MetaTOC stay on top of your field, easily

The paper examines the value‐generating strategies used in some of New Zealand's primary activities in a rapidly changing trading context in which the countries of East Asia increasingly figure. These strategies range from scaling up volume, with a consequent conspicuous impact on rural landscapes, to innovative value‐enhancing relationships linking producers, processors and consumers in processes which value landscapes for the contribution they make to provenance stories. Our argument is that higher‐value strategies are necessarily more intensely collaborative and involve a pursuit of engaged relationships, especially between onshore producers and manufacturers and consumers at a distance. We term this collaborative form of strategising as ‘the relationships economy’. We illustrate our argument using two case studies, dairying and merino. While there are great differences in scale between them, and dairying focuses significantly on volume‐generating capacity, there are players in dairying who are adopting higher‐value relationships‐based approaches similar to those developed in the merino industry. The common thread connecting the case studies is that of intentional enactment, which echoes earlier periods in New Zealand's trading history when considerable work was undertaken by industry participants to create new markets for primary products.

In April 2005, Lucio Gutiérrez was removed from office in the context of a fast‐growing economy. With no economic hardship to fuel social outrage, the failure of Gutiérrez illustrates how political and institutional factors can be the most important forces determining presidential survival. In this article, we qualitatively analyse the path toward confrontation between Gutiérrez and the congressional opposition which led to his political demise. We find that Ecuador's weak democratic tradition working through more proximate causes – radicalism, normative preference for democratic institutions and a negative institutional equilibrium – coupled with other institutional and political variables accelerated Lucio Gutiérrez's fall from power.

The upsurge of press titles in eighteenth‐century Britain provided unprecedented public arenas to discuss socio‐political issues within a global context. Imperial sovereignty became an item of debate infusing as much the commentaries on current affairs as the fictional pieces that contributed to the popularity of newspapers and magazines. This article explores a selective stock of press narratives where Britain's imperial aspirations are set against the backdrop of the fall of the Inca Empire, a theme that became increasingly popular in the wider literary spectrum. This corpus is examined in light of the transnational circulation bearing on the Andean utopia discourses.

In April 1969, Latin America implemented the first nuclear weapon free zone (NWFZ) in an inhabited region of the world. This article explores the creation of Latin America's NWFZ as a utopian impulse. It argues that various Latin American states used the utopian ideals of security, sovereignty, and socio‐economic prosperity to propel the region's denuclearisation forward. Those implementing these utopian ideals had to define the meaning of Latin America, nuclear weapons under a non‐proliferation agreement, and the denuclearisation of an inhabited region. The result was compromise forged from a collision of utopian ideals and dystopian geopolitics.

This article explores three utopian visions which have shaped past and present experiences within Buenos Aires shantytowns: those of upgraded shantytowns, of universal housing, and of a city where shantytowns have been eliminated. The article argues that these visions are collective conceptions that entail a socio‐political critique which is translated into space and which points to an ideal future. The visions proposed emerge from the examination of historical evidence and are a key conceptual tool for understanding previous and current discussions of shantytowns in Latin America.

This article explores how utopian visions are articulated by chavista activists in Venezuela through the practice of “revolutionary self‐making”. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the city of Valencia between 2008 and 2012, it aims to demonstrate how close attention to the formation of new moral and spiritual selves is an integral part of the way that chavistas enact and experience political protagonism. In doing so, the article seeks to provide a ground level view of utopian visions as they are manifested discursively and practically in everyday life.

There is no abstract available for this paper.

This article takes an ethnographic perspective to analyse the ways in which social movements in Buenos Aires, Argentina, politicise experiences of precarity through the creation of popular economy initiatives. I argue that we cannot understand these organising processes exclusively in relation to the pursuit of ‘formalisation’ or the improvement of working conditions. In the context of new forms of State intervention, the notions of ‘rights’—to labour and to the city—that these movements put forward, express ways of envisioning full inclusion in society that encompass notions of worthiness and ‘dignified life’, forged over the course of grassroots political action.

This paper takes a close look at the urban governance and political culture of Macao, the world largest casino city. Macao has experienced spectacular economic growth since gaming liberalisation in 2002 and China's Free Individual Travel scheme launched in 2003. However, the booming gaming sector has crowded out other sectors of Macao. It has not only made the city's economy mono‐structured and consequently extremely vulnerable to external shocks and fluctuations but also induced serious social divisions and political controversies within the local community. By tracing the root cause of the ongoing dilemma and crisis in the mode of governance, the dynamic relationships between formal and informal institutions, consensus politics and the social group culture are intensively discussed in a historical context. In fact, the sustainable development of the former Portuguese colony has largely been hindered by its residents' passive attitudes toward political communication, non‐transparent urban governance, the absence of a middle class and the dominance of pro‐establishment social groups.

Using an innovative survey of protest participants and nonparticipants from five major street demonstrations in Mexico City in 2011 and 2012, this study tests the assumption that influences on protest participation vary across different types of events; namely, ritual demonstrations and reactive protests. The comparison is based on two assumptions: that these are two of the dominant forms of protest in contemporary Latin America, and that specifying the context for different types of social movement participation provides a better understanding of the individual mobilization process for groups seeking to defend their rights or gain new benefits. The comparative analyses reveal some crucial differences. Political interest and previous political experience are more influential in the decision to take part in reactive demonstrations. For ritual demonstrations, the decision to participate tends to be driven more by personal and organizational connections.

This article uses the concept of entrepreneurial powers to discuss how and under what circumstances Brazil successfully accomplishes its goals in international crises. The concept of entrepreneurial power focuses on systematic evidence of middle‐power behavior and its relation to foreign policy tools. Brazil resorts to three agency‐based foreign policy tools that are the substance of its entrepreneurial power. These instruments are always mediated by a structural condition, the dominant power pivotal position in the crisis. This study applies qualitative comparative analysis methodology to 32 international crises since the early 1990s in which Brazil played a role. It finds that for regional crises, the use of only one agency‐based tool is sufficient for success, regardless of the dominant power position; and for global crises, the use of only one agency‐based tool is a necessary and sufficient condition for Brazil to accomplish its goals, despite the dominant power position on the issue.

This article examines the circumstances under which civilians, using protests as a mechanism, alter the strategic use of violence by armed actors (rebels and state forces). By examining the civil war in Colombia between 1988 and 2005, this study finds that combatants decrease their attacks against the population when civilians protest against the enemy. Combatants interpret such demonstrations as costly signals of loyalty. Furthermore, when insurgents are the target of the protests, insurgents increase repression against civilians as rebels get stronger. In contrast, state forces (and paramilitaries) compensate for their weakness in the area by multiplying civilian victims. Both state forces and rebels, however, are likely to decrease violence against civilians when civilians protest against both parties in contested zones. In such contexts, armed actors are likely to refrain from retaliation because any violence might drive noncombatants toward the enemy.

There has been an increasing focus on migration management by academics and policy makers, especially in relation to temporary and transitional forms of mobility. This paper considers the acceleration of Filipino migration to New Zealand in recent years, partly driven by changing policies allowing migrants to transition from student and work visas to permanent residence. It outlines the history of Filipino migration to New Zealand, the roles of the Philippines and New Zealand governments and intermediaries in migration management and the nature of student, temporary work and permanent residence migration. The transitional pathways used by Filipino migrants are analysed in relation to the influence of skills and educational characteristics in creating opportunities for some and vulnerability for others.

This research note discusses the benefits and risks for Melanesian households arising from attempts to increasingly commercialise Canarium indicum, an edible tree nut indigenous to Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Qualitative data were generated during workshops and interviews with Canarium industry stakeholders about the impacts associated with a series of interventions designed to encourage further commercialisation of Canarium. The findings are organised according to three dimensions that elucidate the social implications of industry development for local communities: (i) income and growth; (ii) equity; and (iii) voice and choice. Broader distribution of benefits within and between countries, as well as among supply chain actors, requires a stronger policy response at regional (Melanesia) and national scales, equitable gender representation to avoid reinforcing existing inequalities, and delegation of decision‐making power to the appropriate level to facilitate effective community participation and their links with other stakeholders. Thus, it remains to be seen whether Canarium‐related benefits arising from its commercialisation can be sufficiently reliable compared with either other sources of income (e.g. existing employment opportunities for those located near urban areas) or utilising the resource for subsistence purposes.

Coastal Bangladesh is highly vulnerable to climate change and salinisation; hence, farm‐level adaptation is critically important. Farmers' perceptions of and responses to environmental change were investigated in two villages in Khulna District. Perceived environmental trends included increases in temperature, extreme weather events, soil toxicity, erratic rainfall and scarcity of water for irrigation. Perceptions of climate trends were consistent with measured trends in Khulna. On‐farm adaptation strategies included adjusting planting dates, excavating trenches in rice‐fields, adopting new crops, salinity‐reducing technologies, livestock‐rearing and home‐yard cropping. Non‐farm adaptation strategies included wage employment, short‐term migration and self‐employment. Adaptation was facilitated by income‐earning opportunities, training, and credit, and impeded by lack of access to water, markets, capital, and extension services. Farmers suggested policy support for dissemination of stress‐tolerant cultivars, access to irrigation, and price stabilisation or crop insurance to assist adaptation. While the study shows an impressive degree of awareness and adaptation, external support is needed to increase adaptive capacity.

Hong Kong continues to struggle over which environmental governance approach is in its best interest while fulfilling its environmental obligations. With regard to climate change, Hong Kong's approach is characterised by a passive form of governance that is highly dependent on China's national policy directions. This is reflected, for example, in Hong Kong having not set its own mitigation targets. Market mechanisms have received little attention in developing a city‐wide climate change strategy. A transformative impulse, China's national emissions trading scheme, may provide momentum to a market‐based approach. However, the necessary conditions for such a market mechanism to be successfully implemented in China remain relatively undeveloped. This raises question about early participation by Hong Kong. Direct benefits are likely to be limited, due to Hong Kong's economic structure and weak demand for emissions reduction. Besides, there are regulatory barriers to enforcing emissions targets and/or recognising emissions allowances and credits from China. We therefore argue that nationwide emissions trading may, at this time, present more challenges than opportunities for Hong Kong to leverage its efforts on climate change mitigation. An alternative is to promote voluntary emissions trading that will require active involvement and leadership by businesses.

Cyclone Pam (March 2015) was an unprecedented event in Vanuatu forcing the simultaneous involvement of national and long‐term international actors, well integrated into the national disaster governance system, as well as numerous short‐term international actors, unfamiliar with the geopolitical and cultural disaster context of the country. Cooperation between these three groups of actors evolved through the three scales of bonding, bridging and linking social networking. This paper questions the different drivers and challenges within and across these scales of social networks affecting cooperation among the three different groups of actors during an emergency. Using a mixed methodology based on social network analysis, this paper utilises the case study of Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu to study the strengths and weaknesses of the disaster governance system in place based on bonding and bridging social capital to conduct disaster risk management and to prepare the integration of linking social capital when external support is needed. This paper contributes to the identification of key considerations in the development of resilience‐building strategies: the interactions of diverse actors to address disaster management needs and the reciprocal impacts of these interactions within and across the three different scales of social networks.

This article explores discourses surrounding the modernisation of the state and the formation of national literature in nineteenth‐century Colombia, examining the racism at the heart of both, particularly in their representation of Afro‐Colombian inhabitants of the lower Magdalena River. Then, drawing on recent accounts of plebeian politicisation, and in a reading of selected poems from Candelario Obeso's Cantos populares de mi tierra (1877), it argues that beyond functioning as the medium through which criollos interpellated subalterns as alienated subjects, republican ideology also served as the grounds upon which Afro‐Colombians contested exclusion and negotiated forms of political inclusion.

This article investigates political opportunities and constraints associated with incorporating the concept of universal citizenship into migration debates. Analyzing the speeches of Ecuador's president Rafael Correa over eight years, the article argues that Correa strategically crafted a narrative of universal citizenship to undergird politically beneficial policies. Political constraints from constituents and rivals, and the populist nature of his governing style, hollowed out progressive migration policy innovations to the point that universal citizenship became a rhetorical device more than a substantive policy agenda. Through this empirical case, the article develops a more nuanced critical understanding of universal citizenship discourses as sites for negotiating the relationship between states and migrants.

Literature on the Guatemalan Civil War has debated whether or not state violence was triggered by rebel activities. Did the government respond to each insurrection caused by the rebels, or did it blindly target regions where antigovernment antipathy and movements had historically prevailed? Because state violence was extensive during the civil war period, the dynamism of the war could have been the reason for its occurrence. Relying on the threat‐response model of state violence, this article argues that human rights violations occurred when the government perceived a rebel threat that would have seriously degraded its capability in future counterinsurgencies. The article employs propensity score matching to address the problem of confounding in empirical analysis, and reveals that rebel attacks, particularly those targeting security apparatus and resulting in human injury, increased the likelihood of state violence in the Guatemalan Civil War.

This article analyzes the limitation of cooperation and the expansion of conflict between states in cyberspace. Like traditional security spaces around the world, global cyberspace is also an anarchy system with no absolute authority or institutional status. In such a situation, based on cyber sovereignty and cyber power, the state tries to create an institution applicable to domestic and international cyberspace to make a cyber system favorable to the state itself. Since, unlike traditional power, cyber power has both material and non‐material elements, a state cannot know the level of another state's cyber power. For this reason, conflicts among states in the cyber domain are intensifying. The most active states competing for the upper hand in cyberspace are the United States and China. They lead to different levels of recognition and strategies concerning the cyber domain. While the competition between the United States and China invites conflict, it also triggers temporary cooperation among states. The UN's cybersecurity activities are also fragmented by various inter‐government institutions and management organizations. However, the differences in strategy between the United States and China affect other states. Ultimately, although the direction of discussions on cybersecurity has been set based on the Group of Government Experts activities in the UN and the need for inter‐state cooperation has been acknowledged, such cooperation would be only temporary because states consider domestic policy and strategy to be more important than international or regional cooperative organizations.

Although the formation and development of economic regionalism promoted by Thailand have demonstrated some movement towards a deeper economic integration in ASEAN that had been predicted by the Eurocentric theories, it is evident that Thailand's economic regionalism has not developed in a linear fashion. Indeed, the nation's ambitious commitment as a vigorous supporter of ASEAN economic cooperation has been interrupted by backtracking and delaying commitments to economic regionalism. This inconsistent involvement of Thailand in ASEAN has challenged the rationale of the Eurocentric theories, which claim economic interests as the basis for deepening economic integration. Since their focus on an economically oriented rationale limits the capacity to understand political and other causes (and consequences) of economic regionalism, they could not sufficiently explain the case of Thailand's unsteady progress towards regional consolidation. Particularly, the Eurocentric theories struggle to explain why different administration periods have interpreted economic interests differently and why economic interests have not always been the major cause for pursuing economic regionalism. Given the inadequacy of Eurocentric theories, this article attempts to explore an alternative explanation of Thailand's inconsistent involvement in economic regionalism by focusing on the ASEAN Free‐Trade Area. The article applies the domestic coalition approach with a divergent institutional configuration. Instead of an economically oriented rationale, the study suggests that the rationale for deeper economic regionalism with ambitious commitment has hinged upon the liberal‐minded coalition of dominant actors, along with the relative centralization of domestic political institutions.

This paper examines recent reversals and divergences in Japan's and Korea's free‐trade agreement (FTA) patterns and strategies through the cases of the Trans‐Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations, the Japan–Australia FTA, and the Korea–China FTA. Throughout the 2000s, South Korea was much more proactive in pursuing FTAs with major trade partners and agricultural exporters compared to Japan. Departing from its past FTA practices, however, Japan recently concluded the Japan–Australia FTA and the TPP negotiations, which include substantial liberalization of Japan's politically sensitive and heavily protected agricultural sector. In contrast, Korea has increasingly been taking a more protective stance in its recent FTAs and has been hesitant to join the TPP negotiations. This paper argues that changes in Japan's and Korea's domestic trade governance – in other words the institutions of trade policy‐making that encompass the authority structure, decision‐making processes, and coordinating mechanisms among various societal and political actors – explain Japan's and Korea's shifting FTA patterns and strategies.

This article aims to evaluate the will of the Chinese government to implement UN Security Council Resolution 2270 following North Korea's fourth nuclear test (1 January 2016), thereby seeking out the implications on China's sanctions against the DPRK after its fifth nuclear test (9 September 2016). The results of analysis in this article can be summed up as follows. First, the following instances capture the willingness of the Chinese government regarding the implementation of sanctions against the DPRK: (i) China agreed to stronger sanctions against North Korea (Resolution 2270); (ii) China boasted about its wholehearted support for – and complete willingness to implement – the sanctions at home and abroad; and (iii) upon the agreement, Beijing revealed the lists of items banned from export to North Korea and items subject to additional sanctions more promptly than before. Second, in spite of China's expressed willingness, the following instances demonstrate that there remain some limitations to Beijing's will regarding a thorough implementation of sanctions against Pyongyang: (i) the Chinese government argued that the United States should be responsible for sanctions against the North after its fourth nuclear test; (ii) China proposed the parallel approach of pursuing denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula and a peace treaty; (iii) China placed an emphasis on improving the living conditions of North Koreans; and (iv) China expressed opposition to deployment of terminal high‐altitude area defense on the Korean Peninsula. Third, such reactions are indicative of China's key essentials behind enforcing sanctions against the DPRK, which are the pursuit of Chinese national interests and the prevention of loss of those interests. To that end, China attempts to bypass the United States’ monitoring and pressure, considers the growing strategic value of North Korea as a result of intensifying conflicts between the United States and China, and induces the DPRK into a realm of dialogue. The fact that China needs to secure influence over North Korea and maintain the North Korean regime in a stable state even after its fifth nuclear test indicates that its sanctions against North Korea will be implemented within a boundary of not causing the regime collapse or chaos.

Western commentators often view the emergence of a modernizing Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) through the theoretical lens of Alfred Thayer Mahan, an influential 19th century American naval theorist who advocated an imperialistic brand of sea power modeled on the British example. This approach, however, risks painting a misleading picture of China's naval ambitions because it is based on a hegemonic theory of naval power that most regional powers cannot realistically follow. Instead, this article turns to the writings of Alfred von Tirpitz, the architect of the short‐lived German battle fleet that unsuccessfully challenged British naval dominance during World War I. Applying his ideas about naval power and hegemony to East Asia's strategic context is a useful heuristic device for revealing key logics behind three facets of US–Chinese naval rivalry: (i) China's anxieties over access to markets; (ii) the importance of alliance value; and (iii) the fiscal, operational, and technological dynamics that shape naval arms races between a hegemon and its weaker regional contender. In all three cases, the application of non‐hegemonic naval theory raises important questions about the sustainability and justice of current US naval strategy in the Western Pacific while simultaneously laying bare the major pitfalls of China's current trajectory.

China's remarkable economic development has had profound domestic and international effects. Among the most important of these is China's growing impact on the region of which it is an increasingly important and influential part. For countries such as Australia, which has rapidly become deeply economically integrated with – even dependent on – China, this presents a major and much‐discussed challenge as it tries to balance economic and strategic priorities. Australia provides an important and revealing illustration of how China's elites view key states in its region, which have assumed a growing economic and even strategic importance. This paper aims to develop a more comprehensive overview of the way the strategic, economic and political dimensions of the Sino–Australia relationship are understood in both countries. It also highlights the importance of realist thinking in both Australia and China.

International medical travel may be viewed as an ‘assemblage’ of various components such as infrastructure, hospitals, finance, transport, technologies, staff, facilitators and patients. In this paper, we focus on the articulations of medical travel facilitators (MTFs) and private hospitals in producing international medical travel in the context of the neoliberalising processes that had led to the rise of corporate hospital care in Malaysia in the 1990s. We draw from three hospital case studies for a comparative perspective. We highlight the shifting, unstable and contingent relations and interactions of the MTFs, as one component of the assemblage of international medical travel, with hospitals and medical travellers. We identify the practices of MTFs in providing patients with information and advice about hospitals and doctors as efforts to shape patients' choices in the selection of health‐care providers and in decision‐making. The assemblage approach allows us to see how the MTFs emerge and stabilise as a collective identity for individuals and companies performing particular functions through their multifarious articulations with other components in various sites of assemblage.

The last decade has seen a marked rise in the phenomenon of the so‐called stem cell tourism, whereby people travel from their home countries to access unproven stem cell treatments abroad. Despite increasing attempts on an international level from regulators, policy‐makers and scientists to deter people from undergoing potentially harmful treatments, patient demand persists. Over the last decade, China has emerged as a leading destination for people seeking such treatments, where providers of treatments operate in varying ‘shades of grey’. While Chinese government intervention has had some impact on the availability of treatments within China, top‐down regulatory measures face limitations considering strong patient demand and the geographical flexibility demonstrated by both patients and providers. This article draws on interviews with Australian patients who have travelled to China for stem cell treatments, or considered it and decided against it, as well as representatives of stem cell clinics in China and other stakeholders. It argues that Australian patients and/or carers articulate a culturally situated moral imperative to act in the face of limited conventional biomedical options and that commercial clinics capitalise on this to attract new patients and sustain the demand – either ‘underground’ in China, or by moving to other jurisdictions.

Infertility is a significant reproductive health problem effecting at least 15% of heterosexual Indonesian couples during their reproductive lives. This article explores the preferences and decision‐making processes of 15 married infertile Indonesian couples, of high socioeconomic status, regarding intra‐regional reproductive travel in Southeast Asia. We consider the reproductive destinations of Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, revealing their distinct attractions for different couples. We identify a variety of push and pull factors influencing the choice to leave Indonesia to pursue assisted reproduction technologies (ART), as well as the factors shaping the choice of travel destination. One intractable push factor motivating couples to leave Indonesia is the strict regulation of ART, which designates gamete donation and surrogacy as illegal. The paramount concern of our informants was to maximise their chances of reproductive success, and perceptions of higher success rates for conception via ART elsewhere in Asia informed their travel choices. Emotional and psychological concerns were also crucial in determining travel destinations and included a strong desire for privacy; the desire for emotional support whilst attempting conception via ART; the desire for emotional intimacy with one's partner; and the wish for religious compatibility with fertility providers and treatment protocols.

Over the last decade, political scientists have identified Ecuador as one of Latin America's hybrid regimes. This article examines how President Rafael Correa combined legal reforms, bureaucratic controls and other policies in a contra‐associational strategy aimed at extending executive control over civil society. While the strategy significantly altered the operational environment for civil society groups, it did not completely strip them of their capacity to oppose the regime. Ecuador's experience underscores the ambiguity at play in hybrids; in pursuit of regime legitimation, regimes must cede some space to opponents while simultaneously sabotaging civil liberties.

When delegating governing tasks to a coalition partner, the president would like to give a minister ample administrative powers to be able to effectively accomplish the political mission. Due to information asymmetries, the president runs the risk that this discretion might be used to pursue policy outcomes that may harm the president's preferences. This trade‐off between delegation and control is key to understanding governance strategies the president chooses to minimize agency risks and coordinate public policies. With Brazil as a case study, this article demonstrates that presidents have strategically made frequent use of junior ministers as watchdogs of coalition partners, especially when coalition allies are ideologically distant from the president's preferences. Yet neither the portfolio salience nor the president's decision to share powers with coalition partners proportionally seems to interfere in such strategic decisions.

We focus on the reproduction of gender inequality in the labour market, analysing everyday practices of social boundary demarcation that exclude women from accessing resources at work. We argue that women's diminished position in the labour market – or gender deficit – is a result of taken‐for‐granted, day‐to‐day practices, conditioning the distribution of resources. Taking Chilean professional women as a case study, we focus on labour market practices that uphold gendered evaluation criteria, reproduce social classifications, and engender exclusion through social boundary work that limits women's access to labour market benefits and rewards.

Latin America's “left turn” expanded cash transfers and public services, contributing to lower poverty and inequality. Recently, right‐leaning candidates and parties have begun to win back seats in the legislature, and in some cases have captured the executive branch. This shift has sparked debate about the future of Latin America's welfare states. This article analyzes social policy reforms enacted by two recent right‐leaning governments: that of Sebastián Piñera in Chile (2010–14) and Mauricio Macri in Argentina (2015–). It finds that contrary to neoliberal adjustment policies of the past, neither Macri nor Piñera engaged in privatization or deep spending cuts. Instead, both administrations facilitated a process of policy drift in some sectors and marginal expansion in others. Policy legacies and the strength of the opposition help to explain these outcomes, suggesting that Latin America's political context has been transformed by the consolidation of democracy and the experience of left party rule.

Studies of the Brazilian Landless Movement, particularly the MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, Landless Rural Workers' Movement), note two periods of collective action: the time when tactics such as land occupations are deployed to acquire land (luta pela terra) and subsequent mobilizations to develop territory (luta na terra). The latter period, which includes fostering educational opportunities and coordinating economic production, features prolonged interaction with government authorities. Instead of demobilizing during institutionalization, this study argues, postoccupation practices are as contentious as seizing territory. This is apparent in the movement's efforts to influence public policies that lead to the creation of schools where a contentious, movement‐centered identity develops. Documenting the movement's efforts in education provides a way to understand how the current moment in rural contention in Brazil—called by some the time to acumular forças (accumulate forces)—remains collective and political instead of indicating movement decline.

Singapore has one of the tightest regulations over assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in Asia, a consequence of Singapore's strong state, the priority it gives to reproduction, and the numerous religious groups in the country and their direct and indirect influence on the Bioethics Advisory Committee, which recommends ART regulations for the country. Together, these key actors give shape to the ‘local moral worlds’, which undergird ART governance in the country. Drawing on in‐depth interviews and data from online forums, we illustrate Singaporean fertility seekers' attempts to juggle myriad and sometimes confusing obligations to the state, society and religion in making reproductive choices. We then explore the limits and possibilities for fertility seekers to circumvent the restrictive rules and ‘moral safety valves’ set in place in their home country simply by stepping out to another jurisdiction across national borders. The paper goes on to show how the Internet communities serve as a bridgespace, propelling fertility mobilities by enabling Singaporeans to see creative possibilities in patchwork regulations. At the edges of state and religious power, fertility‐seeking subjects take advantage of liminal spaces, grey areas, or permissive regimes to gain several degrees of freedom to practise adaptive fertility strategies that may be ‘unofficial’ but ‘licit’ or ‘socially acceptable’.

Medical travel has become a self‐evident and intrinsic part of the medical landscape in the Republic of Maldives. This article raises the question of how exactly this has emerged as part of today's reality. The analysis describes the unfolding of a pronounced Maldivian medical travel culture by focusing on a particularly pressing health issue. The population of the Maldives has to face the world's highest prevalence of beta‐thalassaemia, a genetic disorder affecting the body's ability to create red blood cells. The country's 300:1 sea to land ratio, however, with its small population of 340 000 scattered over 200 islands is a challenging context for the curative and preventive measures in thalassaemia governance. The article follows the trail of thalassaemia‐related intra‐archipelagic and extra‐archipelagic medical travel of patients and clients requesting a blood transfusion, iron monitoring, bone marrow transplantation and prenatal diagnostic services. It discusses medical travel organised as a biosocial group activity, financed by insurance and religious bodies while interacting with the migration of health professionals.

This study investigates local expert perceptions of the role of environmental factors, especially in terms of contemporary climate change, in population movements from Bangladesh to India. The aim is to delve into locally held understandings of the phenomenon and to gain a better understanding of these migration processes, which are actively intertwined with local experiences. Both Indian and Bangladeshi experts were interviewed using semi‐structured, in‐depth interviews in order to explore insights from locally held perceptions and understandings of contextual factors. In total, 10 Bangladeshi and 15 Indian experts were interviewed, covering different disciplines, sectors, regions and job types, together providing a more complete and grounded picture of views of environmentally induced migration in Bangladesh and India. The results show that climate change is perceived by local experts as one of the key factors influencing migration in Bangladesh, both internally and externally. The interviewees, however, placed environmentally induced migration in a broader context of labour and economic migration. In particular, migration for environmental reasons in Bangladesh was evident long before the emergence of climate change as an issue. According to the interviewed experts, this does not preclude increased environmentally induced migration within and from Bangladesh in the future, but its analyses ought to be placed in historical and economical contexts.

This paper addresses the growing phenomenon of cosmetic surgery tourism through a focus on the development of this industry in South Korea. Unlike many discussions of this topic, the paper decentres dominant narratives based on west‐goes‐east or north‐goes‐south journeys. Instead, we look at regional flows by exploring the experiences of Chinese patients travelling to South Korea in search of facial cosmetic surgery – procedures often referred to as the ‘Korean Look’ and associated with exported Korean popular culture. We focus on the contested understandings of the motives for and outcomes of this surgery between Korean surgeons and Chinese patients, documenting one example of the cultural investments and (mis)understandings that can impact on the experiences of medical tourists as they travel across national borders in search of treatment. We situate the development of cosmetic surgery tourism in Korea in the context of a discourse we call ‘medical nationalism’, showing how surgeons in particular reproduce this discourse in terms of pride in their contribution to the economic and reputational success of South Korea on a world stage. However, we demonstrate finally that, as a privatised, feminised and trivialised form of medicine, cosmetic surgery will always fail to deliver in this respect.

Existing research on the formation of Asian medical travel destinations has highlighted a variety of activities that attract and accommodate patients from abroad. This paper contributes to the literature by drawing insights from an Indian case study, a major transnational health‐care hub in Asia that has gained little scholarly attention thus far. Using connectivity as an analytical lens, we understand medical travel destinations as a contingent product of relating, connecting and assembling. We study how connectivity is embodied and how it unfolds in care encounters at corporate hospitals in the capital of New Delhi and surrounding urban areas. The following entities are the most effectual in the networks that constitute medical travel destinations in the National Capital Region: (i) circulating narrations of personal experiences; (ii) language interpreters; and (iii) commission fees. We further elaborate on how these connectors work to link foreign patients with Indian hospitals and how they affect itineraries as well as patients and other involved actors. Finally, we suggest that the approach deployed provides a suitable framework for future research aimed at gaining a better understanding of the wider impacts of medical travel by following these connections and examining their workings at places both close and distant.

Cemetery planning in high‐density urban areas is essential for more equitable societies in Latin America. This paper addresses the implementation of a cemetery master plan in Bogotá to explore the effects of public policies. I argue that tensions between the ‘city of the dead’ and the ‘city of the living’ demonstrate how politicians and planners increasingly envision public cemeteries as urban infrastructure rather than public space, making it more difficult to manage cemeteries as a public good. This paper engages with debates about urban planning in contemporary Latin America.

Since 1983, no non‐self‐governing island connected to a (neo‐) colonial European or American metropole has acquired full Westphalian sovereignty and these islands continue to operate within constitutional frameworks that connect them to these metropoles. Large majorities in referendums on several of these islands have rejected full sovereignty. This paper opens with a review of the essential elements of the concept of sovereignty in a historical and global context, before studying how sovereignty is unfolding in new forms in non‐self‐governing islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean. As a case study, an analysis is presented of how pro‐France (loyaliste) and pro‐independence (indépendantiste) parties in New Caledonia are negotiating sovereignty with France. Evidence is given of how these New Caledonian parties are creatively using classic Westphalian signifiers of sovereignty normally reserved for sovereign states such as flags, diplomatic representations and international treaties, while still negotiating New Caledonia's sovereignty with France. This suggests that in contrast to Westphalian sovereignty, a unique ‘Islandian’ concept of sovereignty is emerging. Islands that are not sovereign in a Westphalian sense can creatively disassemble and reassemble signifiers of Westphalian sovereignty to strengthen their continuous negotiations with their metropoles and their neighbours.

Healthcare is most often examined within the confines of nation‐states. Such an analysis, however, is not necessarily indicative of reality, with people often travelling across borders for healthcare. This paper explores cross‐border travel for medical care by patients in the Lao People's Democratic Republic. The paper shows that while travelling across borders for medical care is not new, how, why and who travels across borders have changed in tandem with changes in the political and socio‐economic landscape. The paper is based on a review of the literature and qualitative interviews with patients who had crossed the border for planned healthcare (N = 43), Laotian medical officials working in public institutions (N = 5) and international health advisors (N = 6). Patients came from different districts, a range of socio‐economic backgrounds, had crossed borders for planned healthcare in the last two years and, based on key informant subjective assessments, were information‐rich respondents. The study reveals how Lao cross‐border patients creatively use the cultural and social resources at their disposal to obtain the healthcare they desire. In particular, it draws attention to the interplay between social, economic and cultural capital, and habitus in navigating access to transnational healthcare.

In Bellatin's Salón de belleza aquariums filled with exotic fish function as the symbolic nexus through which queer bodies and destructive power intersect and become involved in mutational processes. This article brings the novella into dialogue with biopolitical philosophy, queer theory and posthumanism in order to conceptualise the multivalent implications of the text's trans‐species reflections and crossings. My analysis moves beyond existing interpretations of the novella as a mournful account of the HIV/AIDS pandemic or as a text that documents violence more broadly, by calling attention to the more affirmative potentialities that are also latent in Bellatin's aesthetics of impersonality.

The outdoor electric escalator in Medellín's Comuna 13, part of an Integrated Urban Project aimed at bridging the city's socio‐spatial divide, did not fully accomplish the project's goal of increasing the mobility of 12,000 people living in the area, nor did it make a significant contribution to diminishing social inequalities. The escalator project can be considered a prestigious solution to an ill‐defined problem that did not take people's mobility patterns into account. Although the project succeeded in increasing civic pride and improving Medellín's image of modernity and progress, it also led to new social inequalities.

The expulsion from Latin America of immigrants from axis countries and their descendants is an important but little‐studied episode of the Second World War. The role of the US, and in particular that of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), in their removal has largely disappeared from historical memory. This article examines how the FBI advanced US commercial interests, and in the process harmed vulnerable people who were subject to these expulsions.

Intra‐regional medical travel by patients from Indonesia to Penang in Malaysia is embedded in and facilitated by regional circuits. Although such movement is fuelled by dissatisfaction with the health‐care services offered in Indonesia, we argue that these contemporary movements for health care are also a continuation of existing exchanges for trade, education and cultural ties that have long existed. In the first part of the paper, we consider the historical interconnections between the locations of Medan and Aceh in Indonesia and Penang in Malaysia. Based upon fieldwork and interviews with 70 intra‐regional patients travelling to Penang for treatment, we describe how these interconnections are now manifested in travel for medical care. We argue that the temporary exit from the Indonesian health system to pursue care in hospitals in Penang by some Chinese Indonesians and Acehnese follows patterns and logics based on social histories of discrimination and conflict as well as geographical convenience. This highlights the need to contextualise such travel not just as geographic movements across space but also through the depth of time and local histories.

What difference does it make if the state makes people vote? The question is central to normative debates about the rights and duties of citizens in a democracy, and to contemporary policy debates in a number of Latin American countries over what actions states should take to encourage electoral participation. Focusing on a rare case of abolishing compulsory voting in Venezuela, this article shows that not forcing people to vote yielded a more unequal distribution of income. The evidence supports Arend Lijphart's claim, advanced in his 1996 presidential address to the American Political Science Association, that compulsory voting can offset class bias in turnout and, in turn, contribute to the equality of influence.

Starting in the 1990s, reforms aimed at addressing the underrepresentation of women have been implemented in Colombia. However, research on the consequences of these reforms has been inconclusive. This article analyzes the influence of institutional variables on the proportion of nominated and elected women in Colombia between 1962 and 2014, at both the national and local levels of government, in three different institutional environments. Results confirm the influence of institutional change, indicating that decentralizing reforms and the introduction of the gender quota have had a positive impact on the proportion of women's candidacies and elections, but that the adoption of the open list negatively affected the percentage of elected women.

What happens to a country's system of labor laws when its government embraces market‐oriented reforms? In a twist on the prediction that labor regulations will be repealed, researchers find that laws remain in place but are not faithfully enforced, a phenomenon known as de facto flexibility. This article examines the case of Brazil to understand its near‐opposite; namely, resilience and renewal in the enforcement of labor regulations. It finds that labor unions have combined the corporatist authority they gained under state control with the autonomy they acquired under democratization to devise new modes of action and to safeguard existing regulations. Meanwhile, labor inspectors and prosecutors rely on existing laws to combat precarious work conditions and promote formal employment relations, which strengthen the unions. This mutually supportive arrangement is neither perfect nor free of tension, but it shows how workers can be protected even when employers are subjected to global competition.

The literature on voting behavior has generally accepted that party identification largely determines voter choice. While many studies have found that party identification is largely transmitted through social learning, less studied are the processes of the construction of party identity by way of group membership. This study seeks to understand how group identity influences party identification among Mexican workers through an analysis of the effects of union affiliation on political behavior. It assesses the utility of corporatist legacies in explaining party identity in Mexico and provides a first assessment of party affinities among independent unionists. The evidence draws from original survey data collected during six demonstrations in Mexico City. The study finds that union membership does condition the party identity of corporatist workers but not that of independent unionists.