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We take the opportunity presented by the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Che Guevara to reexamine his life and revolutionary program and the legacy he left behind. Attention is given to the formative influences that led to his introduction to Fidel Castro and his involvement in the Cuban revolution. We take a close look at the stylized theory of revolution that emerged from this experience, his reflective writings on the subject, and his subsequent attempts to generalize and apply his revolutionary model in the Congo and Bolivia. This model is critically interpreted and evaluated through the lense of his eleven month Bolivian campaign. We conclude by examining the ‘paradox’ of Che Guevara. He was a failed guerrilla who remains an iconic symbol of the revolutionary Left. He was an authentic true believer who dreamed that it might be possible to one day forge a utopian society of ‘new men’ and yet, fifty years after his death, his revolutionary project is farther away from being realized than e...

William I. Robinson (2008), Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 440 Pages. ISBN 978–0801890390. $55.00. Lat...

In this contribution we focus on the political merits as well as limitations of the project of Third Worldism. Through critical historical analysis we identify the difference that Third Worldism made to world politics. At the same time it was without a doubt beset with contradictions from its inception. By foregrounding the contexts of development struggles, we hope to illustrate—at least minimally—these contradictions. From our perspective these are to be found in the politics of emancipatory nationalism. On the one hand, this facilitated a freedom of a kind: recognition and formal equality in world politics. On the other, the institutional form this took was premised on the assumption that national development (especially of the postcolonial states) was somehow independent of wider historical as well as ‘transnational’ social and political relations. A more relational understanding of the history of development would reveal the extent to which wealth and poverty, order, violence and conflict ar...

The theory and practice of development has a complicated relationship to the history of war and peace in the 20th century. Efforts to realise the promise of progress have been played out against the backdrop of the crisis of colonialism, national liberation, decolonisation and the rise and fall of Third Worldism. Third Worldism, conceptualised as a specific project to realise the promises of progress, was also affected by the transformation and onset of the crisis of the nation-state system and the re-calibration of the development–security nexus in the post-Cold War era. The short history of the ‘three worlds of development' appears now to have been overlaid by global development; that is, a process which entails intensified social and political network-relations, with accompanying regulatory efforts becoming more global in scope and reach. Yet, the most influential drivers and proponents of ‘progress' continue to focus on the nation-state as the natural mechanism for the realisation of developm...

This paper focuses on the theory and practice of nation-building. This is done primarily in an effort to explicate how area studies (AS), development studies (DS), and international studies (IS) have been, and continue to be, embedded in international security and economic/development policy processes and questions of national sovereignty, international relations, and global governance. The central argument is that at this world-historical juncture the nation-state system (and the pursuit of modernity via the nation-state) is one of the key obstacles to the achievement of a genuinely emancipatory modernity in an era of global oligopolistic capitalism centered on US hegemony. The analysis followed here challenges the way in which the nation-state, and the nation-state system, remain central to and continue to be routinized and naturalized by the dominant discourses within AS, DS, and IS. Furthermore, with the end of the Cold War, the boundaries between AS, DS, and IS, and their relationship to int...

Ian F.W. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies: Guerillas and their Opponents since 1750 (London: Routledge, 2001). Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of Am...

This article is an effort to advance the political and intellectual debate on the theory and practice of nation building in an era of collapsing states. I assume at the outset that we are in the midst of a crisis of the nation-state system as a whole and, thus of the vast majority of its constituent polities. This is not a problem that can be addressed by technocratic prescriptions for the creation or stabilisation of particular collapsing or failing nation-states or the rehabilitation of the nation-state system as a whole. In this context the debate about nation building needs to be carried well beyond its current terms of reference. Only by dramatically deepening and broadening the current level of both commitment and understanding of what is at stake can we begin to come to grips with the fate of nations, the collapse of states and the future of the world.

This concluding article returns to some of the key themes of this volume in relation to insurgency, counter-insurgency and collapsing states. In particular it attempts to characterise the relationship between the Long War and the Cold War, in relation to the transformation of the nation-state system. More broadly it emphasises that the Cold War was an often misdirected, militarised struggle between ‘genuinely existing’ liberal capitalism and ‘genuinely existing’ state socialism (the First World and the Second World) against each other and for influence and power in the erstwhile Third World. The Long War, meanwhile, reflects both the triumph of ‘genuinely existing’ liberal capitalism as the dominant form of secular modernity over an equally, if not more virulently secular ‘genuinely existing’ state-socialism, and the emergence of an anti-secular neo-traditionalism (often, but not exclusively, Islamic) at both the nation-state and the transnational level. At the same time the binary that drove the...

The article of record as published may be located at http://dx.doi.org/10,1080/01436590601153572 This introductory article provides the context for the contemporary debate about insurgency, counterinsurgency and collapsing states taking place against the backdrop of what originated as the ‘global war on terror’ (GWOT) and is now increasingly being characterised as ‘the Long War’. The Long War and the GWOT are often represented as a ‘new’ era in warfare and US geopolitics, despite the fact that, rhetorically, George W Bush and other administration officials have on occasion invoked the Second World War as analogous to the Long War. This article argues that the Long War is new in important respects, but it also bears many similarities to the Cold War. A key similarity between the Cold War and the Long War is the way in which insurgency and counterinsurgency are seen primarily in the context of inter- state rivalry in which the critical local or regional dynamics of revolution and counter-revolution are neglected. In this context US policy makers and their allies have again erroneously applied a ‘grand strategy’ that suits the imperatives of conventional military and geopolitical thinking rather than engaging with what is a much more variegated array of problems facing the changing global order. The Long War is ostensibly a war against various non- state movements, networks and actors, and is even represented as such by the Pentagon and the White House. However, the overall approach to the Long War has continued to fall back on the conventional ‘American Way of War’ that produces more problems than it solves.

The conclusion to this special issue reiterates some of the wider themes sketched out at the beginning and in the various contributions. At the same time it also foreshadows ways to move beyond nat...

This introductory article emphasises the need to put the contemporary nation-building (state-building) effort in post-Saddam Iraq and elsewhere in historical perspective. With the resurgence of a powerful international discourse on nation-building that draws very selectively on the ostensible lessons of earlier nation-building successes and failures since 1945 (in fact the term nation-building is increasingly being substituted for the less problematic concept of state-building), it is more important than ever to set the idea and practice of nation-building in the context of decolonisation, the universalisation of the nation-state system, the geopolitics of the rise and fall of the Cold War and the transformation of the global political economy between the 1950s and the 1990s. In contrast to a growing number of quantitative and technocratic studies of nation-building and political instability, the article emphasises the profound need for broad qualitative analysis that historicises and de-routinis...

T. Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Pp.xix + 260. US$24.95. ISBN 0-231-13166-6. A.J. Dommen, The Indochinese E...

Despite its importance and timeliness Peter Gowan's article “Triumphing toward International Disaster” falls short insofar as it fails to locate “American Grand Strategy” in the context of the global social relations of the capitalist order; particularly problematic is the way that he takes for granted the constitution of “global politics” as a system of nation-states. In our response we try to draw out some of the inconsistencies in Gowan's analysis by engaging the state-centeredness of his argument and discussing some of the implications of this for critical engagement with the changing world order and the current global crisis.

The idea of the Third World, which is usually traced to the late 1940s or early 1950s, was increasingly used to try and generate unity and support among an emergent group of nation-states whose governments were reluctant to take sides in the Cold War. These leaders and governments sought to displace the ‘East–West’ conflict with the ‘North–South’ conflict. The rise of Third Worldism in the 1950s and 1960s was closely connected to a range of national liberation projects and specific forms of regionalism in the erstwhile colonies of Asia and Africa, as well as the former mandates and new nation-states of the Middle East, and the ‘older’ nation-states of Latin America. Exponents of Third Worldism in this period linked it to national liberation and various forms of Pan-Asianism, Pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism and Pan-Americanism. The weakening or demise of the first generation of Third Worldist regimes in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with or was followed by the emergence of a second generation of Third Worldist...

The US plays a pivotal role in the contemporary international system and is able to shape that system to reflect its own interests. At a time when the contemporary international order is in a period of flux, and when the position of the US itself is subject to a range of internal pressures and external challenges, it is useful to try and gauge both the character of, and limits to, US hegemony. We shall examine the dynamics of US power in the context of East Asia, the region most likely to generate a challenge to US hegemony in the coming century. The first part of the paper considers the concept of hegemony. Following this, we place America's relationship with East Asia in historical context, before considering its current relationships with China, Japan and the region as a whole. The central argument we advance is that the character of US hegemony is changing and this is closely connected to the wider transformation of the nation-state system.

In early December 1992, in a brief address to the Annual Conference on Trade, Investment and Development in the Caribbean Basin held in Miami, U.S. President-Elect Bill Clinton, proclaimed that ‘to...

(2001). The post-cold war predicament: A conclusion. Third World Quarterly: Vol. 22, No. 6, pp. 1079-1085.

With the end of the Cold War, economic policies (grounded in romantic conceptions of laissez-faire and validated by neoclassical economics) and political prescriptions (based on the idealisation of representative democracy and legitimated by liberal political science) have emerged as crucial elements in a powerful global discourse on development and modernity. This introductory article argues that a central weakness of the dominant development discourse that emerged after 1945 was the way in which (in the context of decolonisation and the consolidation of the nation-state system), the nation-state was enshrined as the key unit of analysis and praxis. Between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s the dominant development discourse was grounded in the assumption that nation-states were homogenous and natural units of a wider international politico-economic order and that state-mediated national development could, should and would lead to economic, and eventually even political, outcomes beneficial to, or at least...

One noteworthy feature of the political crisis in Indonesia, which followed the Asian financial crisis of 1997 was the speed with which the collapse of the Suharto government was subsumed by a wider crisis of the Indonesian nation-state. One aspect of this crisis is the strengthening of secessionist movements in several regions of Indonesia, calling into question the country's national boundaries, themselves a legacy of the Dutch colonial era. This article examines the tensions in the nation-building efforts of the Indonesian state by focusing on the three territories where secessionist movements have been strongest: East Timor, which has already successfully broken away from Indonesia, and Irian Jaya and Aceh, where long-standing secessionist movements experienced significant growth in the aftermath of the resignation of President Suharto on 21 May 1998. Our analysis emphasises that these secessionist movements arose in direct response to the ways in which the Indonesian state, especially during the Suha...

This article looks at the rise of APEC as a vehicle for the promotion of free trade in the Asia-Pacific. It argues that, although the Japanese government was more interested in trade cooperation than free trade, it played a key role, along with the Australian government, in the establishment of APEC, while the main challenge to APEC came from the Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamed. During the 1990s, however, Mahathir's proposal for an East Asian Economic Bloc which excluded the USA, Australia, New Zealand and all other 'non-Asian' nation-states, was incorporated into APEC and took the name of the East Asian Economic Caucus. The accommodation of Mahathir's proposal to the APEC process, and his inability to get Japanese support for his pan-Asian initiative, symbolised the limits on any and all regional challenges to US hegemony in the Asia-Pacific. The article also emphasises that, with the coming of the East Asian crisis, the prospects of a successful regional challenge to US hegemony have become e...

(1999). Feature review Up from neoliberalism: Free-market mythologies and the coming crisis of global capitalism. Third World Quarterly: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 453-463.

(1997). Old state and new empire in Indonesia: Debating the rise and decline of Suharto's New Order. Third World Quarterly: Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 321-362.

Mary A. Renda has written an engaging study of the history of the U.S. occupation of Haiti and its aftermath in relation to the wider cultural dynamics of U.S. imperialism and the changing character of American national identity in the first half of the twentieth century. Taking Haiti is part of an important and growing literature on the cultures of U.S. empire building seeking to shed light on the complexity of the interaction between the agents of U.S. expansion and the peoples with whom they come into contact. In particular this emergent field of study has illuminated the role of both formal territorial expansion and the more informal types of U.S. imperialism in the production of U.S. national identity. The occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and the creation of a Haitian Gendarmerie under the aegis of the U.S. Marine Corps, as Renda makes clear, not only had important implications for the culture of the U.S. civilising mission, but also fed directly into the changing character of national-...

Introduction: US Power, North American Knowledge and the Cold War There is now a substantial literature which seeks to situate the influential Latin American theories of development which emerged during the Cold War in their wider political and historical context. And there is a large number of articles which look at the North American historiography of Latin America and at the study of inter-American relations. Unlike most of these studies, however, this article focuses more directly on the relationship between US power in, and the production of a professional North American knowledge about, Latin America during the Cold War. Building on imperial state theory, recent international relations theory derived from Gramsci, and discourse theory, it emphasises the need to locate the emergence and subsequent consolidation of Latin American studies at the height of the Cold War, in the context of the rise of the historical and social science professions and the vicissitudes of US foreign policy in Latin...

The so-called collapse of communism has reinforced powerful North American- and Western-European-centred visions which continue to see 'Western' models of development as the key to modernization world-wide. The end of the Cold War has also drawn renewed attention to the rise of an increasingly dynamic capitalist East Asia, which has brought with it triumphant East Asian-centred discourses which celebrate East Asianstyle development models distinct from and superior to 'Western' models of development. At the same time, challenges to the dominant discourses and the emergent post-Cold War capitalist order continue to emerge from numerous angles and at multiple sites. Two recent books represent important efforts at critically examining global inequality and articulating alternative perspectives to the dominant international narratives on development and social change. In After the Revolution , Arif Dirlik attempts to recast and recuperate Marxism so that it can play a role in progressive politics at the end o...

The end of the Cold War has contributed to the dramatic globalisation of market economics and electoral democracy. But the significance of global capitalism and the substance of the democratic transitions of the past few years are subjects of considerable debate. Some observers continue to emphasise that the end of the Cold War represents the triumph of liberalism and it is only a matter of time before the former Soviet Bloc along with the rest of the world (led by the 'newly industrialised countries' (NICS) of East Asia) arrives at the capitalist prosperity and democratic stability currently seen to prevail in North America, Western Europe and Japan.' Certainly the end of 'state socialism' in Eastern Europe and the former USSR has made an important contribution in symbolic and substantive terms to the demise of socialist development models generally and 'state socialism' in the 'Third World' more particularly.2 Nevertheless, although the so-called Asian Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) are at the centre of a major economic boom which is lifting them out of their 'Third World' status and shifting the axis of global political economy to the Pacific Rim, the 'neoliberal' governments of the rest of Asia, the former Soviet Bloc, Latin America, Africa and Oceania are not necessarily guiding their people to consumer capitalism and parliamentary democracy. Democratic transitions, where they have taken place at all, have often remained superficial, while neoliberal economic policies have stimulated economic growth without necessarily improving the quality of life for the majority of the population. The acceleration of economic and political globalisation which attended the end of the Cold War has contributed more to the resurgence of ethnic and national conflicts than it has to international peace and stability.3 The social formations which are emerging out of the ferment of Soviet collapse are not characterised by democratic order and dynamic economic 'development', but by unstable parliamentary-authoritarian governments, considerable dependence on the IMF and World Bank and transnational capital, and growing 'ideological' and even 'cultural' subordination to the United States and Western Europe. While East Asia may be leaving the 'Third World' much of the former Soviet Bloc can be said to have (re)joined it.4 At the same time, the rise of East Asia, the demise of the 'Second World' and the onset of a new era of global capitalism, throws the problems associated with the continued use of the term 'Third World' into sharp relief. The term (along

William LeoGrande has written an important history of U. S. policy in Central America with a focus on the crucial period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. The author is exceedingly well qualified to write critically about the Reagan years. In the late 1970s he gained a reputation for his research on Cuban foreign policy, and after 1981 he emerged as a major critic of the Reagan administration. A professor of government at American University in Washington D. C., he produced a range of influential policyoriented books and articles during the 1980s which made a substantial contribution to the growing critical literature on U. S. policy in Central America. He was on the editorial board of NACLA Report on the Americas and the World Policy Journal for many years. He testified before the Kissinger Commission on Central America in 1982 and served on the U. S. House of Representatives' Democratic Caucus Task Force on Central America in 1985 and 1986. He was also on the executive board of Policy Alt...

“We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind … Our acquisition of India was made blindly. Nothing great that has ever been done by Englishmen was d...

(1988). Imperialism and sexual exploitation: A response to Ronald Hyam's ‘empire and sexual opportunity’. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History: Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 83-89.