Radical Shifts in Global Balance - Geopolitics, Surging Emerging Markets & a Wobbling G7 - RL Vol XI No XV, CXXIV, MMXVII

Radical Shifts in Global Balance: Geopolitics, Surging Emerging Markets & a Wobbling Group of Seven

Public Lecture – RL Vol XI No XV, CXXIV, MMXVII

Costantinos Berhutesfa Costantinos, PhD

Professor of Public Policy, School of Graduate Studies,

College of Business and Economics, AAU

Abstract

By the year 2020, a great shift will have occurred in the worldwide balance of economic power. Emerging market economies will become some of the most important economic forces, and China will take the top spot in the list of the world’s largest economies by GDP, both outright and measured in terms of PPP, that will have broad implications for the world’s allocation of consumption, investments and environmental resources. Emerging economies are advancing while advanced economies are mature markets that are slowing aided by the 2008 global financial crisis. On the other hand, cyber-attacks on Western democracy. Countries and non-state networks are using the civil war to accomplish their political goals with uninhibited use of force. Menacingly, cyber warfare in the Ukrainian conflict and US elections in 2016 shows a new hotspot dimension of the conflict (Greenberg, 2017). The US, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia and terror networks are all using the Syrian conflict to wage their own fight making Syria a global battleground (Kassab, 2016:1-3). Elsewhere, China claims sovereignty of virtually all of the South China Sea, aggressively fortifying its foothold by turning seven mostly submerged reefs into island outposts that other claimants to the atolls oppose on a key waterway for world trade (Fox, 2017). 

Today, fluidity rather than order define economic and political security. Distinctions between foreign and domestic policy are no longer valid. Terrorism, cyber warfare, climate change, and refugee flows have removed the distinction between the internal and external, between domestic and foreign. changing ideas of legitimacy emerge as foreign policy is no longer a prerogative of the state but a central realm of domestic politics – one which is ripe for manipulation by outside powers - Mutually Assured Disruption. As frightening as Mutually Assured Destruction was during the cold war, it helped to take a particularly deadly option off the table. In today’s world, we need to develop norms around the internet, economic warfare, and new technologies – if not to achieve order, then at least to create some boundaries to chaos that can save the world from implosion (Leonard, 2017).

Key words: Emerging market economies, Syria, South China Sea, cyber-attacks, Mutually Assured Disruption, Mutually Assured Destruction,

See lecture here or https://www.academia.edu/34069174/Radical_Shifts_in_Global_Balance_-_Geopolitics_Surging_Emerging_Markets_and_a_Wobbling_G7_-_RL_Vol_XI_No_XV_CXXIV_MMXVII.pdf

Humanity & Conflicts clinch in a Tragic Embrace - The Human & Institutional Spoils of Interventionist Warfare -RL Vol XI No XVII, CXXIV, MMXVII

If war is the worst enemy of development ever seen, healthy & balanced development is the preferred form of conflict prevention. Kofi Annan, 1999.

Humanity & Conflicts clinch in a Tragic Embrace

The Human & Institutional Spoils of Interventionist Warfare

Public Lecture – RL Vol XI No XVII, CXXIV, MMXVII

Costantinos Berhutesfa Costantinos, PhD

Professor of Public Policy, School of Graduate Studies,

College of Business and Economics, AAU

Abstract

Is it a fact that states might want to uphold conflicts in their search for stable surroundings or ‘ontological security’. How could it be possible that a state might covet a conflict? We assume states want to avoid conflict. Yet there are cases where parties seem deeply attached to the conflict that seems to be keeping the conflict alive. Realists who look to the security dilemma would explain this anomaly with the concept of uncertainty (Schouten, 2009:1). In 1967, The US Blue Ribbon Commission wrote a secret report entitled Report from Iron Mountain: On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace. The substance of the document are unsettling. That medical advances are viewed more as problems than as progress; or that poverty is necessary and desirable, public postures by politicians to the contrary notwithstanding; or that standing armies are, among other things social-welfare institutions in exactly the same sense as are old-people's homes and mental hospitals (The Blue Ribbon Commission, 1967).

The intervention of Nato in Libya’s annihilation, the foreign support to regime change in Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan and the Afro-Arab Winter are all that still haunt the architects of these conflicts. The human and institutional costs are too ghastly to contemplate even for the warmonger minds of these last horses of the apocalypse. The West’s engagement in Libya has created a failed state leaving behind an arena for warring factions, armed to the teeth with weapons provided directly by allies effectively transforming a peaceful, prosperous African country into a classic paragon of a phantom state. The fact is that foreign powers that would like to parachute democracy into these lands often do not efficiently realise in practice the potential of the ideas and goals they promote. Hence, the volume of their interventions is not nearly proportional to their impact raises the issue of whether the ideas in question may be fundamentally constrained at the exact moment of their conception by the very institutions and technocratic structures that ground their articulation. It enters politics and society in relatively abstract and plain form, yet pundits expect it to land itself to the immediate and vital Afro-Arab polity's socio-political experience. It insinuates itself, and seems within grasp, only to evade action and appears readily realisable only to resist fulfilment.

Key words: intervention, conflicts, wars, impact, ontological security, 

See paper here or https://www.academia.edu/33930621/The_Human_and_Institutional_Spoils_of_Interventionist_Warfare_-_Vol_XI_No_XVII_CXXIV_MMXVII.pdf

Rentier States & Economies - Deontological, Teleological & Ideological Clangs - RL Vol XI No XVIII, CXXIV, MMXVII

Rentier States & Economies -

Deontological, Teleological & Ideological Clangs

Public Lecture – RL Vol XI No XVIII, CXXIV, MMXVII

Costantinos Berhutesfa Costantinos, PhD

Professor of Public Policy, School of Graduate Studies,

College of Business and Economics, AAU

Abstract

In political science and international relations theory, a rentier government is a state, which derives all, or a substantial portion of its national revenues from the rent of indigenous resources to external clients, where only few are engaged in the generation of rent, while the majority is involved in its distribution and consumption. Rentier theory makes a distinction between ‘earned’ and ‘unearned’ income and assumes that a rentier economy creates a specific mentality. The economic behaviour embodies a break in the work-reward causation - a complacent attitude among the rentier states, which contrasted vividly with the sense of alarm and urgency prevalent in most other underdeveloped countries with massive impoverishment of the general populace. Consistent with the political strategy, rentier regimes undertake major restructuring of the polity, setting the foundation for and cutting it up into a score of regional governments based on linguistic, ethnic and cultural identity. In engaging in uncertainty reducing activities which short cut the full emergence of open and transparent states, rentier regimes often enlist the support of outside participants. Ideological constructs tend to be unsettled and, at times, unsettling.

Although states have the central responsibility for safeguarding the security of their citizens and providing public services, they can also be a source of domestic and international insecurity. Such states are fragile or collapse, manifested by violent disorder, conflict, lawlessness, and collapse of basic services. There is growing concern among politicians, development agencies and academicians about weak, fragile, or failing states. This concern is that fragile states serve as a base for terrorist groups, organized crime and other international security threats. In state building, it is possible to draw a conceptual distinction between two levels of articulation of ideology and to note the implications of their relations for process openness. These are representations of specific interests, identities, needs, wishes, goals, claims, demands and so on, different in different individuals, groups and communities on the one hand and production and circulation of ideology where broad-based concepts, principles and rules take shape and come into play, on the other. Peace, stability and development require effective and legitimate states able to fulfil their responsibilities of providing basic social services and security to citizens. State building will contribute to human security and international stability. State building also assumes that the only way a state can function peacefully is if it has gained acceptance and support being accountable and responsive to citizens.

Key words: rentier state, rent seeking, rent, deontology, teleology, ideology

See lecture here or https://www.academia.edu/33922155/Rentier_States_and_Economies_-_Deontological_Teleological_and_Ideological_Clangs_Vol_XI_No_XVIII_CXXIV_MMXVII.pdf