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practices may have fuelled the continuation of war and may not have fostered industry. However, they have made the DRC and other neighbouring countries’ economies grow (Bayart 1998; Straus and Waldorf 2011). Additionally, as the localists and regionalists have argued, the resource wars thesis neglects important identity, political and security concerns that go hand in hand with economic motivations. These criticisms have resonated strongly in the most recent policy strategies, to the point of embracing them (Day and Ayet Puigarnau 2013; Framework Agreement 2013; ISSSS
leading commentator on international relations theory notes, ‘the international distribution of power can drive countries’ behaviour only by influencing the decisions of flesh and blood officials’.51 Given this, US foreign policy is better understood by contextualising the world situation, as understood by US policymakers at the time.52 Thus, structural factors, domestic interests, and identity politics all influenced the decisions undertaken by US policy-makers.53 It is by taking this approach that one can better appreciate and explain why certain policy choices were
of the assumed unity of state and nation. As the locus of international security shifts in practice from state to nation, the unchallenged, and uncritical, acceptance of the unity of state and nation has become problematic. The amalgam of state/sovereignty is contested within and across international boundaries, as it is confronted by a competing amalgam: nation/identity. The implication is that, although the state remains a central actor in the international system, it is not the sole actor in the area of security. Ethnonationalism and identity politics also have
else's identity, political causes can make claims almost as loud and intemperate. The obliteration of one person's autonomy in the service of someone else requires the most grandiose justifications. The salience of religious identity and of the cultivation by both religious and secular leaders of congenial and conformist settings for their own sense of identity has neither been wholly absent nor uniformly dominant. It may have had a more sustained presence in unmobilised societies as a form of ensuring that the population was quiet and orderly
, Rural Reconstruction , 67. 60 Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘The Beginnings of the Irish Creamery System, 1880–1914’, Economic Review of History , 30.2 (1977), 284–305; William Jenkins, ‘Capitalists and Co-operators: Agricultural Transformation, Contested Space, and Identity Politics in South Tipperary, Ireland, 1890–1914’, Journal of Historical Geography , 30 (2004), 87–111. 61 Ingrid Henriksen, Eoin McLaughlin and Paul Sharp, ‘Contracts and Co-operation: the Relative Failure of the Irish Dairy Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century
patterns of suffering or harm which our political and economic systems impose on each other can be rooted in some of the basic forces which shape human identity – political, economic, cultural, and emotional. International institutional machinery is indeed an important tool in working on questions of rights. But the achievement of ‘universality’ across societies in the form of real dialogue and significant agreement on and commitment to working with the forms of abuse embedded in collective life seems as yet some way off. To capture the agreement of elites is precisely
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that there is not a single principle of democratic inclusion but several principles, and that it is important to distinguish their different roles in relation to democratic boundaries. It considers the general "circumstances of democracy" that consist in normative background assumptions and general empirical conditions under which democratic self-government is both necessary and possible. The book discusses the principles of including all affected interests (AAI), all subject to coercion (ASC) and all citizenship stakeholders (ACS). It contextualizes the principle of stakeholder inclusion, which provides the best answer to the question of democratic boundaries of membership, by applying it to polities of different types. The book distinguishes state, local and regional polities and also argues that they differ in their membership character.