Suchergebnisse

This study examines the potentials of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in enhancing economic growth and competitiveness in Pakistan. In doing so, it analyses the experiences and best practices from Pakistan's neighbouring countries in order to give policy recommendations for an effective SEZ policy for the country. Based on this, it emphasises that, over a short period of time, Pakistan should ensure improvement in business climate in the economic zones. This can be done through improved infrastructure and trade facilitation to attract investment by foreign and domestic firms in the zones. It furthers asserts that based on the successful experiences of other countries, Pakistan can use SEZs as a laboratory for policy experimentation in order to test the impacts of specific policies, which if successful, can later be replicated in other sectors of the economy. Finally, SEZs should generate a trickle-down effect such that it benefits the whole economy, workers and firms outside the zone.

South Africa's cities are focal points in any contemporary snapshot of the country. Their swift transformation within the national landscape means that they now affect or even dominate every other element within it. Its cities and their burgeoning populations have become defining characteristics of the country with their increasing political sway and growing contribution to the national economy. For many people living in cities, their urban affiliation is stronger and more meaningful than an increasingly abstract and distant national affiliation. Cities are important to national branding because they are localised and tangible points where national perception and reputation often originate or are reinforced. For many stakeholders it is city brands that contribute most directly to their perceptions of the national brand in areas such as ease and security of investment, economic status, liveability, tourism, personal interaction or safety and security. This article considers South Africa's largest cities, their competitive positions within the country, in Africa and across the globe, and it does so with a measure of inclusive urbanisation that is relevant to a wide spectrum of South Africa's stakeholders — national and international business and investors, institutions, government and citizens.

Abstract
Human movement from conflict and the desire for different livelihoods have been abiding features of most social orders. Yet, the categorization of people as refugees and specific international refugee laws and welfare programmes is a recent endeavour. This article looks at the key factors driving the international refugee regime's expansion. It argues that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has played a central role in this regard, advancing categorizations of displaced persons in refugee terms to ensure its survival and growth over the years. By tracing the historical development of the refugee regime, we can better understand how the control of human movement has become constituted in ways that foster organizational growth and geopolitical legitimacy, under the authority of humanitarianism.

In what follows I sketch out two macro developments. First, the way in which, challenged by an expanded social imagination which has fully incorporated migration and transnational cultural processes within its horizon, political and critical imaginaries are forced to expand. New reterritorializing social practices, whatever their origins or structural causes, demand new ways of conceptualizing those processes. Some of the limits that are quickly reached in this impasse are those of the national political and critical research imaginations. The Nation-state and the social sciences it produced are challenged to comprehend, visibilize or invisibilize, the new social processes unleashed by globalization. Secondly, there is another crucial epochal tension between imagination as a way of social control and as a means of (potential) social transformation. The dynamics of visibility and invisibility affecting newly globalized Latino populations in the U.S. often times manifest as a contradiction or tension between two forms of such in/visibility: cultural citizenship and cultural consumption, difference and recognition on the one hand, and equality both political and economic, on the other. My contention is that Latino Studies must be a place to think these tensions as a way of intervening in the uncovering of the in/visibilization of the social dynamics involved.

My purpose in this paper is to link the larger social context that structurally necessitates "wars without end" perpetrated by the U.S. elite with the rhetoric that legitimizes them so as to sociologically situate the rhetoric, the vocabularies of motive within a historically formed war-centric social structure that reveals an easily discernible pattern in the use of language. I consider Franklin D. Roosevelt's speech of December 8, 1941 announcing U.S. entry into World War II to be the rhetorical "Master Frame", the blueprint in this regard that was subsequently incorporated by later presidents to justify all wars without end. I compared dissected components of this rhetorical Master Frame to war speeches made by different U.S. presidents in the pre- and post-World War II era to reveal the qualitative difference between war rhetoric of a peace-time social structure where war is an aberration and the permanent war based social structure of the post-World War II U.S., when war became the taken for granted norm.

In an era of worldwide rights regression, beleaguered Taiwan remains Asia's most democratic, gender equitable, and liberal internationalist nation. What accounts for this seemingly exceptional record—and how does the feminist factor contribute to the construction of rights? Bridging constructivist and feminist scholarship, this essay argues that gender equity is a force multiplier for democratization as it empowers civil society and fosters legitimacy at home and abroad. In a three-level game, states at the margin of the international system may benefit from rights reform that expands the national interest and delivers material and reputational rewards. The case of Taiwan illustrates the dynamics of the double transition to liberal democracy and a liberal gender regime and its projection to world politics. The rewards of rights for Taiwan suggest a wider range of options even in small states facing regional challenges—and greater attention to the feminist factor in world politics. (Pac Rev / GIGA)

During the 1970s and 1980s, the United Methodist Church in the Midwest prioritized recruiting people of color. This included Filipino immigrants whose population continued to grow across greater Chicago. Amid these recruitment efforts, Methodists took firm stances on matters related to social justice and international affairs using religious doctrine or reasoning to justify political mobilization. Filipino Methodists formed critical alliances with non-Filipino Methodists, other Christians, and leftist organizations to raise awareness about Ferdinand Marcos's dictatorship and martial law order in the Philippines. Their grassroots activism helped sustain and bolster the efficacy of anti-Marcos and anti-martial law movements occurring worldwide.