Faculty for Management & Economics

Artikel aus FAS: Wie kann man den derzeit nach Europa strömenden Flüchtlingen helfen, ohne die bestehenden Sozialsysteme zu stark zu belasten? Dieser Beitrag schlägt hierfür europaweite eigene Sozialsysteme für Flüchtlinge vor, die von freiwilligen Beiträgen alimentiert werden. Somit wird die hohe private Hilfs- und Zahlungsbereitschaft abgeschöpft, unabhängig von nationalstaatlichen Grenzen.

Cassava is Africa's most important tuberous crop. It is an all-year-round cheap and reliable staple food for millions of Africans, making it vital for food security on the continent. However, cassava production in Africa is hindered by a persistent problem of low yield per hectare. This study addresses the dearth of research on the specific influences of area harvested and yield per hectare on cassava production in Africa. This work uses panel data from 37 African countries from 1961 to 2020 and sheds light on three key aspects. Firstly, it investigates the extent and nature of the low yield per hectare problem, offering insights into its underlying causes and implications. Secondly, it examines the interplay between area harvested and yield per hectare, revealing the factors driving the observed trends in cassava yields on the continent. Lastly, this study contributes to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Goal 15: Life on Land and Goal 2: Zero Hunger, by providing valuable information to enhance cassava production sustainability. The findings indicate that approximately 95.6% of the variability in production can be explained by changes in the area harvested, around 1.1% by yield variability, about 27.6% by consumer price index and 1.8% by temperature changes. Notably, the study observes a significant increase in the area harvested by 16.8 million hectares and average yield levels varied between 5.7 and 9.6 tonnes per hectare. The analysis also reveals a disparity in translating gains from disease eradication and introducing high-yield, disease-resistant varieties into smallholder cassava farming. In conclusion, the study highlights the potential for sustainable intensification of cassava production as a viable pathway to enhance absolute and per-hectare yields while promoting farmers’ income and mitigating cassava cultivation-related deforestation. Understanding and addressing the low yield per hectare problem in cassava production are crucial steps toward ensuring food security and achieving sustainable agricultural practices in Africa.

Africa faces severe ecological crises, such as climate change, resource depletion, and biodiversity loss, undermining sustainable development efforts and exacerbating poverty and hunger. Integrating environmental concerns into social policy planning could help build community resilience and support sustainable development. This study employed policy analysis and stakeholder engagement to identify key environmental issues, policy gaps, and strategies for integrating environmental considerations into social policies across various sectors in Africa. The study found a significant lack of integration of environmental concerns into social policy across areas like disaster management, agriculture, urban planning, healthcare access, and infrastructure development policies. As a percentage of respondents, the top environmental issues were flooding (32%), drought/desertification (13%), and food security/agriculture (11%), with farmers (35.4%) and women (21.7%) being the most vulnerable to climate change. Most community stakeholders (87.5%) emphasized the importance of integrating environmental considerations into social policy, with 56.25% rating it a high priority. They underscored the need for more locally driven planning, ecological monitoring,
land restoration, diversified livelihoods, and climate change adaptation support through social policies to enhance environmental sustainability. This study's novelty lies in its comprehensive approach to understanding and addressing the complex interplay between environmental challenges and social policy planning in Africa. The findings emphasize the urgent need for policymakers to develop cross-sectoral national and local policies that use participatory processes to prioritize environmental sustainability, adaptation, community empowerment, and alignment with sustainable development goals while being responsive to continuing environmental uncertainty and change.

This article challenges exclusively rationalist accounts of and offers a complementary explanation for the emergence of liberal trade policy in the Kennedy administration. I draw on recent insights in constructivist institutionalism to emphasize the need to take agency seriously in institutionalist research. Using archival records, I analyze the decisive role Kennedy's advisers played as carriers of ideas in advocating for liberal trade policy by 'constructing the national interest', thus convincing a reticent president to support attempts aimed at achieving closer economic integration, culminating in the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. Insights from their role as advisers can help in specifying the role of agency in the ideas and institutional change literature, through strategic action which shaped a political leader's belief and put political issues on the agenda. By grasping agency in terms of making ideas actionable, an important step is taken in advancing endogenous approaches of institutional change.

This article investigates how influential policy advice constructs a stable Congo image and upholds the belief in intervention benefits. By investigating analytical blind spots and the way counter evidence is dealt with, this article shows that current policy papers imagine the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)'s economy, politics and society in a reductionist way. The economy is seen as criminal, illegal and unproductive. The state is portrayed as weak, despite obvious examples of its influence. Finally, society is seen as dominated by sexual violence. This ‘functional pathologization’ allows for self-referential reasoning about Western interventions, security sector reform for example, and serves as a recipe to perpetuate them.

Despite growing scholarly criticism in IR and various strands of research like practice theory, governance and governmentality, the failed state is alive and well in Congo analysis. Building on a performative understanding of the state as an effect of practice, this paper enacts the Congo in three ways: Using interview material gathered in Goma and New York, I first argue that one reading of this material sees foreign humanitarians and peacekeepers engaged in enacting the Congo as a failed state. A second reading, by contrast, sees them performing it as an entity which deals with the intricacies of human nature, collective
interaction and the role of history. After highlighting the fact that both of these performances can usefully be made to undercut the seeming inescapability of the state norm in International
Relations, I argue that doing IR ethnographically is in itself a performative practice. The third performance of the Congo offered here is thus the one made by the analyst himself - an
ambiguous performance which strives to bring the state back out to render continued intervention in the Congo harder to justify.

Entwicklung ist ein schillernder Begriff, der trotz aller Kritik weiterhin selbstverständlich benutzt wird. Nicht nur westliche Planer aus Weltbank und GIZ, sondern auch Marxisten und radikale Aktivisten wie Frantz Fanon führten und führen den Begriff im Munde.

Despite widespread disenchantment with development aid and the merits of military intervention, billions continue to be spent and the number of humanitarian organizations and UN peacekeeping mission keeps rising. The West continues to have an urge to influence faraway lands. Why is this? In this seminar, we will explore the role of Western ideas and rationalities in triggering and sustaining these interventions. We will approach these rationalities with the help of theoretical texts by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben and recent more empirical work.

This chapter argues that practice theory comprises two key approaches to practices. The first claims there is a different social ontology at play with practices at its heart. The second is methodological and considers practices as heuristic devices to understand social processes better. Both approaches, however, tend to be overly empiricist. They share a reluctance towards social 'totality'. Society and capitalism are not in focus when practices are. The available shopping lists of what practice theory looks at more specifically never contain totalizing concepts. Building on a pragmatist 'logic of reconstruction' in which research is judged according to the questions and controversies it triggers and not by its design the chapter will go on to argue that he best research might thus consist in convincing and aesthetic totalizing punch-lines enriched by carefully balanced minute practices and details. Democratic Republic of Congo (Routledge) he has published in Third World Quarterly and the European Journal of International Relations among others and is currently working on a book project on the nature of money in global capitalism.

Critique is back on the scholarly agenda. Since the financial crisis critique has been debated in philosophy and sociology with renewed rigor. IR is currently picking up on these developments. Yet the critique of capitalism is largely absent in IR. This article argues that the theoretical resources deployed among ‘radical’ IR help explain this phenomenon. In order to rectify this, the article aims to resituate Marx at the center of the debate about critique. Based on a discussion of the understandings of critique by
Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour the article shows that their conscious focus on the small and the contingent has prevented a more totalizing strategy of critique from taking hold. The article illustrates this unwillingness to situate social life in our capitalist social whole by zooming in on ‘resistant’ intervention scholarship. Speaking to the nature of IR more broadly in a second step, the article shows that this lack of ‘totalizing’ analysis has been present in IR and IPE since their inception. Taking into
account Marxian and Critical Theory understandings of totality the article outlines a totalizing strategy of critique. This strategy has two components: It takes capitalism as such seriously and it offers a methodology to implement this substantial shift using Marx’ dynamic method of ‘concretization’.

Since the start of reporting during the ‘Congo wars’ in 1998 the International Crisis Group (icg) has been one of the most important sources of information for Western analysts, UN agencies and ngos dealing with the political and economic challenges of the Democratic Republic of Congo. This article takes a closer look at the way Congolese government politics is analysed in icg reports. It shows that the logics of government and the dilemmas of rule in a country with the size, geography and history of the DRC receive hardly any attention in icg reporting. Building on Klaus Schlichte’s approach to the dilemmas of rule, the article argues that President Joseph Kabila has in fact responded skilfully to the dilemmas of elite inclusion across the different hubs of power and wealth from the Kivus to Katanga to the capital Kinshasa. While his political and human rights records are by no means impeccable, not all is rotten in the state of Congo, and the Kabila government deserves more analytical rigor and openness than is offered by the pathologising modes of analysis used by the icg.