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Review of: Singapore's State‐Led Capitalism in a Rules‐Based World Order. By Lee, Khuay Khiang, Leiden University Press, Leiden, 2025. 266 pp. ISBN: 978‐9‐08‐728459‐6
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Patterns of Trust in Financial Services: Critical Factors and Gender Differences
Full text linkThis study investigates the interrelationships among factors of trust in financial services. Additionally, it examines how these factors correlate with gender differences, offering insights into trust patterns in emerging markets. Ethiopia, characterised by economic and financial volatility, was selected as a case study for an emerging market. A sample of 470 individuals was surveyed with the assistance of interviewers to overcome language and literacy obstacles, with balanced representation across key demographics, particularly gender, enabling robust statistical analysis. Logistic regression and correlation matrices were employed to analyse trust. The study reveals that correlations between trust factors vary widely but are predominantly positive, with only one exception. Gender differences in trust factors are evident but do not represent significant schisms in financial behaviour. Unexpectedly, digital trust exhibits a strong positive correlation with age, challenging assumptions about generational preferences for financial technologies. While the sample size aligns with standard practices in similar studies, expanding the dataset would improve the precision of the analysis. The complexity of administering detailed surveys at scale poses a challenge for single studies. This study demonstrates the utility of combining traditional determinants of trust with advanced statistical methods, such as logistic regression, to uncover probabilities and interactions among trust factors. Gender differences in trust patterns exist but are less pronounced than expected, even in a society with significant gender disparity. Other demographic factors, such as age, education, and income, play more substantial roles in shaping trust behaviours, suggesting that financial inclusion efforts should prioritise these variables. This research highlights the transformative potential of digital trust, which extends beyond traditional definitions of trust. Despite operating in a society with high gender disparity, the findings indicate that gender is not a significant concern in financial trust patterns
Conservation and Displacement: A Study of Dampa Tiger Reserve (DTR) Forest in Mizoram, Northeast India
Full text linkConservation projects and displacement are two facets of the relationship between the state and the environment. Conservation projects aim to address the threats to the environment and its biodiversity that are undoubtedly real in contemporary times. At the same time, they are based on an exclusionary framework in approach, practices, and understanding. They begin with the process of identification, distinction, division, and demarcation of what is to be preserved and conserved. Hence, state-led conservation becomes top-down, instrumental, and forceful. My thesis argues that such practices of conservation projects become untoward and unsustainable, victimising people, and destroying nature. It fails to both understand people and the environment and to address the problems. The approach denies an ecology whereby both the people and the environment share a symbiotic relationship, and displacement becomes a common outcome. Displacement of people from a conservation project is not just about the physical removal of the people from their habitats but also the erasure of their history, memory, and representation (Schama 1996 cited in Brockington and Igoe, 2006) and fails to recognize complex and enduring human-nature interactions. Consequently, it disrupts ecosystems in the name of conservation. My thesis critically examines and analyses the issues of conservation and displacement from a bottom-up approach, that is, from the experiences of the displaced. It studies a prominent ‘tiger conservation project without tiger’, namely the Dampa Tiger Reserve (DTR) in the state of Mizoram, India, its disruption of local ecosystems it was established to conserve and the resulting environmental and socio-economic crisis. I investigate socio-cultural and historical factors affecting the human-nature relationship in the DTR. The Dampa Tiger Reserve (DTR) conservation project demonstrates the importance of understanding local ecosystems and conservation that challenges the state-led conservation practices resulting in displacement of both people and nature
Navigating Personal Law in the Gulf: a Sociolegal Analysis of Nationality and Family Law in Qatar and select GCC jurisdictions
No full textGulf state laws benefit from religion and custom as sources of legitimacy, particularly when state law’s provisions are based on or similar to them. For example, Arab states sometimes justify their nationality laws, which allow males only to transmit nationality to their children by default, through nasab, which in Islam and customary law holds that affiliation and membership in the kin-group is patrilineal. Moreover, part of family law’s legitimacy stems from its positivised Shari‘a provisions. These laws have a personal scope of application: they construct or manage certain subjectivities and ascribe specific rights to them. Family law codifies specific opinions within the Shari‘a to the exclusion of all others, and makes this code the ‘personal law’ of Muslims/Sunnis/Shi‘a and/or nationals. Nationality law makes nationality and its type (i.e., original or acquired nationality) a determinant of certain political and socioeconomic rights, such as voting, candidacy, housing, and employment. Additionally, nationality and religion determine the family rights of foreigners and non-Muslims in Gulf states. A number of studies have addressed how Arab states construct and manage subjectivities and ascribe specific personal laws to certain intersections of identity through law, bureaucracy, and the court. Less attention has been directed towards the way in which different actors, including judges, litigants, and laypeople navigate these laws, particularly in the Gulf. Therefore, informed by theories of intersectionality and normative and legal pluralism, this thesis explores 1) the ways in which nationality, religion, sect, gender, and tribe determine the political, socioeconomic, and family rights of individuals in Qatar and select Gulf jurisdictions 2) how different actors in these jurisdictions navigate the state-sanctioned personal law corresponding to their intersecting identities, and negotiate tensions between their national, religious/sectbased, and tribal subjectivities, and between state law and its sources of legitimacy, particularly Shari‘a and customs, both in the court setting and outside it. To do so, the thesis employs a sociolegal approach informed by theories of intersectionality and legal pluralism and involving a doctrinal and comparative analysis of legislation and court judgements in family or nationality-related disputes, and a qualitative analysis of archival and in-situ online discussions and campaigns concerning nationality-related rights in Qatar, ensuing from announcements of draft laws or laws regarding Shura Council elections in 2008 and 2021, on QatarShares Forum and Twitter. The thesis finds that while the legal positions of persons in the Gulf are impacted by the intersection of factors such as nationality, religion, sect, gender and tribe, actors find ways to assert rights or subvert the law, particularly by accounting for legal or normative pluralism. For instance, while the court has the final say on the applicable law, litigants in Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain employ varied strategies to participate in deciding their personal law in the family court, depending on the connecting factors and substantive rules at stake, including: certifying their marriage before the sect-specific circuit with the ruling potentially more favourable to them and less favourable to their spouse, claiming to differ or be united in sect/religion with their spouse, or claiming that the application of their own sect’s rules is inconsistent with public order. In relation to restrictions based on nationality, people rely on the same sources of legitimacy as the state law to transcend or challenge it, both in the court setting and outside it. In particular, Qataris who marry foreigners inconsistently with state law, do so by concluding marriages in accordance with what they understand to be the rules for marriage validity under Shari‘a; thereby reclaiming the Shari‘a as their ‘personal law’. While the Interior Ministry challenges the legitimacy of these marriages, judges attempt to reconcile between positive law and Shari‘a. Furthermore, in online discussions and campaigns for nationality-related rights, hadith and ethical tenets of Shari‘a are often invoked to support arguments for equality between men and women, and between Qataris of original and naturalized status. Thus, the same normative orders that the state relies on to justify its laws are utilised as sources for reclaiming rights, and imagining an alternative, more just la
Mirroring Hegemony: China’s discursive contestation of the ‘Liberal International Order’
Full text linkContemporary analyses of the crisis of the ‘liberal international order’, and the threat posed to it by China, are deficient. These accounts are based on a particular understanding of the international, and an assumption that China’s contestation of existing power relations is necessarily ‘disordering’. At the same time, the combination of compliance and contestation in China’s international practices is interpreted as ‘paradoxical’. This thesis argues that there is no paradox: China complies with the fundamental rules and institutions of international order, and its contestation is reserved for the power relations which structure Western-led liberal hegemony. The concept of the ‘liberal international order’, with its assumption that liberal hegemony and international order are coterminous, is, this thesis argues, an ideological construct, discursively fusing two different concepts with productive effects: it implies that liberal domination is essential to international order, and that opposition to this domination is necessarily illiberal, and self-evidently disordering. Furthermore, in granting authorial agency for the production of international order to Western actors, the role of the global South in co-producing international order, and the centrality of the South to the liberal hegemonic project, is effaced. This thesis uses this apparent ‘paradox’ in China’s practices as a lens to disarticulate the concept of the ‘liberal international order’, and to reveal, as through a mirror, certain features of liberal hegemony which are missing from accounts of the ‘liberal international order’. This highlights the role of discursive power within hegemony, as well as the central role of the global South within both the liberal hegemonic project, and the Chinese counterhegemonic project. The thesis further observes that, while China represents itself as an entirely different type of international actor from the West, its counterhegemonic discourses and practices take the form of ‘mirroring’ those discourses and logics which are fundamental to liberal hegemony: this raises important questions about how we can understand China’s counterhegemonic project
Encumbered Security? Vertical and Horizontal Repos in the Euro Area and Their Inherent Ambiguity
Full text linkDespite the significance of repurchase agreements (repos) in market-based finance, European repo markets remain underexplored. Drawing on monetary hierarchy literature, we make three conceptual arguments. First, we argue that repos’ balance sheet mechanics differ depending on the counterparties’ relative hierarchical position. Vertical repos across hierarchical levels imply money creation; horizontal repos lend on pre-existing money. Second, we conceptualize the ‘inherently ambiguous’ whereabouts of the security used as repo collateral: it becomes the lender’s off-balance-sheet asset, paired with a liability to return it, while the Basel III regulations treat it as ‘encumbered’ on the borrower’s balance sheet. Third, we propose an on-balance-sheet notation of collateral frameworks that illustrates their function as a central bank policy tool which influences central counterparties’ general collateral baskets. Empirically, we study vertical repos of the Eurosystem and horizontal repos in European interbank markets with regard to their institutional evolution and principal role in the Eurocrisis. We show that in case of Eurosystem repos, the ‘inherent ambiguity’ helps conceal the security and enable sovereign debt funding compliant with the ‘monetary financing prohibition’. In case of interbank repos, the ‘inherent ambiguity’ facilitates the security’s effective bilocation as it gets simultaneously treated as the borrower’s encumbered asset and as disposable for the lender’s re-use
Women in surgery: The social construction of gender in surgical practice.
Full text linkDespite comprising over half of Canadian medical graduates, women remain underrepresented within surgery. Strategies to address this gap have largely focused on increasing numbers or targeting individual women, overlooking subtle, systemic gender inequities that may deter women from the field. 67 h of participant observation with six surgeons and semi-structured interviews with six women surgeons were conducted at a Canadian academic hospital to explore how gendered processes shape surgical life. Data was analyzed iteratively and thematically. Gender influenced women surgeons' lives across three levels: organizationally, their surgical status was questioned and undermined; individually, they navigated a double bind of being both a woman and a surgeon; and environmentally, their bodies conflicted with cultural and physical norms of surgical spaces. This study suggests that gender inequities are deeply ingrained in surgical structures and practices, highlighting the need for systemic transformations to ensure women are fully included and valued within surgery. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2025 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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