Along with the large middle income countries Brazil, China and South Africa, India has been put under increasing pressure to shoulder parts of the mitigation burden and commit to national emission reduction targets. India, however, refers to its limited capacity and wide-spread energy poverty. Is India hiding behind its poor? While others examined the distribution of emissions within the country to answer this question, we study domestic policy making at the examples of energy subsidies and access to clean energy. Evidence from a combination of interviews and secondary sources suggests that domestic policy making is not generally inconsistent with the pro-poor arguments advanced at the international level. Given their large number and the country's democratic system, the poor do have some weight in Indian politics. However, inconsistencies can be identified within India's international discourse that simultaneously tries to project an image of a strong emerging economy, and of a poor developing country in need of special treatment. We show that this branding strategy is problematic both for the progress of international climate negotiations and for India's poor.
This paper analyzes the formation and subsequent securitization of the digital protest movement Anonymous, highlighting the emergence of social antagonists from communication itself. In contrast to existing approaches that implicitly or explicitly conceptualize Othering (and securitization) as unidirectional process between (active) sender and (passive) receiver, an approach that is based on communication gives the “threat” a voice of its own. The concept proposed in this paper focuses on “designations” as communicating rules and attributes with regard to a government object. It delineates how designations give rise to the visibility of political entities and agency in the first place. Applying this framework, we can better understand the movement's path from a bunch of anonymous individuals to the collectivity “Anonymous,” posing a threat to certain bases of the state's ontological existence, its prerogative to secrecy, and challenging its claim to unrestrained surveillance. At the same time, the state's bases are implicated and reproduced in the way this conflict is constructed. The conflict not only (re)produces and makes visible “the state” as a social entity, but also changes or at least challenges the self‐same entity's agency and legitimacy. Such a relational approach allows insights into conflict formation as dynamic social process.
US extraterritorial sanctions are implemented with comprehensive global reach, despite allies and adversaries opposing and rejecting them as violations of international law. I argue that this staggering reach rests on more than just the central position of the US in the global financial system, as existing accounts indicate; it builds fundamentally on the financial system's operational autonomy. Enabled by technologies such as the 'risk-based approach' and automated screening procedures, this globalized network of private actors observes its regulatory environment through its own logic. It translates sanctions into risks susceptible to mitigation beyond the political system's territorial borders, as the cases of Switzerland and the European Union show. These jurisdictions took futile measures to defend against foreign encroachment of their authority. Unless the financial system's increased autonomy from the state system is recognized conceptually, analyses of international sanctions will remain deficient and attempts to counter their extraterritorial reach ineffective.
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