We are very pleased to present the ninth edition of the Cambridge Journal of Political Affairs. Scroll down to read articles online, access the letter from the editors, or read the full issue here.

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Letter from the Editors:

With the Journal in its fourth year and ninth edition, we have been delighted to witness the momentum gained, especially throughout the previous issue, continue and even be accelerated during this issue. From over sixty submissions coming from thirty-two unique global institutions, we have chosen twelve articles based on the strength of their argument, the quality of their writing, and the sheer depth of their research. This issue is a generalist and interdisciplinary effort to bring together twelve articles with the furthest reaches, both in the geographical as well as the disciplinary sense, of politics.

What kind of story can we tell from the twelve articles that we present to our readers for the latest issue of this Journal? What story can we tell about the articles — fruits of six months of cooperative labour between authors and the editorial board — when considered as a whole, while also remaining true to these authors’ unique research paths and idiosyncratic engagement with political affairs? There is undoubtedly much value in simply appreciating the sheer diversity of concerns and letting the articles breathe without pigeonholing them. Perhaps no such single story is possible, given these authors’ different thematic concerns, methodological approaches, and backgrounds.

Still, the question that we found before us was whether, in doing so, we would be reinforcing the seeming fragmentation nowadays so pervasive in the social and political sciences: the turn away from the macro (too metaphysical, too abstract, too vague) to the micro (more grounded, more precise, more real). The true danger of this fragmentation is not in its focus on details nor its preference for data over abstraction.  Instead, it is in its whispered suggestion that politics can indeed be an isolated field in which the paradigms of study need not be applicable beyond one’s isolated region of interest. The intellectual magpie flies, never to return to a drudgery of over-specialisation, and students devoid of broader training that ask the same questions.

The intellectual battle between the micro and macro certainly cannot be resolved in these pages. The words stamped in black on the white light of the screen’s background are instead an invitation for you to examine the spaces in between. How do each of these articles, each discipline, and each theme contribute to academic politics? What can also be revealed about the puzzle of academic study more widely when encountering its missing pieces? In this initial letter, we provide summaries to consider the running threads and thematic concerns of the various articles, in view to better illustrate both the diversity of the research considered in this issue and the family resemblance that underlies many of its concerns. We hope to enable our readers to peruse at their own leisure, letting the experience of jumping from one article to another be an experience both of discovery and of contemplation.  May you see these thematic groupings as only door frames, through which you must pass to enter but which you ultimately leave behind in that very act of stepping forward.

THE ARTICLES

We begin this issue with Jonah Lo’s examination of Singapore’s challenges in navigating Indonesia’s shifting political landscape following the fall of Suharto and the New Order regime. Making use of Alexei Tsygankov’s (2013) model of foreign policy, Lo attributes this struggle to Singapore’s failure to understand Indonesia’s profound political changes and effectively engage with the emerging diverse new actors, especially with regard to popular politics and civilian strategies. Unlike Japan and the United States, which have prioritised Indonesia’s novel democratic dimension in their diplomatic relations, considering empirical sources such as speeches and press releases allows Lo to see that Singapore has rarely engaged with Indonesian popular politics to the detriment of the security relationship between the two states.

The inability to adequately engage with the political apparatuses of a country and a certain preoccupation with its political developments is not unique to Singapore, nor is it particular to relations between nation-states. Entities such as the European Union, for example, are principally preoccupied with monitoring the values and political apparatuses of its neighbours as well as directly working to ensure that reforms are implemented within those neighbouring nations to bring them ideologically and politically closer to itself. In a way, the European Union’s situation initially appears to be the very opposite of Singapore’s. Whereas the latter is reluctant to embrace the democratic transition within Indonesia, the European Union’s explicit goal under the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) for countries such as Moldova and Armenia has been to help foster sustainable democratic reforms and good governance. However, as Adriene Daniere explores, attempts at reform promoted by the European Union have – for the moment – yielded rather disappointing and fairly meagre results. As Lo explores in the case of Singapore, the European Union’s ambitions towards its two neighbours remain comparably frustrated and only half-realised as Moldova continues to exhibit high levels of corruption and Armenia has had similarly disappointing progress with regard to democratic and anti-corruption reforms (Daniere, 2024, p. 28). Although Daniere rightly discusses several other impacting factors, such as Russian and American influence, and problems of internal cohesion, he argues that the EU continues to struggle to establish effective transgovernmental cooperation with partner administrations in both countries as well as sustained implementation of democracy and anti-corruption reforms, because of the lack of inclusiveness of its traditional top-down approach to promoting democracy.

Yet, if Lo and Daniere endeavour to show the losses incurred by national and supranational organisations for their failure to fairly engage with the specificities of those reckoned as ‘other’ or in need of support, we must wonder what the view might be like from the vantage point of those very ‘others’. In tracing self-identification generally in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), and the Visegrád group in particular, Leonas Pausch finds a contested and conflicted sense of belonging within an imagined European civilisational destiny. More recent memories of disillusionment with post-Soviet liberalisation, coupled with a lingering sense that — despite the Iron Curtain long having fallen down — Western European counterparts remain rather unwilling to part from their perception of CEE countries as unruly enfants terribles, continue to shape the self-perception of these countries and their people. The sense of being looked at with concern and suspicion by the other whom one is encouraged to emulate creates fractured identities: as Bhabha (1994) explains in the context of colonial relations, efforts by a dominant power to encourage mimicry can create subjects who fluctuate between complicity and mockery. Similarly, Pausch reveals how the region and its national leaders oscillate between embracing their role of eager students of Western integration and that of the populist rebels who mock and oppose neoliberal values. In other words, this attempt by a more powerful entity to enforce its normative values upon the weaker party produces here ambivalent national identities rather than straightforward norm acceptance.

Implicit in Pausch’s account is the very conflicted yet intense emotional dimension that comes with the performance of one’s social roles and political obligations. Rather than emotion as exclusively an effect of political action, emotions (even when troubled and conflicted) may also act as the directives of that action. Charlotte Stobart’s article provides the methodological tools to consider how the affective dimension of the human experience may play an incisive role in political affairs, particularly regarding political mobilisation. Stobart considers the emotional dynamics at play during the 2011 Arab Spring, which allowed large portions of the Egyptian population to move from a state of passivity to which they had been relegated during Hosni Mubarak’s regime to activism. Social life is not merely the site of colliding individual human subjects, who may occasionally bounce off one another or be pulled and pushed around according to the forces present. Instead, engaging with ‘affect’ allows us to see how emotion creates and dissolves bonds between individual agents. In this way, Stobart demonstrates that the principal alchemical feat of emotions is to create a united community of collective action from disparate individuals.

If Stobart’s account mostly emphasises the positive role of emotion in building strong political communities geared around social justice, from Zoe Zhang’s contribution, we might extract a certain caution towards too eager an embrace of the ontological prioritisation of the category of life over that of the mind or reason. Zhang traces the genealogy of Richard Wagner’s vitalism to Friedrich Nietzsche and Ernst Jünger, and the family resemblances shared by these thinkers. Wagner’s vitalism, with its emphasis on life, emotion, and instinct, laid the groundwork for intellectual movements that rejected rationalism and instead valorised a raw, unmediated connection to existence. As Zhang concludes, ‘reactionary modernism would have been unthinkable without the initial existence of Wagnerian vitalism’ (Zhang, 2024, p. 59). In other words, this trajectory culminated in the emergence of reactionary modernism, where romanticised notions of life and vitality intertwined with nationalist and anti-modernist ideologies.

There remains something highly relevant to Walter Benjamin’s warning against an ‘aestheticisation of politics’ that has as its priority the emotional spectacle, insofar as it was a key ingredient to the insurgence of fascist regimes for the philosopher (Benjamin, 1935). As Anthony Marx rightly points out in his critique of Benedict Anderson, collective sentiment can be (and is often, in actuality) constructed or mobilised by the elite (Marx, 2002, p. 104). It is this ‘organised creation’ of sentiment to which Siyue Tang pays attention in the context of Serbian ethnic nationalism during the Yugoslav Wars (Tang, 2024, p. 71). Employing the framework of ‘securitisation theory’, Tang considers how ethnic animosity expressed by Serbian nationalists towards Croats and Kosovo Albanians was neither the by-product of supposed Balkan primitivism nor the result of an inevitable civilisation clash. Instead, Tang speaks of the deliberate political spectacle created around security fears, which fuelled ethnic solidarity and justified violence against outgroup ethnicities.

The production of emotion is thus entangled with the dynamics of power such that sometimes, as with Serbian nationalism, emotion is manufactured with clear directives. A similar situation appears in Jasmine Kalstein, Amina Lučkova, Elisabetta Ragonese, Marta Sacco, and Réka György’s Foucauldian exploration of how collective trauma has been weaponised in nationalist discourses in Russia and Israel.  Similarly to Lo’s emphasis on the methodological value of media valuation for political analysis, the authors engage in critical discourse analysis (CDA) of public statements published by Russian and Israeli state media platforms. In the case of Russia, for example, Putin’s mobilisation of historical memory through public speeches has been particularly noticeable in the context of the invasion of Ukraine. In this context, Putin is shown to strive to draw links between the present Russian aggression and collective memories of the heavy losses suffered at the hands of Nazi forces during the Second World War: ‘your fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers did not fight the Nazis, defending our common homeland, so that today it would be the neo-Nazis who seized power in Ukraine’ Putin recalls (Videoklub, 2022). This kind of collective recollection is far from spontaneous, as Pierre Nora (1989) has made clear, and in the work of Kalstein et at., knowledge about the past emerges as a fragile artefact deeply embedded within and vulnerable to nationalist discourses.

However, while Foucault is the thinker par excellence to consult on power dynamics, it is crucial to avoid the simplistic assumption that he reckoned power to flow one-sidedly. The complexities – and productiveness – of power emerge, especially when considering discourses concerning discourses surrounding the bordering and health of migration governance in Europe. Ben Brent coins the term ‘contested creation’ to explain the ‘production and reproduction of the spaces and practices of migration governance and conditions the experiences therein’ insofar as it allows the power that flows through these spaces to emerge ‘diffuse and relational rather than a tangible entity possessed by the state’ (Brent, 2024, p. 108).  If ‘health-based reasoning has entrenched violent bordering practices’ and has allowed the state’s apparatus to wield the powers of life and death over the bodies of migrants, the ‘capacity to contest manifested through the medium of health’ (Brent, 2024, pp. 104-105). Even when the state’s apparatus emerges at its most brutal, a space for agency and resistance remains.

With these debates about agency and power in mind, Subomi Ade-Alamu critiques the post-conflict policies in Sierra Leone, particularly the Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration (DDR) program, for neglecting the reintegration of girl soldiers. As Ade-Alamu finds, of the total 6,900 children registered as DDR programme participants, only 529 girls were registered, although estimates placed a total of 8,600 to 11,400 eligible girls (Ade-Alamu, 2024, p. 111). Through a close critical analysis of United Nations documents, Ade-Alamu argues that Western assumptions about women as victims, especially of sexual violence, have overlooked the complex roles of girl soldiers in these conflicts, who occupy dual positions as both victims and perpetrators. Insofar as these assumptions about agency have led to flawed policies regarding rehabilitation, they have caused significant harm to the girls’ livelihoods. Ade-Alamu argues that given the girl soldier’s experience, the goal of post-conflict policy should not be to ‘fully return people to their prior state’ or a ‘shallow return’ but instead ‘deep reconciliation’ that allows for change as well as rehabilitation (Ade-Alamu, 2024, p. 128).

Brent and Ade-Alamu both beckon us to consider the assumptions which underlie our understanding of who counts as an agent and who is instead relegated to a passive position in our imagination: Brent explores the false portrayal of the state as the sole wielder of influence, and Ade-Alamu considers the patriarchal assumptions that confine girls in Sierra Leone to the exclusive role of victims.  Bailey Gould continues this trend to examine the relegation of agency solely within the confines of the human subject. Attributing the crises in the Niger Delta solely to oil overlooks the historical and ongoing patterns of nature’s exploitation that are central to capital accumulation, which involves the exclusion of both human and non-human elements from society. In examining environmental degradation, Gould advocates for a perspective that views nature as an active agent capable of resisting exploitative capitalist relations: ‘nature pushes back against the contradictory relations of capital’ (Gould, 20204, p. 133). We can read in Gould echoes of Latour’s emphasis on the agency of ‘non-human entities’ and the need to overcome the anthropocentric’ object avoidance tendency’ of political philosophy (Latour, 2005, p. 15).  This approach challenges anthropocentric views and reframes environmental history as a site of struggle and resilience.

The overall concern of these articles is to, therefore, add political dynamism to what often appears as static or common sense. Eduard-Alex Ciuhandu adds a quantitative perspective to this approach by examining the political factors that influence the adoption of mandatory private pensions in EU countries. Using a mixed-methods approach, including binary time-series cross-section and survival analyses from 1980 to 2020, Ciuhandu also conducts an in-depth study of Romania and analyses World Bank pension reform projects in six other countries. Ciuhandu’s findings highlight the significant role of the governing party’s ideology and the involvement of international institutions like the World Bank, with Romania serving as a key case study. Ciuhandu’s accomplishment is to look critically at a topic often entrenched in technocratic discourse, where quantitative studies rarely focus on political factors.

Yet even if choices are mediated by structured political dynamics, agency and a concern for the lived experience must remain central to our analyses. Although it may not be possible to ever unearth a transparent reality devoid of political influence, and even if political discourse is what generates that shared reality, one must come to terms both with the multifaceted effects of singular political discourses (as Pausch’s case had highlighted) and that the multiple actors engaged in the scene may propose varied narratives. Luke Dorman’s article thus cautions us from taking at face value the explanations of the Chinese state for China’s Rural Revitalisation and for why many urban dwellers have begun relocating to the countryside. The Chinese state is invested in a narrative of rural revitalisation, yet by engaging directly with the motivation of these migrating individuals through interviews, Dorman finds that choices about relocation are often more reactive and largely influenced by immediate economic pressures rather than long-term plans. As Dorman finds it, ‘there is no significant relationship between either participants’ desire to help the rural poor or their experience of inspiring media and a desire for rural relocation’ (Dorman, 2024, p. 184). The assumption that rural revitalisation should align with cultural or ideological ideals may thus overlook the more urgent, material concerns that shape people’s behaviours and lived experiences.

CLOSING REMARKS

The Cambridge Journal of Political Affairs has, since its inception in 2020, dedicated itself to nurturing talented scholars in political affairs. Our Seminar Series, Special Edition, Research Conference, the expansion into short-form content, and this issue have all been designed to afford more space and attention to undergraduate research. Throughout its history, the Journal has welcomed submissions from over 40 institutions and over 15 countries. Over the course of its previous issues, eighty unique authors have seen their work published. With each issue, we have witnessed both a sustained growth within the editorial team, as well as an expansion and diversification of those authors who choose our Journal in which to both refine and give a platform to their research.  As a direct result of this growth, with the attention and diligence of each new editorial board, the Journal now stands in good stead to expand its initiatives, offering even greater opportunities to young scholars in Politics. 

Each issue has, furthermore, brought about a refinement of our review processes and an improvement of our publication standards. For the latest issue, the Journal’s review processes have been, once again, innovated. We have developed a ‘pre-review’ procedure, which we hope has further improved our vetting processes, bolstered the role of Managing Editor, and increased the number of stages at which authors can expect feedback on their submissions. For their contributions to this improvement in our review processes, we are also thankful to the members of our Oversight Board, composed of academics from the Department of Politics and International Studies. We sincerely wish to thank Duncan Kelly, Ayşe Zarakol, and members of Cambridge University Press and the Cambridge Review of International Affairs for their patience and support.

We sincerely hope that our readers may see the value we have tried to bring to the fore through this ninth edition of the Journal. This is for academia and student editors, publication, originality, and contribution to student research. Through the great diversity of case studies, theories, and methodological innovations offered here, may you discover something new about why – in an age seemingly saturated by politics – its careful, deliberate study remains all the more necessary.

Matilde Fulfaro and Rachel East

Editors in Chief

Volume 5, Issue 2

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