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April 23, 2012
The issue of the delivery of urban water and sanitation services in African countries is one of the continent’s greatest development challenges. The purpose of this essay, focusing on Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, is to critically analyze the nature and implications of that city’s recent growth spurt on the ability of local government to meet the basic needs of all its citizens, particularly needs for water and sanitation services. The essay finds that while financing water and sanitation services is a major problem, problems of infrastructure and management are of equal if not more importance. In the short-term, this will continue to be a problem as the rate of informal urbanization proceeds at the same pace as official planning. This represents a classical principal–agent problem. Planners and managers might devise well-thought-out and logical plans for the development of both a market-based urban economy and infrastructural capacity, but the realities of population growth and new, unplanned settlement thwart their best efforts.
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Vol. 65, No. 1, Fall/Winter 2011
Authoritarianism in Zimbabwe survives because a coalition of political and military elites stands ready and willing to employ violence to execute the Machiavellian vision of President Robert Mugabe and perpetuate his control of the state. Several variables reinforce the durability of this regime—chief among them the mass out-migration and the large inflow of remittances that has decimated the middle class and dampened the political voice of those who remain in the country. Beginning in 2000, Zimbabwe’s authoritarianism became militarized with the overt intrusion of the security sector into the political arena, a process that reached its peak before the June 2008 presidential runoff election. The electoral dimension of its authoritarianism stems from the fact that the regime unfailingly holds elections in search of popular legitimacy but then manipulates them for its own ends. This article dissects Zimbabwe’s militarized form of electoral authoritarianism with specific reference to the 2008 reign of terror. It concludes that the factor that best explains the regime is the symbiosis between the party and the security sector, with Mugabe providing the glue that binds them together in pursuit of regime survival.
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Vol. 64, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2011
Submerged tensions between India and China have pushed to the surface, revealing a
deep and wide strategic rivalry over several security-related issues in the Asia-Pacific
area. The U.S.-India nuclear deal and regular joint naval exercises informed Beijing’s
assessment that U.S.-India friendship was aimed at containing China’s rise. China’s
more aggressive claims to the disputed northern border—a new challenge to India’s sovereignty
over Kashmir—and the entry of Chinese troops and construction workers in the
disputed Gilgit-Baltistan region escalated the conflict. India’s reassessment of China’s
intentions led the Indian military to adopt a two-front war doctrine against potential
simultaneous attacks by Pakistan and China. China’s rivalry with India in the Indian
Ocean area is also displacing New Delhi’s influence in neighboring countries. As China’s
growing strength creates uneasiness in the region, India’s balancing role is welcome within
ASEAN. Its naval presence facilitates comprehensive cooperation with other countries
having tense relations with China, most notably Japan. India’s efforts to outflank China’s
encirclement were boosted after Beijing unexpectedly challenged U.S. naval supremacy
in the South China Sea and the Pacific. The Obama Administration reasserted the big
picture strategic vision of U.S.-India partnership first advanced by the nuclear deal.
Rivalry between China and India in the Indian Ocean, now expanded to China and
the United States in the Pacific, is solidifying an informal coalition of democracies in the
vast Asia-Pacific area.
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Vol. 64, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2011
“The world has enough for both of us” has come to be a regular refrain of Chinese and
Indian leaders. Even academic commentaries sometimes use this argument to explain
why Asia’s two fastest growing economies and increasingly dynamic billion-plus-strong
societies will not clash as they pursue peaceful development. Their relationship continues
to be examined in simplistic dichotomies of competition or cooperation, rivals or partners,
friends or foes, etc., ignoring the complex nature of their evolution and interactions. This
paper argues that their continued rapid economic growth and resultant ever-expanding
engagement with the external world is not completely innocent, and that their growth has
begun to influence their bilateral relations. Prima facie, multilateral forums provide
China and India with a relatively neutral playground in which the two countries have
gradually begun to decipher their stronger commonality of interests in addressing their
regional/global challenges within multilateral settings. This expanding mutual trust and
understanding at the multilateral level is expected to have a positive impact on the nature
of their historically complicated bilateral equations. No doubt, their difficult bilateral
engagement also impacts their interactions at the multilateral level and their mutual
trust deficit circumscribes their joint strategies in multilateral forums. Yet, on balance,
contemporary Sino-Indian relations seem to mark a clear shift in the center of gravity from
a bilateral to a multilateral matrix. This shift is now discernible enough to stand scrutiny
and also to guide the future direction of Sino-Indian equations.
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Vol. 64, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2011
China and India remain locked in a stagnant embrace when it comes to the most intractable
of security dilemmas: the Sino-Indian border issue. A closer look at Chinese and
Indian strategic, scientific and academic experts’ security perceptions vis-à-vis one another
reveals that there is much more to the Sino-Indian security dynamic than meets the eye.
Chinese and Indian strategic analysts hold divergent interests when evaluating each
other’s military modernization, the former preoccupied with India’s naval development
and the latter with China’s army. Technical analysts in each country share a similar level
of interest in the other’s aviation and aerospace programs. Scholars exhibit a strong, if not
symmetrical, level of focus on the other country’s nuclear strategy and status. Using this
tripartite discourse as a baseline, this essay provides both a quantitative and qualitative
analysis of each group’s perceptions to better understand Sino-Indian security relations
and to propose measures within each arena to enhance mutual understanding. It shows
that the Sino-Indian security dilemma cannot be simply viewed through the prism of the
border anymore.
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Vol. 64, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2011
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Vol. 64, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2011
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Vol. 64, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2011
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Vol. 64, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2011
Seventeen years after publishing “India: A New Tiger on the Block?” in the Spring/
Summer 1994 issue of the Journal of International Affairs, Arvind Panagariya revisits
his analysis of India’s 1991 economic reforms and looks ahead to India’s economic prospects
in a changing world order.
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Vol. 64, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2011
China and India have had an often turbulent relationship. At the state level, strategic
and diplomatic relations between the two are fraught with complications, tensions and
misgivings that many observers believe are destined to continue for the foreseeable future.
The purpose of this paper is to detail the various opportunities for cooperation that stem
from the common challenges that China and India face as they continue to develop into
major global powers. We argue that the key to successful cooperation will not occur at the
intergovernmental level; rather, it will be based upon the building of social and cultural
bridges between the Chinese and Indian people.
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Vol. 64, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2011
In an interview with José Vericat of the Journal of International Affairs, Kishore Mahbubani, dean and professor in the practice of public policy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, situates Sino-Indian relations in historical context, explains the U.S.-China-India balancing act and assures us that the rise of two somewhat acrimonious giants is not all bad news.
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Vol. 64, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2011
The rise of China and India has reshaped Asia’s regional dynamics, as well as its position in the world. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the region’s most prominent multilateral organization, is made up of much smaller states that are vulnerable to the ups and downs of their more influential neighbors, China and India. Surin Pitsuwan, the secretary general of ASEAN, explains the economic, security and diplomatic dynamics of the organization’s interactions with China and India to the Journal’s José Vericat.
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Vol. 64, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2011
For better or worse, India and China are major players in the changing balance of power, though their exact role is still to be determined. In an interview with Rikha Sharma Rani for the Journal of International Affairs, Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and former U.S. deputy secretary of state, reflects on the future of international relations, the position of India and China therein, and the view from the United States.
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Vol. 62, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2009
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Vol. 64, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2011
The objective of this paper is to examine how patterns of Indian and Chinese reporting
on Myanmar reflect the political climates of each country. A sample of 94 articles from
Indian sources and 106 articles from Xinhua News Agency (English) was examined
using content-analysis techniques. There is a clear divergence in the topics covered by the
Indian and Chinese media during the time period reviewed, 3 November to 17 November
2010, which was selected to coincide with Myanmar’s first nationwide elections in twenty
years as well as the release of political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest.
The Indian press provided more coverage of Suu Kyi’s release and of Myanmar political
affairs than the Chinese press, but neither India nor China covered Suu Kyi’s activities
in the days following her release. The Chinese press provided more coverage of economic
affairs and the Myawaddy border crisis, which the Indian press ignored. Surprisingly, the
press in nondemocratic China attentively chronicled and promoted Myanmar’s elections
while the press in democratic India had very little to say about them. This suggests that
on these issues, the press focus on what they perceive to be in the national interest of their
respective countries.
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Vol. 62, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2009
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Vol. 62, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2009
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Vol. 62, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2009
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Vol. 63, No. 1, Fall/Winter 2009
Wilder argues that for the large amounts of foreign aid pouring into Pakistan to have significant benefit, the government of Pakistan and its international donors will have to prioritize supporting a politically astute public administration reform (PAR) program. He describes how the fundamental obstacles to PAR in Pakistan are political in nature and not due to a lack of technical expertise or knowledge of what needs to be done. The main political challenge is that those with the power to push for reform – namely the military, politicians and civil servants themselves – have historically had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. This paper argues that devising political strategies and tactics to overcome disincentives for reform, combined with creating a broader public constituency for reform, will be required if critically needed public administration reform efforts are to succeed in Pakistan.
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Vol. 63, No. 1, Fall/Winter 2009
Dr. Hasnat highlights the historical tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan, discussing how the two nations’ policy concerns have overlapped and diverged at various points in time. He argues that it is the historical differences between Afghanistan and Pakistan —not their sameness — that should guide U.S. policy toward the region. Hasnat believes that Obama’s strategy of “AfPak,” in which Afghanistan and Pakistan policy is unified due to their political, economic, and social intertwinement, is a mistake. He states that the strategic interests of the two countries differ, and thus a single strategy should not be devised for dealing with insurgents and terrorists.
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Vol. 63, No. 1, Fall/Winter 2009
Book review of "The Search for Al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology, and Future" by Bruce Riedel.
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Vol. 63, No. 1, Fall/Winter 2009
Book review of "Islam and Education: Conflict and Conformity in Pakistan’s Madrassahs" by Saleem H. Ali.
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Abdullahi Boru, Dacia McPherson, Gerri Pozez, Irina Gambs, Jeffrey Klug, Khisraw Amini, Kyle Henderson, Mujtaba Rahman, Rohina Phadnis, Scott E. Hartley, Sonia Luthra, Waheed Ahmad Sheikh
Vol. 63, No. 1, Fall/Winter 2009
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Vol. 63, No. 1, Fall/Winter 2009
Afghanistan’s non-democratic local powers grow stronger while international efforts to ballast Kabul’s government falter, so robust central governance continues to remain elusive to Afghanistan’s leaders. Despite the influx of foreign aid, development agendas, democratic processes and urbanization at the center, localities at the state’s periphery—predominantly in the south—are heavily reliant on self-administration and service provision...
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Vol. 63, No. 1, Fall/Winter 2009
This article undertakes an in-depth case study of Pakistan to shed light on three questions. (a) How can a country that has suffered from political volatility and instability for such a long period achieve high rates of economic growth? (b) Have the periods of stable authoritarian regimes provided the wherewithal for long term economic performance and (c) Have external influences particularly the close relationship with the U.S. played the smoothing role?
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Vol. 63, No. 1, Fall/Winter 2009
This paper will trace the origins of the Indo-Pakistani rivalry in Afghanistan, assess India’s current status and role in Afghanistan in the context of the Indo-Pakistani rivalry and discuss the implications for American policy.
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Vol. 63, No. 1, Fall/Winter 2009
In April 2009, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that the Pakistani Taliban was a “mortal threat” to the world.1 By that time, militants associated with Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, or the “Pakistani Taliban’’) were closing in on the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, having already seized much of the Pashtun belt...
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Vol. 63, No. 1, Fall/Winter 2009
Book review of "The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One" by David Kilcullen.
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Vol. 63, No. 1, Fall/Winter 2009
