Why did the far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, with financial support from Donald Trump's US government, preside over the group recognition of around 47,000 displaced Venezuelans as ...refugees? It would appear implausible that a far-right, nationalistic government led by a president who had expressed visceral hostility to migrants and refugees would use the provisions of a progressive regional framework to grant refugee status to thousands of displaced people, aided by a US president whose government was literally caging child refugees. To address this question, we show that recognition of Venezuelans as refugees was grounded in an existing and credible legal and bureaucratic process managed by the Brazilian National Committee for Refugees (CONARE) that also brought to bear the influence and presence of key international actors, particularly the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). An additional crucial factor was Bolsonaro's anti-communism, which provided a strong ideological and instrumental motivation for his government to engage with the US government of Donald Trump in its efforts to undermine the Maduro regime in Venezuela and led to the seemingly paradoxical situation of a far-right Brazilian government granting refugee status to thousands of displaced people that exceeded responses in other South American countries.
Pioneers moving into Iowa in the nineteenth century created a distinctly rural culture: family, farm, church, and school were its dominant institutions. After decades of settlement, however, several ...lively and perceptive generations interpreted their political, economic, and cultural environment-their Iowa-much more imaginatively; they offered such abundant insight, understanding, meaning, and mission that they mentally and spiritually recreates Iowa. In Kinship with the Land historian Brad Burns celebrates this intense period of intellectual and cultural development.Through their novels, short stories, poems, essays, drawings, and paintings, Iowa's regionalists expressed a rich abstraction of people and place. They conferred meaning, imparted understanding, defined the soil and the folk, conveyed a sense of place. Grant Wood in his overalls-the quintessential symbol of sophisticated talent and rural values-clearly represented regionalism's spiritual solidarity with the land and the people who worked it. Burns lets these Iowans speak for themselves, then interprets their distinctive voices to present a cogent case for and an understanding of the rural in an overwhelming urban America.Kinship with the Land emphasizes the importance of Iowa's intellectual and cultural history and reaffirms the state's identity at the very moment that standardization threatened to eradicate it. By endowing Iowa with vibrant, independent art and literature, regionalists made refreshing sense of their environment. Readers from every state will appreciate their generous legacy.
There is a growing scholarly consensus that Latin American regionalism has entered a new phase. For some observers, the increasing complexity of regional cooperation initiatives renders collective ...action ineffective. For others, the creation of new schemes signals a "posthegemonic" moment that has opened a space for collaboration on social issues. Both camps attribute this shift to the absence of the United States and the presence of left-leaning governments. By contrast, this study demonstrates that this agenda is not new, nor has the United States impeded similar initiatives in the past. In fact, the United States was instrumental in expanding regional cooperation on social issues in the early twentieth century. Instead, this article argues that agenda shifts are best explained by an evolving consensus about the role of the state. The "new agenda" is in line with historical attempts by governments to use regionalism to bolster their own domestic reforms.
Among the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit outcomes, localisation of humanitarian aid has received the greatest amount of attention. Localisation is described as giving more support to national first ...respondents, making humanitarian aid 'as local as possible, as international as necessary'. Despite the good intentions, localisation presents a biased understanding of the local and its agency in transforming humanitarianism. Not only is localisation a failed attempt to reconfigure the international humanitarian system power relations, dominated by Western actors, but also it glosses over the crucial role of the South in moulding the humanitarian action norm. In order to address the latter, the paper reviews the history of humanitarian action in East Asia as a case of norm circulation, showing how the region's agency was essential to accommodate the foundations of liberal humanitarianism during the Cold War and, in the last two decades, to contest them. I argue that instead of localisation, a process of deglobalisation is taking shape in the region, based on increased national ownership of crisis response, privileging reciprocal, bilateral support over multilateral action, and legitimating the rejection of unnecessary support. These changes are pushing traditional humanitarian actors to rethink their practices, bringing much-needed change but also challenges.
This special issue examines the contributions of Latin American thinkers and theorists who have analyzed the various regional cooperation and integration initiatives since the 19th century. This ...special issue includes papers that evaluate Latin American contributions on the subject. The premise on which the special issue is based upon is developed in this presentation: there is a long tradition of Latin American reflection on regional integration and cooperation. This tradition was first manifested in an “knowledge about regionalism”, an expression of which was the contributions of Simón Bolívar, Francisco Bilbao, José Martí or José Enrique Rodo. There was already in the twentieth century a shift towards a theorization of Latin American regionalism, a first expression of which, although still embryonic, was the work of Alejandro Bunge, but that theorization acquired maturity from 1949 in Raúl Prebisch and the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC). Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, Helio Jaguaribe and Juan Carlos Puig developed the theory of autonomy. Thinkers such as Aldo Ferrer or Alberto Methol Ferré also made contributions to this Latin American. The evolution from a “knowledge about regionalism” to a theorization on the issue in Latin America is account in this presentation. Resumen En este número especial se examinan las contribuciones de pensadores y teóricos latinoamericanos que analizan las diversas iniciativas de cooperación e integración regional desde el siglo XXI. Para ello se incluyen trabajos que evalúan los aportes latinoamericanos sobre el tema. La premisa en la que se basa este número temático se desarrolla en esta presentación: existe una larga tradición de reflexión propia latinoamericana en torno a la integración y cooperación regional. Esto se manifestó primero en un “saber integracionista”, expresión de lo cual fue la obra de Simón Bolívar, Francisco Bilbao, José Martí o José Enrique Rodo. Ya en el siglo XX se hace un giro hacia una teorización del regionalismo latinoamericano, una de cuyas primeras expresiones, aunque aún embrionaria, es la obra de Alejandro Bunge, pero que adquiere madurez en Raúl Prebisch y al Comisión Económica para América Latina (CEPAL) a partir de 1949. Posteriormente, en los años 70 y 80 del siglo XX, Helio Jaguaribe y Juan Carlos Puig desarrollan la teoría de la autonomía. Pensadores como Aldo Ferrer o Alberto Methol Ferré también hacen contribuciones a esta reflexión propia. En este número temático se analiza esa evolución de “un saber sobre regionalismo” a una teorización sobre el tema en América Latina. Palabras claves: América Latina; regionalismo; integración; teoría; saber
With the exception of the Sica genesis sequence, the Central American presidential summits have received little attention from academics, both empirically and theoretically. If those presidential ...summits were considered crucial for the pacification of Central America in the 1980s, have they played such a central role in the institutionalization of Central American integration since then? We provide an empirical examination of the Central American presidential summits’ state of play in order to assess the place of presidential diplomacy as a driving force of Central American regionalism. We claim the summits are in crisis and through them the presidential model of Central American regionalism as a whole.
The European and African experiences of integration have followed different historical trajectories. However, Africa's approach to regionalism seems to be dominated by European conceptions in two ...areas: political and institutional. From an institutional perspective, a number of European Union and African Union institutions bare certain similarities. Do these institutional similarities represent traceable evidence of the diffusion of regional integration from the European Union to the African Union? This article answers this question using a process tracing methodology within a policy transfer and diffusion framework. It tests for evidence of diffusion haven occurred through conditionalities (incentives) offered from EU support for Africa's continental integration as well as for lesson drawing and emulation by the AU. It finds no traceable evidence of diffusion from the EU to the OAU/AU between 1963 to 2003 and concludes that normative emulation is the most probable cause of the institutional similarities between the EU and AU.
Regionalism is not only a sociological phenomenon, but also an important culture-forming process influencing the development of the human person. The social thought of the Church refers to it ...straightforwardly as an anthropological phenomenon and interprets it as an axiological category. Referring to these assumptions, the article analyzes regionalism through the prism of the personalistic category of participation described by Karol Wojtyła in the book The Acting Person, the structure of which is based on two principles: solidarity and objection. These principles can serve as a criterion for assessing individual forms of regionalism in terms of answering the question of to what extent they recognize and acknowledge the subjectivity of each member of the regional community, and to what extent they refer to the key values of regional solidarity and the region’s common good.
Despite Flanders is often presented as a handbook example of strong regionalism, the organization of a referendum on Flemish independence has never been on the political agenda. This article explains ...the reasons for the absence of a self-determination referendum in Flanders and shows that, since the 2000s, the omnipresence of the self-rule issue at the top of the political agenda is not – per se – a direct response to regionalist demands of Flemish voters or the Flemish political class. Instead, it is the consociational features of the Belgian political system that enhance intra-community party competition and contribute to the escalade of inter-community conflicts. This mostly explains the deep constitutional crises of the late 2000s and early 2010s. In this context, we can better understand why Flanders independence is supported neither by a majority of the population (9.5 percent), nor its representatives (except those belonging to one of the two regionalist parties, N-VA and VB).
This paper investigates the terminology associated with "New regionalism" and its integration into Ukrainian legislation, analyzing its political and administrative implications. "New regionalism" is ...a contemporary administrative-territorial reform, with a focus on the principle of subsidiarity, which minimizes central authority intervention in local affairs. While not explicitly present in its regulations, certain subsidiarity elements are part of Ukrainian law. The study explores the adoption and implementation of "New regionalism" principles and terminology within the country's legal discourse. The second aim of the study was to examine how "New regionalism" could potentially influence the political dynamics and administrative structures, particularly in the context of decentralization efforts. By employing systematic and comparative methodologies alongside principles of dialectical analysis, the study offers insights into the evolving landscape of Ukrainian political and administrative terminology alongside its structures, which might play a crucial role in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
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