism sector. Recent developments include: the garment sector continues to be one of Cambodia's main engines of growth, the external position remains stable, supported by healthy foreign direct investment inflows, underpinning the overall macroeconomic stability, Exchange rate targeting continues to support price stability, inflation has eased significantly with continuing depressed food prices and the recent decline in oil prices, and financial deepening continues, supporting economic expansion as deposit and credit growth accelerated quickly in 2014.

This report is structured as follows. Chapter one analyzes the performance of Kazakhstan s trade. Chapter two presents an overview of recent developments in Kazakhstan regional and international trade integration. Chapter three examines in detail key issues related to market access, focusing on non-tariff measures and trade facilitation and logistics. Chapter four examines the services sector and offers a roadmap for actions to enhance its competitiveness. Chapter five addresses building institutional capacity for the trade and competitiveness agenda. The report s recommendations are summarized in the following table. In order of the four main messages of the report, they cover balancing regional and international integration efforts, measures to improve access to inputs and export markets by reducing non-tariff barriers and through trade facilitation measures, raising the quality and efficiency of the services sector, and strengthening institutional capacity to implement an effective trade policy and competitiveness agenda.

Despite decades of war and instability, Iraq's abundant natural resources, strategic geographic location and cultural history endow Iraq with tremendous potential for growth and diverse economic development. Driven by windfall oil revenues in recent years, the Government of Iraq has invested heavily in rebuilding the infrastructure of the country, and its abundant oil reserves ensure that progress can continue steadily. This report was initiated at the request of the Iraqi government to assess the local investment climate and identify those high priority factors which most significantly impede private sector development in Iraq, in an effort to prioritize the recommended investments, institutional and regulatory reforms which would most significantly contribute to sustainable private sector growth and increased productivity.

Regulatory reform and competition policy are two important and inter-related areas of regulatory policy and public administration. Both can play a key role in improving the quality of regulation, and creating healthy and competitive markets and an attractive investment climate. This in turn leads to greater economic growth, employment and incomes. Part one of this paper discusses definitions and key issues associated with regulation, regulatory quality, and competition policy. This discussion focuses on competition policy as it relates to restrictions on competition and also pro-competitive regulation, which involves protecting consumers through economic regulation. Part two of this paper considers institutions and processes for implementing regulatory quality and competition policy agendas, including regulatory agencies, regulatory reform bodies, competition authorities and broader regulation-making processes. Part three notes the importance of assessing competition policy issues on a case-by-case basis and identifies the main objectives and features of competition policy. This includes a discussion about when competition policy issues are likely to play an important role in regulatory assessment and reform. Part four considers mechanisms for coordinating- where appropriate-competition policy and regulatory quality assessments, including undertaking competition assessments and providing advice to decision makers.

This publication targets private sector stakeholders who want to reduce a company s risk and vulnerability to corruption. It aims to provide guidance and recommendations for integrating ethics programs into corporate governance mechanisms to safeguard against corruption. Anti-corruption attitudes have changed significantly over the past two decades. Corruption is no longer regarded as a subject to be avoided and is now widely condemned for its damaging effect on countries, industries, governments, and the livelihoods of individual citizens. More importantly, the view of the private sector in the corruption equation is changing. Companies are no longer viewed only as facilitators of corruption - they are increasingly recognized as victims and a valuable source of working solutions, and anti-corruption efforts seen as integral to good corporate governance, Predictable, competitive, and fair economic environments free of corruption are central to sustainable business, economic growth and national development. It has been an easier task to raise this awareness than to reduce the corrosive effects of corruption, especially its worst manifestation of state capture. And though the challenge defies simple solutions, significant progress is being made. Today we have in place numerous international conventions and global collective action initiatives that set higher standards of transparency and accountability in corporate and public governance. More importantly, such standards are buttressed by a growing convergence of ethical values that set the tone for 'doing the right thing' in both the public and private sectors.

Daniel Levine on Hidden Hands, Vocation and Sustainable Critique in International Relations











Daniel Levine is part of a new generation
of IR scholars that takes a more pluralist approach to addressing the hard and
important questions generated by international politics. While many of those
interviewed here display a fairly consistent commitment to a certain position
within what is often referred to as 'the debate' in IR, Levine straddles the boundaries
of a diverse range of positions and understandings. Time to ask for
elaboration.














Print version of this Talk (pdf)




What is, according
to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your
position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?






The
question I'd like us to be asking more clearly than we are is, 'are we a
vocation and, if so, what kind of vocation are we'? This points to a varied set
of questions that we, as scholars, gesture to but spend relatively little
theoretical time developing or unpacking. There's an assumption that the
knowledge we produce is supposed to be put good for something, practical in
light of some praiseworthy purpose. Even theorists who perceive themselves to
be epistemologically value-free hope, I think, at least on an intuitive level, that
some practical good will emerge from what they do. They hope that they are doing
'good work' in the sense that some Christians use this term. But, there is not
really a sustained project of thinking through how those works work: how our notions of vocation might
be different or even mutually exclusive, and how the differences in our notions
of vocation might be bound up in non-obvious ways to our epistemological,
methodological, and theoretical choices.







Moreover,
except for a few very important and quite heroic (and minoritarian) efforts, we
don't really have a way to think systematically about the structure of the
profession: how it influences or intervenes or otherwise acts on particular
ideas as they percolate through it, and how those ideas get 'taken up' into
policy. Brian Schmidt has
done work like that, so has Inanna Hamati-Ataya,
Ole Waever, Ido Oren,
Oded Löwenheim, Elizabeth Dauphinee, Naeem Inayatullah,
and Piki Ish-Shalom; and it's good work, but
they are doing what they are doing with limited resources, and I think without due
appreciation from a big chunk of the field as to why that work is important and
what it means.







When
I started writing Recovering
International Relations, I had wanted to recover the 'view from nowhere'
that many social scientists idealize. You know, that methodological conceit
where we imagine we are standing on Mars, watching the earth through a
telescope, or we're Archimedes standing outside of the world, leveraging it
with distance and dispassion. I had worked on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
for a long time, was living in Tel Aviv, working for a think tank, and was—am—an
Israeli citizen and an American citizen. I had this somewhat shocking discovery
right after the Second Intifada broke
out. Most of my senior colleagues were deploying their expertise in what seemed
to me to be a very tendentious way: to show why the second Intifada was Yassar
Arafat's fault or the Palestinian Authority's fault—or, in a few cases, the
Israelis' fault. There were some very simplistic political agendas that were
driving this research. People were watching the evening news, coming into work
the next morning, and then running Ehud Yaari's commentary through their respective fact-values-methods mill. Or if they were
well-connected, they were talking to their friends on the 'inside', and doing
the same thing.







It
was hard to admit this for a long time, but I was very naïve. I found that very
unsettling and quite disillusioning. That's why the view from nowhere was so
appealing. I wanted to be able to talk about
Israel and Palestine without taking a position on Israel and Palestine—but without eschewing the expertise I had
acquired along the way, in part because I was
a party to this conflict, and cared about its outcome. I was young,
inexperienced, and slightly arrogant to boot—neither yet a scholar, nor an 'expert,'
nor really aware of the game I was playing. So my objections were not well
received, nor did I pose them especially coherently. To their credit, my senior
colleagues did recognize something worthwhile in my diatribes, and they did
their best to help me get into graduate school.







As the
project developed, and as I started engaging with my mentors in grad school, it
appeared that the view from nowhere was essentially impossible to recover. With
Hegel and with the poststructuralists, we can't really think from nowhere; the
idea of it is this kind of intellectual optical illusion, as though thinking
simply happens, without a mind that is conditioned by being in the world. Therefore,
there needs to be a process by which we give account of ourselves.







There
are a variety of different ways to consider how one might do that. There's what
we might call the agentic approach, in which we think through the structure of
thought itself: its limitations, our dependence on a certain image of thinking
notwithstanding those limits—thought's work on us, on our minds. This is closest
to what I do, drawing on Adorno and Kant, and Adorno's account of how concepts
work in the mind; how they pull us away from the things we mean to understand
even as they give us the words to understand them. And drawing on Jane Bennett, William Connolly,
Hannah Arendt, Cornel West, JoanTronto, and JudithButler to think through how one
conditions oneself to accept those limitations from a space of love, humility
and service. Patrick Jackson's (TheoryTalk #44) Conduct of Research in IR is quite
similar to this approach; and so is Colin Wight's Agents, Structures and International
Relations; though they use more philosophy of science than I do.







One
could also do this more 'structurally.' One could say 'this is how the academy
works and this is how the academy interconnects with the larger political
community' and then try to trace out those links: I mentioned Hamati-Ataya,
Oren, and Ish-Shalom, or you could think of Isaac Kamola,
Helen Kinsella, or
Srdjan Vucetic.








Any of
those approaches—or really, some admixture of them—would be pieces of that
project. I would like us to be doing more of that—alongside, not instead of,
all the other things we are already doing, from historical institutionalism to formal
modeling, to large-N and quantitative approaches, and normative, feminist and
critical ones. I would like such self-accounting to be one of the things
scholars do, that they take it as seriously as they take methods, epistemology,
data, etc. Driving that claim home in our field, as it's presently constituted,
is our biggest challenge.






How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?






I'm 42,
so the Cold War was a big deal. I'm American-born, and I was raised in a pretty
typical suburb. John Stewart from the Daily
Show is probably the most famous product of my hometown, though I didn't
know him. My view of history was a liberal and progressive in the Michael
Waltzer/Ulrich Beck/Anthony Giddens, vein, but I was definitely influenced by
the global circumstances of the time, and by the 'End of History' discourse
that was in the air. I thought that the US was a force of good in the world. I
was a nice Jewish boy from New Jersey. I really wanted to live in Israel for
personal reasons, and the moral challenge of living in Israel after the
Intifada seemed to go away with the peace process. So, it seemed to me that it
was a kind of golden moment: you could 'render unto Caesar what was due to Caesar',
and do the same for the Lord. I could actually be a Jewish-Israeli national and
also a political progressive. (That phrase is, of course, drawn from the Gospels,
and that may give you some sense of how my stated religious affiliations might
have differed from the conceptual and theological structures upon which they actually
rested—score one for the necessity of reflexivity. But in any case, those
events were important.)







I moved
to Israel when I was 22 and was drafted into the military after I took
citizenship there. In the IDF, I was a low-level functionary/general laborer—a
'jobnik', someone who probably produces less in utility than they consume in
rations. Our job was to provide support for the combatants that patrolled a
certain chunk of the West Bank near Nablus—Shechem, as we called it, after the
biblical name. I was not a particularly distinguished soldier. But we were cogs
in a very large military occupation, and being inside a machine like that, you
can see how the gears and pieces of it meshed together, and I started taking
notice of this. Sometimes I'd help keep the diary in the operations room. You
saw how it all worked, or didn't work; or rather, for whom it worked and for
whom it didn't. All that was very sobering and quite fascinating.







I once
attended a lecture given by the African politics scholar Scott Straus, and he
said the thing about being present right after genocide is that you come across
these pits full of dead bodies. It's really shocking and horrific—there they
are, just as plain as day. Nothing I saw in the sheer level of violence compares
to that in any way—I should stress this. But that sense of it all just being out there, as plain as day, and being
shocked by this—that resonated with me. Everyone who cared to look could
understand how the occupation worked, or at least how chunks of it worked. So I
would say in terms of events, those things were the big pieces that structured
my thinking.







Here's two
anecdotal examples. Since I was a grade of soldier with very limited skills, I
was on guard duty a lot. We had a radio. I could hear the Prime Minister on the
radio saying we are going to strike so-and-so in response to an attack on such-and-such,
and then I could see helicopters pass overhead to Nablus, and then I could see
smoke. Then I could see soldiers come back from going out to do whatever it was
the helicopter had provided air support for. I'd see ambulances with red
crescents or red Stars of David rush down the main road. It began to occur to
me that there was a certain economy of violence in speech and performance. I
didn't think about it in specifically theoretical terms before I went back to
graduate school, but Israelis had been killed, political outrage had been
generated. There was a kind of affective deficit in Israeli politics that
demanded a response, and some amount of suffering had to be returned—so the
government could say it was doing its job. I found this very depressing. My odd
way of experiencing this—neither fully inside nor outside—is certainly not the
most important or authentic, and I'm not trying to set myself up as an expert
on this basis. I'm only trying to account for how it made me think at the time
and how that shows up in what and how I write now.







Later,
when I was in the reserves, I was in the same unit with the same guys every
year. One year, we were lacing our boots and getting our equipment for our
three weeks of duty in a sector of the West Bank near Hebron, I think it was. I
remember one guy, one of the more hawkish guys, said 'we'll show 'em this time,
we'll show them what's what'. Three weeks later, that same guy said 'Jeez, it's
like we're like a thorn in their backside; no wonder they hate us so much.' (He
actually used some colorful imagery that I can't share with you.) I remember
thinking, 'well, ok, he'll go home and he'll tell his family and his friends;
some good will come of this.' The next year, I saw the same guy saying the same
thing at the start, 'we'll show those SOBs.' And then three weeks later, 'oh my
God, this is so pointless, no wonder they hate us…' So after a few years of
this I finally said to him, 'tagid, ma
yihiyeh itcha?'—Like, dude, what's your deal? 'We've had this conversation every year! What happens to you in
the 48 weeks that you're not here that you forget this?' And I think he looked
at me like, 'what are you talking about?'







I
thought about that afterwards: we have these moments of experience when we're
out of our everyday environment and discourse, the diet of news and fear, PR
and political nonsense—that's when these insights become possible. So, when
this guy comes in and says 'ok, we'll get those SOBs,' he's carrying with him this
discourse that he has from home, from the news and TV, from his 'parliament'
with his friends where they get together and talk about politics and war and
economics and whatever else—and then a few weeks of occupation duty disrupts
all that, makes him see it in a different light, and he has these kinds of
fugitive experiences which give him a weirdly acute critical insight. Suddenly,
he's this mini-Foucault.







In a
few weeks, though, he goes back to his life, there's no space or niche into
which that uncomfortable, fugitive insight can really grow, so it just sort of
disappears or withers on the vine, its power is dissipated. This is a very
real, direct experience of violence and it's covered over by all of this
jibber-jabber. So there's a moment where you start to wonder: what exactly
happens there? What happens in those 48 weeks? What happens to me during those weeks? You can see how a
kind of ongoing critical self-interrogation would evolve out of that. Again,
none of those things are exactly what my book's about, but it gives you a sense
of how you might find Adorno's kind of critical relentlessness and negativity vital
and important and really useful and necessary. You can see how that might
inform my thinking.







In
terms of books, as an undergraduate, I had read, not very attentively, Said and
Foucault, and all of the stuff at the University of Chicago we had to take in
what they called the 'Scosh Sequence,' from sociologists like Elijah Anderson
and William Julius Wilson to Charles Lindblom and Mancur Olsen: texts from the
positive and the interpretive to the post-structural. I had courses with some
very smart Israeli and Palestinian profs—Ephraim Yaar, Salim Tamari, Ariela
Finkelstein. And of course Rashid Khalidi was there at that time. Once I was in
the military, the Foucault and Said suddenly started popping around in my head.
Suddenly, this sort of lived experience of being on guard duty made the
Panopticon and the notion of discipline go from being a rather complicated,
obscure concept to something concrete. 'Oh! That's
what discipline is!'







When I
went back to graduate school, I was given a pretty steady diet of Waltz,
rational deterrence theory, Barry Posen, Stephen Walt (Theory Talk #33), and Robert Jervis (Theory Talk #12). Shai
Feldman was a remarkable teacher, so were Ilai Alon in philosophy, Shlomo
Shoham in sociology and Aharon Shai in History. Additionally I had colleagues
at work who were PhD students at the Hebrew University working with Emanuel Adler;
they gave me Wendt (Theory Talk #3), Katzenstein's (TheoryTalk # 15) Culture of National Security, Adler and
Barnett, and Jutta Weldes' early article on 'Constructing National Interests'
in the EJIR (PDF here).
My job was to help them publish their monographs, so I got really into the guts
of their arguments, which were fascinating. I am not really an agency-centered
theory guy anymore and I am not really a constructivist anymore, but that stuff
was fantastic. I saw that one could write from a wholly different viewpoint,
perspective, and voice. This is all very mainstream in IR now, but at the time,
it felt quite edgy, very novel. Part of the reason why the middle chapters of Recovering IR has these long discussions
about different kinds of constructivism is that I wouldn't have had two
thoughts to rub together if it was not for those books. I do disagree with them
now and strongly, but they were very important to me all the same.






What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the
world in a global way?






I'd be
more comfortable answering that question as someone who was, until relatively
recently, a grad student. I've not been productive long enough to say 'Well,
here's how to succeed in this business and be a theorist of enduring substance
or importance' with any authority. But I can say, 'here's how I'm trying to be
one.' There's a famous article by Albert O. Hirschman called 'The Principle of
the Hiding Hand,' (PDF here)
and in it he says that frequently, the only way one can get through really
large or complicated projects is to delude oneself as to how hard the project
is actually going to be. He takes as an example these ambitious, massively
complicated post-colonial economic projects of the Aswan High Dam variety. The
only way such enormous projects ever get off the ground, he says, is if one
either denies their true complexity or deludes oneself. Otherwise you despair
and you never get it done. From the first day of seminar to dissertation
proposal to job—thank God I had no idea what I was in for, or I might have
quit.







Also,
the job market being what it was, we had to be very, very passionate scholars who
wrote and argued for the sheer intellectual rush and love of writing. And yet,
we also had to be very practical and almost cynical about the way in which the
academic market builds on the prestige of publications and the way in which
prestige becomes shorthand for your commodity value. At least in the US, the
decline of tenure and the emergence of a kind of new class of academics whose
realm of responsibility is specifically to engage in uncomfortable kinds of
political and moral critique—but without tenure, and at the mercy of a sometimes
feckless dean, an overburdened department chair or fickle colleagues—that's very scary. If you're doing 'normal
science', it's a different game and the challenges are different. But if your
job is to do critique, in the last ten years, it's a very big deal. Very
difficult. I'm very fortunate in that regard; at Alabama I've had great support
from my department, my chair, and my college.







I was a
Johns Hopkins PhD, and my department was fantastic in terms of giving me
support, encouragement, getting out of my way while throwing interesting books
at me, reading drafts that were bad and helping me make them good—or at least
telling me why they were bad. We did
not get particularly good professional training, because I think they did not
want us to get professionalized before we found our own voice. I'm really
grateful for that, truly. But then there's this period in which you have to
figure out how to make your voice into a commodity. That's really tough, it's a
little bit disheartening—even to discover that you must be a commodity is dismaying; didn't we go into the academy to avoid
this sort of logic? But just like Marx says, commodities have a double life, and
so do you. The use-value of your scholarship and its exchange-value do not
interlock automatically and without friction. So you spend all this time on the
use-value of it—writing a cool, smart, interesting dissertation—thinking that
will translate into exchange-value, and it turns out that it sort of does, but
a lot of other things translate into exchange-value too that aren't really about
how good your work is necessarily. And many of your colleagues, if what you're
doing is original, won't really understand what you're doing; the value or the
creativity of it won't be apparent to them unless they spend a lot of time sifting
through your bad drafts of it, which only a few—but God bless those—will do. So
how you create exchange-value for yourself is important. So is finding people
who will care about you, your project, your future—and learning when to take
their advice, when to ignore it, and how to do so tactfully.







If all that's
hard, you're probably doing it right. It's unfortunate that that's how it is,
but at all events, that's how it was for me.











Would you elaborate on the concept of
vocation and why this is so important to the view from nowhere? It is important
to say that the view from nowhere is perhaps difficult. So is vocation, or a
kind of Weberian approach, a way to articulate that for you?







There's
a quote in a book from a Brazilian novelist named Machado de Assis. His
protagonist is this fellow Bras Cubas, who's writing a posthumous memoir of his
own life. He's writing from beyond the grave. From there, he can view his whole
life and his entire society from outside; he's finally achieved positivism's
view from nowhere. But the thing about this view—and the book means to be a
sendup of the Comtean positivism that was fashionable in Brazil in those
days—is that it gives him no comfort. He now knows why he lived his life the
way he did; how he failed and what was—and what was not—his fault. The
absurdity of it all makes sense. But it changes nothing: he has died
unfulfilled, unloved, and essentially alone: a minor poet and back-bench politician
who was ultimately of little use to anyone nor of much to himself. All he knows
is how that happened.







In the
end, if we're all playing a role in how a world comes into being and it's in
some sense our job simply to accept this, and our job as scholars merely to
explain it, this gives us no comfort in the face of suffering, in the face of
violence and evil. To some extent as scholars, and to some extent as a
discipline, we exist as a response to evil, to suffering, to foolishness, to
folly; it's not a coincidence that the first professorship of IR is created in
Britain in the wake of WWI, and that it's given to someone like E. H. Carr.







If we
don't have a view from nowhere because we've given up anything like a moral
sense that can't be reduced to fractional, material, or ideological
sensibilities, and if we know that sometimes those 'views from somewhere' can
provide cover for terrible kinds of evil or justify awful kinds of suffering,
then the notion of vocation seems to come in at that point and say well,
'here's what I hope I'm doing', or 'here's what I wish to be doing', or 'here's
what I'd like to think I'm doing', and then allowing others to weigh in and
give their two cents. Vocation, in the sense of Weber's lectures, comes out of
that. It's Kant for social scientists: What can I know? What should I do? For
what may I hope? In other words, what the necessity and obligation of thinking
is on the one hand, and on the other what its limitations are.







This is
a way to save International Relations from two things: one, from relativism and
perspectivism, and the other, from a descent into the technocratic or the
managerial. I am trying to stand between the two. My own intellectual
background was in security studies at Tel Aviv University in the 1990s: the
period immediately after Maastricht, in the period of the Oslo Process, the end
of Apartheid. My hope back in the days when the peace process seemed to me to
be going well was that I'd be able to have a kind of technocratic job in
Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs or Defense. Counting tanks, or something
similar. I thought that would be a pretty good job. I would be doing my part to
maintain a society that had constructed a stable, long-term deterrent by which
to meaningfully address the problem of Jewish statelessness and vulnerability,
but without the disenfranchisement of another people. I could sit down and
count my tanks with a clear conscience, because the specter of evil was being
removed from that work. The problem of the occupation was being be solved.
Again, it's somewhat embarrassing to admit this now.







I would
say in the US academy, there is definitely a balance in favor of the
technocrats. We have enormous machines for the production and consumption of
PhDs in this country. The defense establishment is an enormous player. Groups
like the Institute for Defense Analysis need a lot of PhDs, the NSF funds a lot
of PhDs (for now, at least), and that tips the balance of the profession in a
certain way. My ability to use ideas compellingly at ISA won't change that fact
all by itself, there's a base-superstructure issue in play there.







In
Europe, it's a different story, for a bunch of reasons. The defense
establishments of the EU member states aren't as onerous a presence. And, there
are more of them; so there's a kind of diversity there and a need to think
culturally about how these various institutions interlock and how people learn
to talk to each other: the Martha Finnemore-to-Vincent Pouliot-to-Iver Neumann (Theory Talk #52) study of ideas and institutions and
officials. Plus, you have universities like the EUI and the CEU, which are not
reducible to any particular national interest or education system; creating
knowledge, but for a political/state form that's still emergent. No one knows
exactly what it is, what its institutions and interests will ultimately be.
Because of that, it's hard to imagine the EUI producing scholars with obviously
nationally-inflected research programs, like Halford Mackinder,
Mahan, Ratzel from a century
ago. There will still be reifications and ideologies, but there's more 'give'
since the institutions are still in play. And there's fantastically interesting
stuff happening in Australia, and in Singapore—think of people like Janice
Bialley-Mattern, Tony Burke and Roland Bleiker.











Critique has a long and controversial
history in our discipline. Could you perhaps elaborate, as a kind of background
or setting, how critique can be used in IR and why you've placed it at the
center of your approach to IR theory?







Critique
as term of art comes into the profession through Robert Cox (Theory Talk #37) and through the folks that were writing
after him in the '90s, including Neufeld, Booth, Wyn-Jones, Rengger, Linklater and
Ashley—though pieces of the reflexive practice of critique are present in the
field well before. For Cox, the famous line is that theory is always 'for
something and for someone.' The question is, if that's true how far down does
that problem go? Is it a problem of epistemology and method, or is it a problem
of being as such, a problem of ontology? Is it fundamental to the nature of
politics?







If the
set of processes to which we refer when we speak of 'thinking' is inherently
for someone and for something, and that problem harkens back to the idea that
all thinking is grounded in one's interests and perspectives, i.e., that all
practical or systematic attempts to understand politics are 'virtuous' in the
Machiavellian sense (they serve princely interests) but not necessarily in the Christian
sense (deriving from transcendent values), then we have a real problem in keeping
those two things separate in our minds. Think of Linklater's book Men and Citizens in International Relations
as a key node in that argument, though Linklater ultimately believes (at least
in that book) that a reconciliation between the two is possible. I'm less
convinced.







Now
recall the vocation point we discussed before. IR as a discipline has a deep
sense of moral calling which goes beyond princely interest. And the traditions
on which it draws are as much transcendently normative as anything else. So
encoded in our ostensibly practical-Machiavellian analyses is going to be
something like a sense of Christian virtue; we'll believe we're not merely
correct in our analyses, but really and
truly right in some otherworldly, transcendent way. True or not, that sense
of conviction will attach itself to our thinking, to the political forces and
agendas that we're serving. We'll come to believe that we are citing
Machiavelli in the service of something greater: whether that's 'scientific
truth' or the national interest, or what have you. Nothing could be more
dangerous than that. Critique, as an intervention, comes here: to dispel or
chasten those beliefs. Harry Gould, Brent Steele, and especially Ned Lebow (Theory Talk #53) write about prudence and a sense of
finitude: these are the close cousins of this kind of critique.







If we
take seriously the notion that people sometimes fight and kill in the service
of really awful causes while believing they are doing right, and that scholars
sometimes help them sustain those convictions rather than disabuse them of them—even
if they do not intend this—then critique becomes an awfully big problem and it
really threatens to undermine the profession as such. It opens up a whole new
level of obligation and responsibility, and it magnifies what might otherwise
be staid 'inside baseball'—Intramural scholarly or methodological debates. Part
of the reason why the 'great debates' were so great—so hotly fought—had to do
with this: our scholarly debates were, in fact, ideological ones.







It
undermines the field in another way as well. If we take critique seriously,
there's got to be a lot of moral reflection by scholars. That will make it hard
to produce scholarship quickly, to be an all-purpose intellectual that can
quickly produce thought-product in a policy-appropriate way, because I will
want to be thinking from another space, and of course precisely what
policy-makers want is that you don't
think from some other space; that you present them with 'shovel ready' policy
that solves problems without creating new ones.







So you
now have not just a kind of theoretical or methodological interruption in the
discussion of, say, absolute or relative gains. You now have to give an account
of yourself. And for me, that's what critique in IR means. To unpack the
definition I gave above, it's the attempt to give an account of what the duties
and limits of one's thinking are in the context of politics, given the nature
of politics as we understand it. Because IR comes out of the Second World War,
we're bound to take the most capacious notions of what political evil and
contingency can be; if we are not always in the midst of genocide and ruin,
then we are at least potentially so. And so contingency and complexity and all
the stuff that we're talking about must face that. I want to hold out that Carl
Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau might be
right—in ways which neither they, nor I, can completely fathom. Then I have
to give accounts of thinking that take a level of responsibility commensurate
with that possibility.







In that
vein, when I look at accounts of thinking in the context of the political, when
I look at what concepts are and how they work and how they do work on the world
so that it can be rendered tractable to thought, I realize that what we come up
with when we're done doesn't look very much like politics anymore. We have
tools which, when applied to politics, change it quite dramatically; they reify
or denature it. To be critical in the face of that, you're going to be obliged
to an extensive degree of self-interrogation and self-checking, which I call chastening.







That process
of chastening reason, is, in effect, what remains of the enlightenment obligation
to use practical reason to improve what Bacon called the human estate. What's
left of that obligation is to think in terms of the betterment of other human beings
as best as you can, knowing you can't do that very well, but that you may still
be obliged to try.







That's
really hard to do and it's an odd form of silence and non-silence. After all,
if I were to look at the Shoah while it was happening, or look at what happened
in Rwanda, and say 'well, I don't really have a foundational position on which
to stand so I can't analyze or condemn that'—that would not be a morally
acceptable position. Price and Reus-Smit (TheoryTalk #27) say this
in their 1998 article and they are absolutely right. But then there's the fact
that I don't quite know what to say beyond 'stop murdering people!' The world
is so easy to break with words, and so hard to put back together with them—assuming
anyone cares at all about anything we say. So I am obliged to respond to those
kinds of events when I see them, and I am also obliged to acknowledge that I
can't respond to them well, because my authority comes from the conceptual tools
I have, and they aren't really very good. Essentially, what I'm doing as
scholar of IR is the equivalent is using the heel of my shoe to hammer in a nail.
(That's a nice line, no? I wish it was mine, but it's Hannah Arendt.) It will
probably work, but it will take a while, and the nail won't go in so straight. To
chasten one's thinking is to remind oneself that the heel of one's shoe is not
yet a hammer; that all we're doing is muddling through—even when we do our work
with absolute seriousness and strict attention to detail, context and method—as
of course we should.











You discuss IR theory in terms of different
reifications. In which was does that also lead you to take a stand against a Weberian
understanding of IR?







I think
where I depart from Weber is that he has more faith than I do that, at some
point, disenchantment produces something better. There is faith or hope on
their part that the iron cage that we experience as a result of disenchantment
and as a result of the transformation from earlier forms of charismatic and
traditional authority to contemporary rational ones won't always be oppressive,
not forever. New forms and ways of being will emerge, in which those
disenchanted modes actually will fulfill their promise for a kind of
improvement in the human estate. If it's a long, complicated process—hence the
image of slow boring into hard wood—but faith is still justified, good things
can still happen.







For me,
the question is how would you manage a society that is liable to go insane or
to descend into moments of madness because of the side-effects or intervening
effects of disenchantment and modernization, while holding fast to the notion
that at some point, this is going to get better for most people? I'm a bit less
certain about that than I read Patrick and Weber being. I think that even if
they're right, it makes sense morally as scholars, not necessarily as citizens
or individuals or people, to dwell in the loss of those who fall along the way.








I find
myself thinking about the people who are gone a lot. My ex-wife teaches on
slavery, and I think a lot about this terrible thing she once told me. On slave
ships, when there was not enough food they would throw the people overboard
because ship masters got insurance money if their property went overboard, but
not if human beings succumbed on-ship. There's a scene depicting this in
Spielberg's film Amistad and it
haunts me. I find myself thinking about those people, dragged under with their
chains. I wonder what they looked like, what they had to say. I wonder what
they might have created or how their great-great grandchildren children would
have played with my child. I wonder if my best friend or true love was never
born because her or his ancestor died in this way. An enormous number of people
perished. I can't quite believe this, even if I know it's true.







Yoram
Kaniuk, the recently deceased Israeli novelist, wrote that the Israeli state was
built on the ground-up bones of the Jews who couldn't get there because it was
founded too late. I wonder about them too. And when I taught course modules on
Cambodia, I would find myself looking at the photographs made of the people in
Tuol Sleng before they were killed, the photo archives which the prison kept
for itself. There is a mother, daughter, father, brother, son, and I find
myself drawn into their eyes and faces. I don't want those people to disappear
into zeros or statistics. I want somehow to give them some of their dignity
back, and I want to dwell in the tragic nature my own feeling because it bears
remembering that I cannot ever really do that. If I remember that, I will have
some sense of what life's worth is, and I won't speak crassly about
interventions or bombings or wars—wherever I might come down on them. I would
say that it's almost a religious obligation to attend to the memory of those
people. My desire to abide with them makes me very, very suspicious of hope or
progress. I want this practice of a kind of mourning or grief to chasten such
hope.







There's
a problem with that position. Some will point out to me that this will turn
into its own kind of Manichean counter-movement, a kind of Nietzschean ressentiment. Or else that dwelling in
mourning has a self-congratulatory quality to it. And there are certainly
problems with this position at the level of popular or mass politics. We do see
a lot of ressentiment in our
politics. On the left, there's a lot of angry, self-aggrandizing moral
superiority. And you can think about someone like Sarah Palin in the US as a
kind of populist rejection of guilt and responsibility from the right.







But as social
scientists, we might have space to be the voice for that kind of grief, to take
it on and disseminate the ethics that follow from it; to give that grief a
voice. That kind of relentless self-chastening is what I'm all about. I think
it opens you up to new agendas and possibilities. I think it's a much deeper
way to be 'policy relevant' than most of my colleagues understand this term. If
we are relentlessly self-critical as scholars, and if we relentlessly resist
the appropriation of scholarly narratives to simplistic moral or political ends
and if we, as a society, help to build an intolerance of that and a sense of
the mourning that comes out of that, we also open our society up to say things
like, 'ok, well what's left?'







And
then, well, maybe a lot of things are left, and some of them are not so bad. Maybe
we start to imagine something better. That's where I'd rejoin Jackson and
Weber; after that set of ethical/emotional/spiritual moves. I think, by the
way, that Patrick mostly agrees with me; it's only a question of what his work
emphasizes and what mine has emphasized. On this point, consider Ned Lebow's
notion of tragedy. He and I disagree on some of the details of that notion. But
on top of his remarkable erudition, he's a survivor of the Shoah. I suspect he has thought very deeply about grief and
mourning, and in ways that might not be open to me.











The final question I want to pose to you is
a substantive one: Your understanding of critique somehow does relate to
sustaining progress, in a way. Perhaps on the one hand, you are not so
optimistic as Weber was, but on the other hand, your work conveys the sense
that it is possible to bridge the gap between concepts and things. I'm not sure
if it's possible, but perhaps you can relate it to the substantive example of
how your work relates to concrete political situations. I think the example of
Israel-Palestine comes to mind best.







Again,
I don't think I am as optimistic as that. In my heart of hearts, I desperately
wish this to be the case. To think of the people who were most influential on
my intellectual development—my cohort of fellow grad students at Johns Hopkins
and our teachers, to whom as a group I owe, really, everything in intellectual
terms—I was certainly in the minority view. Most of them were, I think, working
in the Deleuzian vein of making 'theory worthy of the event.' I just don't
believe that's possible; or anyway I think it's really, really, really hard, the work of a generation to tell that
story well and have it percolate out into our discipline and our culture. In
the meantime, we must muddle through. I hope I'm wrong and I hope they're
right. I'm rooting for them, even as I try to give them a hard time—just as I
give Keohane (Theory Talk #9)
and Waltz and Wendt and everyone else I write about a hard time. But I'd be happy, very happy, to
be wrong.







What I
do think can be done is that you can sustain an awareness of the space between
things-in-themselves and concepts, and by extension some sense of the fragility
and the tenuousness of the things that you think and their links to the things
that you do. Out of this emerges a kind of chastened political praxis.







You mentioned
Israel and Palestine, which I care a great deal about and am trying to address
more squarely in the work I'm doing now, partly on my own and partly in pieces I've
worked on with my colleague Daniel Monk. What we observe is that though the diplomatic
negotiations failed pretty badly twelve and a half years ago, we're still
looking at the same people running the show: the same principal advisers and
discussants and interlocutors: in the US and Israel and in the Palestinian Authority.
The same concepts and assumptions too. Just a few days ago, Dennis Ross
published a long op-ed about how we get the peace process back on track, and
you might think that you're reading something from another time—as though the
conflict were a technical challenge rather than a political one. You know that
Prince song about 'partying like it's 1999'?







I don't
know what a peaceful, enriching, meaningful Israeli-Jewish-Arab-Palestinian-Muslim-Christian
collective co-existence or sharing of space or world looks like, but I know
that this pseudo-politics ain't that. When I see something that's just a
re-hashing, I can say, 'come on guys, that is not thinking, that's recycling
the old stuff and swapping out dates, proper nouns and a few of the verbs.' Nor
is it listening to other voices who might inspire us in different ways, or
might help us rethink our interests, categories and beliefs. Lately, I've been
listening to a band called System Ali, hip-hop guys from Jaffa's Ajami quarter,
who sing in four languages. What they say matters less to me than the fact that
they really seem to like another, they trust each other, they let each voice
sing its song and use its words. They have something to teach me about
listening, thinking, acting and feeling—because it's music after all—and that
can produce its own political openings.







Of course,
there are pressure groups, from industry and AIPAC to
whatever else in the US, and those groups merit discussion and debate, but I'm
also wary of the counter-assumption which follows from folks who talk about
this too reductively: that there actually is an American interest, or a
European or Arab or Israeli one, which somehow transcends partisan interest—one
that can be recovered once the diaspora Jews, the oil moguls, the arms dealers
or the Christian 'Left Behind' people are taken out of the picture. That feels
like the same heady brew that Treitschke and Meinecke and the German realpolitik scholars poured and drank:
that the national state has some transcendent purpose to which we gain access
by rising above or tuning out the voices of the polity or its chattering
classes. Only with a light liberal-internationalist gloss: Meinecke meets David
Lake (Theory Talk # 46),
Anne-Marie Slaughter or John Ikenberry.







I can
also go meet starry-eyed idealists who want to hold hands and sing John Lennon,
I can say to them yes, I want to hold your hand and sing John Lennon, but I am
also enough of a social scientist to know that if a policy does not respond to
real and pressing problems—water, land, borders etc.—that any approach that
does not respond to those things will be hopelessly idealist. It will be what
my granny called luftmentsch-nachess—the
silly imaginings of men with their heads in the clouds, like the parable about Thales
and the Thracian maiden. I am not interested in being either a luftmentsch nor a technocrat. So what
does that leave with you with? You need to balance.







You can
look at groups at the margins of political culture to see what they can tell
you. In Israel and Palestine, it's groups like Ta'ayush, Breaking the Silence and Zochrot, and this settler
leader who recently died, Rabbi Frohman, who was going out and meeting every
Palestinian leader he could because for him, being a Jew in the land was not,
in the first instance about his Israeli passport. There were and are
possibilities for discussion that feel really pregnant and feel very different
from the conversation we are sustaining now; which reveal its shallowness and
its limitations and its pretentiousness. These other voices are of course not
ideal either, they are going to have their own problems and limitations, their
own descent into power and exclusion and so on, but they reveal some of the lie
of what we're doing now.







I guess
in the end, social scientists make a living imagining the future on the basis
of the past. I also spend a lot of time reading novels and watching books and
films. Partly because I am lazy and I like them. Partly because I'm looking for
those novels and films to help me imagine other possibilities of being that
aren't drawn from the past. Art, Dewey tells us in The Public and its Problems,
is the real bearer of newness. Maybe then, I get to grab onto those things and
say ok, what if we made those them responsive to an expansive materialist
analysis of what an Israeli-Palestinian peace would need to survive? What if we
held the luftmentsch's feet to the
materialist/pragmatic fire, even as we held the wonk's feet to the luftmentsch's fire? Let them both squeal
for a while. There's possibility there.







Daniel J. Levine is assistant professor at the University of Alabama. Among his recent publications (see below) stands out his book Recovering International Relations.



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Related links








Faculty Profile at U-Alabama
Read the first chapter of Levine's Recovering IR (2012) here (pdf)
Read Barder and Levine's The World is Too Much (Millennium, 2012) here (pdf)
Read Levine's Why Morgenthau was not a Critical Theorist (International Relations, 2013) here (pdf)
Read Monk and Levine's The Resounding Silence here (pdf)




Print version of this Talk (pdf)

The main message of this report is that if Kazakhstan wants to take advantage of global integration and diversification opportunities, the government needs to improve its trade policy framework, its management, and its regulations. It is also finalizing accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) while its trade strategy includes a number of free trade agreements to be negotiated. It is an active member of the Central Asia Region Economic Cooperation (CAREC). This report is composed of three policy notes that discuss how to improve the trade policy framework, management, and regulations: note one is on the trade policy framework and recommends joining the WTO on a tariff schedule that is more liberal than Russia's; note two postulates that to benefit more fully from the WTO membership and future regional or bilateral agreements, the institutional framework for trade policy management will need a clearer strategic vision, better coordination within the government and with private sector, and enhanced human capacity; and note three suggests that for the private sector to benefit from global integration and diversification, the government should ease the burden of regulations that affect trade (non-tariff measures (NTMs)).

Inhaltsangabe: Introduction: Ghettos of poor and unemployed people, homeless people, families relying on food banks, sick people without health insurance. There is a long list of people which comes into our minds when we think about poverty and people who are affected by it. If we search for an exact definition of poverty we will not find a single, universally accepted standard definition of it. Poverty is hardly measurable. Every interpretation is affected by credos of value. The ethical correctness of these trails to valuate poverty is scientifically not concluding appraised. The European Union's working definition of poverty is: 'Persons, families and groups of persons whose resources (material, cultural and social) are so limited as to exclude them from the minimum acceptable way of life in the Member State to which they belong'. This definition is the basis of the valuations of poverty in this assignment. The variety of poverty shows how many groups of people in particular are at risk of becoming poor. In Germany the gap of income and the number of poor people in the society increased from the year 2000 to the year 2005 faster than in any other country of the OECD. Causes are the high unemployment rate in the year 2005 and a significant gap of income. Nobody can be excluded if we talk about the poor ones in future. High income during employment does not mean that there is enough money for times of unemployment or old-age-pension. When thinking about poverty we should never forget of what advantage it is to have a high old-age pension when you are lonesome and you have to pay for every help you need? Policy options have to be divided in to groups: Actions to prevent poverty. Actions to help people out of poverty. From a scientific point of view there is only one thing needed to stay out of poverty: enough money to sustain your expenditures. Therefore a well paid job is necessary. Minimum wages are a controversially discussed topic during the last months. Only an occupation with an adequate salary is good for covering all costs. Another crucial point is to secure the old age pensions. Due to this the Federal Government promotes a 3-layer programme. The tax policy is also a point which can be influenced by the state. Prevention of excessive indebtness and a adequate asset accumulation are also important topics. Proper education is a crucial point to prevent poverty and likewise the core measure to get out of poverty. Only good education opens the doors to the well paid jobs. Some social groups are usually not able to get out of poverty on their own. Therefore help is needed. Especially for single parents, families with many children, drug addicts and disabled people as well. Proper programmes for social housing or for improving language skills are often helpful for the poor. Here, the government has countless options to help people, but the realty is often different. In the fight against poverty the Federal government starts several actions to avoid and to help people out of poverty. The central statements behind these actions are: Every person should secure his life by gainful employment at first. Furthermore specific social transfer benefits should help to secure basic needs, especially for families. They directly stress the responsibility of the successful fight against poverty lying in the hands of everyone. Especially one aspect implied in the first statement is important for every citizen: Gainful employment, everyone himself is responsible for, gives the chance to secure life. In the past poverty and employment were inseparably connected and mutual exclusive. As employment was taken poverty was banned, in case of unemployment poverty threatened. Today especially the first statement is no longer true without restrictions. The effectiveness of employment as major driver in avoiding and helping out of poverty was weakened. The reason is the increase of low-wage employees. The belief gainful employment can always secure life is no longer true. The actual problem in Germany is a high amount of fully-employed people becoming poor. The expression 'working poor' describes working full-time in one and even more jobs earn wages under the existence minimum. Labour unions claim legal minimum wages in the different lines of business. The Confederation of German Employers BDA demands the negotiation of minimum wages by the bargaining parties, employer associations and labour unions. The free social market economy of Germany may not be influenced by law. The Federal Government established and renewed the 'Mindestarbeitsbedingungsgesetz' and 'Arbeitnehmer-Entsendegesetz', which do not give legal minimum limits. The laws ease the establishment of minimum wages in business lines. Low wages and the difference of income are one reason of the gap between rich and poor. To even this income differences the federal government introduce the progressive income tax rate. It attenuates the inequality of the gross incomes. But the gap between rich and poor is only less affected by the tax policy. The other reason for the gap between rich and poor is the difference of assets. The gap increases because the middle-class decreases. More and more people become poor. Poor people are not able to establish coverage by accumulating asset. People who are able to accumulate asset need the right strategy. Capital investments offer different strategies to accumulate asset, from conservative to risky. In the actual financial crises many people and companies have lost much asset. The trust of savers in the banking system and especially in shares hits the rock bottom. Today every possibility to accumulate asset is questioned. The coverage in old-age was formerly granted by legal pensions. But legal pensions are no longer safe, as it was belief for a long time. The 'three-layer-concept' of retirement provision offers possibilities to close the increasing gap. The intention is to support the conventional public old-age pension by two additional layers. Nevertheless every layer and every kind of provision has its own particularities which should be considered. Poor and unemployed people are often threatened by indebtedness. Especially unemployed people are not able to pay back their bills and become excessively indebted soon. To leave this hopeless way debt relief and employment are the best means. In insolvency proceedings the debt relief is pronounced. From the year 2002 until now the annual increase of insolvency proceedings decreases. Additionally the average amount of indebtedness decreases in these years too. The basic requirement for employment and therefore a central driver to avoid and to help out of poverty is education. Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel proclaimed the 'Educational Republic of Germany'. One reason for her reaction is secondary general schools are in trouble. After graduation many youngsters stay in the transitional system for too long. They don't find a vocational education. Another reason is even the vocational education has a problem. The participation in the Dual System in the vocational education decreases from 51.2 percent to 42.6 percent in 2005. This is an alarming development. Although the tendency is declining in the year 2005 to 2006 the efficiency of the Dual System should be improved even more. Forecasts of the employment market show a growing demand for highly qualified employees between 2003 and 2020. The demand for low qualified people will reduce. According this forecast qualification and competence become the securing means of future, for everyone at anytime. This can only be granted by lifelong learning. Besides the stated major effects of policy options affecting the whole society there are some groups of people, which need special support: Single parents, families with many children, people addicted to drugs, homeless, disabled and migrated people are treated in detail.Inhaltsverzeichnis:Table of Contents: Executive SummaryI Table of contentsVI List of AbbreviationsIX List of FiguresX List of TablesXII 1.Introduction1 2.Problem Definition2 3.Objectives3 4.Methodology4 5.The Fight Against Poverty5 5.1Poverty – A Definition5 5.2How to Measure Poverty7 5.3The Variety of Poverty7 5.3.1Key Factors of the Risk of Becoming Poor7 5.3.2Poverty Among Poor Educated People8 5.3.3Child Poverty9 5.3.4Poverty of Seniors10 5.3.5Poverty Among Handicapped People12 6.The International Day for the Eradication of Poverty14 7.Poverty in Germany15 7.1The Risk-of-Poverty-Line in Germany15 7.2The Present Situation in Germany17 8.Prospective Poor People19 8.1Outsiders of Today are the Poor of Tomorrow19 8.2An Income Above the Average is No Relaxing Situation20 9.Policy Options Against Poverty21 9.1Actions to Avoid Poverty22 9.1.1Minimum Wages22 9.1.2Securing Pensions23 9.1.3Tax Policy27 9.1.4Asset Accumulation27 9.1.5Prevent Excessive Indebtedness28 9.1.6Education28 9.1.7Basic Education29 9.1.8Vocational Education29 9.1.9Lifelong Learning30 9.2Actions to Help People Out of Poverty30 9.2.1Education30 9.2.2Help for Single Parents31 9.2.3Language Skills32 9.2.4Aid for Families with Many Children32 9.2.5Help People Out of Drug-Addiction32 9.2.6Social Housing33 9.2.7Disabled People33 10.Reality – How Political Options Impact on Life The Status Quo – Facts35 10.1Policy Options to Avoid Poverty Impact Reality36 10.1.1Effects of the Policy Option 'Minimum Wages'38 10.1.2Effects of Policy Options to Secure Pensions41 10.1.3Effects of the Tax Policy45 10.1.4Effects of Asset Accumulation46 10.1.5Effects of Policy Options to Prevent Indebtedness48 10.1.6Effects of Policy Options to Improve Education50 10.1.7Basic Education in Reality51 10.1.8Vocational Education in Reality54 10.1.9Lifelong Learning in reality55 10.2Policy Options to Help out of Poverty Impact Reality56 10.2.1Education56 10.2.2Effects of Policy Options to Support Single Parents56 10.2.3Effects of Policy Options to Improve Language Skills57 10.2.4Effects of Policy Options to Support Families with Many Children59 10.2.5Effects of Policy Options Against Drug-Addiction60 10.2.6Effects of the Policy Option 'Social Housing'63 10.2.7Effects of Political Options to Support Disabled People65 11.Results68 12.Conclusion69 13.Integral Total Management (ITM) – Checklist70 13.1General Economics70 13.2Strategic Management70 13.3Marketing70 13.4Financial Management70 13.5Human Resources Management70 13.6Business Law70 13.7Research Methods/Management Decision Making70 13.8Soft Skills/Leadership71 14.Bibliography72Textprobe:Text Sample: Chapter 9.1.3, Tax Policy: Tax policy is the whole of tax actions of a state with policy objectives. Through tax policy the state pursuits the aim to generate income to cover all expenditures. The state is able to pursuit socio-political aims through tax reduction or tax increase. An effective instrument to even the income differences is in particular a progressive in-come tax rate. Within the tax reform of 2000 the Federal Government decreased the in-come tax rate radically. According to the judgement of the Federal Constitutional Court that the minimum living wage must be tax free, the German government increased the tax free level virtually every year. This goes along with a decrease of the marginal tax rate from 25.9% in 1998 to 15.0% in 2005. 9.1.4, Asset Accumulation: Having savings in the bank is a good way to avoid poverty. In times of unemployment citizens are able to draw money from the bank and cover the financial gaps without being dependent on public benefits. The Federal government offers mainly two types of investment: Savings. Acquisition of shares. These are both appropriate to accumulate assets on a long range. 9.1.5, Prevent Excessive Indebtedness: Debts are always a fast way to cross the poverty line! Therefore is very important to prevent indebtedness before it begins. In 2002 approx. 9% of all households in Germany were over-indebted. Debtors are often not able to solve the problem on their own. For that reason they need help. The government financed debt counselling and measures for debt relief. This came along with a programme to educate indebted people. 9.1.6, Education: The significance of education to prevent poverty is indisputable. School education and vocational qualification are the best way to participate on the job market as well as the best protection against unemployment and poverty. The European Union regards a graduation from secondary school as minimum qualification to participate in modern knowledge society and for the best prospects on the job market. In January 2008 the Federal Cabinet approved the draft law for the qualification initiative (i. e. Qualifizierungsinitiative). It mainly contains actions to: Improve education opportunities for children younger than six years of age. Improve the permeability in the education system. Improve the way to be promoted. Improve the options of further education. 9.1.7, Basic Education: Education does not start in school. Potentials of children should in fact be developed earlier and dependent on their age. Kindergartens, beside the family, have as places for infantile education a particular duty. In kindergartens talents – even from children of underprivileged families – may foster at an early stage and learning difficulties may be discovered early. Primary schools cover the first four years of schooling (in Berlin and Brandenburg six years). They are attended by all children and provide basic education, preparing children for secondary schools. At the end of primary school parents and teachers have to decide which type school the pupils should attend further on. Available are: Secondary general schools (i. e. Hauptschulen). Intermediate schools (i. e. Realschulen). Grammar schools (i. e. Gymnasien). Comprehensive schools (i. e. Gesamtschulen). Special schools (i. e. Förderschulen). This affects the life and future job options of the child profoundly. Therefore promotion of primary school pupils is essential. One out of eleven pupils in a grammar school lives in poverty, but every second in a secondary general school. Poverty is one causal reason for bad education. Out of 100 children who were considered to be poor during kindergarten only four manage to archive the entry qualification for grammar school – compared to 30 in well-off families. These are the results of a long term study by the Workers Welfare Federal Association from 1997 to 2005. 9.1.8, Vocational Education: A Certificate of Education (minimum: Certificate of Secondary Education / Hauptschulabschluss) is necessary to get a proper chance on the apprenticeship market. The Federal Government takes actions to educate juveniles in the dual system of vocational education to decrease the number of untrained youngsters. Because a qualified apprenticeship is crucial for partaking and fulfilment in the community and the best protection against the risk of unemployment and income poverty. 9.1.9, Lifelong Learning: Learning will not end after school, vocational training or university degree. Learning is an essential mean to shape an individual's chances in life. Lifelong learning is the keyword for coping with the job market, to finally get a school's or a vocational qualification or just for further training. Once archived qualifications are less and less sufficient to cope with the challenge of business and community. Continuing learning all lifelong is becoming more and more important to secure the participating on the job market permanently. The partaking in further education is low in Germany - compared to other countries. In particular, people with lower qualification do not take part in further qualification sufficiently. 9.2, Actions to Help People Out of Poverty: 13.5 % citizens of the total population live below the poverty line. These need help to become better off and – even more important – stay below the line. 9.2.1, Education: As stated in chapter 9.1.6 proper education is the best way to prevent poverty, but it's also a lasting way to get out of it. People with no or only basic education have a strictly limited access to well paid jobs or no access jobs at all. In 2006 7.9 % of all pupils left school without any graduation. However, without any graduation the prospects of an apprenticeship are very small. Thereby the vicious circle of poverty starts turning. The government provides different measures to help juveniles and adults to improve their education: Help to get the Certificate of Secondary Education (i. e. Hauptschulabschluss). Help to get an apprenticeship. Help to make the change from Secondary Education to higher education entrance qualification easier. Olaf Scholz (Secretary of State for Employment) even recommended a legal claim to achieve a Certificate of Secondary Education. This should be financed by the Federal Employment Office. But he wasn't able to convince the CDU-parliamentary group.