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After President George Bush coined the phrase “New World Order,” he tried to articulate it in terms that would infuse a new sense of mission to America. He seemed to regard instability abroad as a danger for America.⁴ Although President Bush wanted to continue the U.S. internationalist policies of the last forty-five years, Americans and the Congress tended to lurch between isolationism and idealism. But as the Cold War has wound down, there can be little doubt that a New World Order is emerging that creates challenges for the United States and other Western nations that might be equal to those that existed when world politics turned on the confrontation between East and West. Unfortunately, most of the attention has been focused on the major events that created the New World Order: the dramatic dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union, and the resurgence from their remains of independent republics. It appears that the 1990s will see foreign aid both from the United States and from the other Western countries going primarily to help establish free-market economies in the former communist countries.

Charles Tilly argues that continuous wars and preparation for wars motivated early European rulers to extract resources from their subject populations, thereby expanding states’ infrastructure and establishing mechanisms to enable negotiations with societies. State capacity was thus strengthened. Tilly's argument has inspired a wave of scholarship to reconsider state building in various regions of the Third World. Analysts of the Third World employ two theoretical elements inferred from Tilly to account for the failures of many Third World states. One is that without continuous international wars (as early modern Europe had), there would be no capable and effective states. The other element is that availability of foreign aid from the global powers so unique to the Cold War Era exempted Third World states from extracting resources from their societies. I call these analyses Tillian theories of the Third World.

Tillian analysts acknowledge that the capable state in Taiwan during the Cold War stood out from its Third World counterparts. However, the Tillian generalization of the Third World does not account for Taiwan's state-building path. Taiwan's experience is situated in a perplexity between the two variables above: On the one hand, Taiwan resembles early modern European state formation with high military expenditures and a huge standing army prepared for war. In the Tillian model, this condition enhances state capacity. On the other hand, Taiwan was a huge US aid recipient in the Cold War, second only to South Korea. In the Tillian model, this degrades the state's effectiveness, contrary to Taiwan's experience. Solving this puzzle will revise Tillian logics of state building. That, however, is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, through literature review and presentation of empirical evidences, I suggest some analytical directions for future research to enhance our understanding of Taiwan's state-building trajectory in particular and of Third World states in general.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

This essay demonstrates that US economist Charles Post’s attempted rebuttal of the ‘labour aristocracy’ thesis is both theoretically and empirically flawed. Defending the proposition that colonialism, capital export imperialism and the formation of oligopolies with global reach have, over the past century and more, worked to sustain the living standards of a privileged upper stratum of the international working class, it rejects Post’s assertion that the existence of such cannot be proven. The essay concludes with a working definition of this ‘labour aristocracy’, setting the concept within the field of global political economy and reclaiming its relevance to the Marxist tradition.

Recurrent “methodological disputes” have haunted the social sciences, again and again polarizing the case-oriented quest for specification against the natural science inspired quest for general, high-level theory. As a consequence, too much social science research is captured in either one of two vicious circles: ever more highly specified monographic case studies or preoccupation with periodically shifting general theories. The interaction of these two circles increases the risk of widespread amnesia: as social scientists are either bogged down in a stream of cases or flying high with the most recent grand (meta-)theories, social science forgets the actual empirical knowledge that is being meticulously created, maintained and revised in the daily handicraft carried out by a growing mass of researchers.

The African continent is filled with a textured history, vast resources, and immense opportunity. The landscape of higher education on such a diverse continent is extensive and complex. In this review of the landscape, four primary topics are evaluated. The historical context is the foundational heading, which briefly covers the evolution from colonization to independence and the knowledge economy. The second main heading builds upon the historical context to provide an overview of the numerous components of higher education, including language diversity, institutional type, and access to education. A third section outlines key challenges and opportunities including finance, governance, organizational effectiveness, and the academic core. Each of these challenges and opportunities is interconnected and moves from external influences (e.g., fiscal and political climate) to internal influences (e.g., administrative leadership and faculty roles). The last layer of the landscape focuses on leveraging higher education in Africa for social and economic progress and development. Shaping a higher education system around principles of the public good and generating social benefits is important for including postsecondary institutions in a development strategy.

A confluence of several factors influenced donors’ decision to launch a new wave of institutional reforms that, on the surface, appeared to be the opposite of what the second wave of reforms were about. One of the main contributors to this shift was the increasing amount of evidence pointing to the limits of relying purely on market policies. Contrary to donors’ prescriptions, not all the countries that followed the “Washington Consensus” prospered as a result of the reforms. If anything, the Asian crisis, the experiences of transition from command to market economy, and situations in much of the poorest regions of the world provided examples of the human costs of neglecting the proper role of public sector institutions.²