EADI Research Monitor – January Issue (2013)

A Conceptual Analysis of Livelihoods and Resilience: Addressing the ‘Insecurity of Agency’
Coping with Financial Crises: Latin American Answers to European Questions
Governing Arab Reform: Governmentality and Counter-conduct in European Democracy Promotion in the Arab World
More Research Highlights

A Conceptual Analysis of Livelihoods and Resilience: Addressing the ‘Insecurity of Agency’

2012/12 – Overseas Development Institute (ODI); Authors: Adam Pain and Simon Levine
Much of the aid world is debating how aid investment can be reoriented towards supporting the resilience of people who face crises. Resilience is usually being framed in terms of risk, and of people’s ability to cope with the shocks that they are at risk of experiencing.
‘Resilience’ is sometimes promoted because of its positive perspective about what people can do for themselves. This paper agrees that people’s ‘agency’ – their ability to develop and see through their own choices for their lives – should be the central focus of analysis, rather than any predetermined set of indicators about assets, income, education, etc. However, the paper argues that to do this, it is better to retain a focus on what constrains people’s freedom to act and that vulnerability, rather than resilience, remains the most useful way of analysing this. 

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2013/01 – Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID); Authors : Eduardo A.Cavallo and Eduardo Fernández-Arias
Europe faces challenges reminiscent of Latin American financial crises, namely unsustainable sovereign spreads, banking system distress, sudden stops in capital flows and growth rate collapse.
Latin America’s experience yields relevant policy lessons for Europe on all these fronts, tempered only by the slight exception that sharp real devaluation, which was key to spearheading recovery in Latin America, is unfeasible in the eurozone. Struggling eurozone countries are caught between a rock and a hard place, as the currency union imposes strict policy constraints while the reintroduction of national currencies under conditions of crisis would be catastrophic. Nevertheless, contemporary Europe stands a better chance of recovery because, in contrast with the Latin America experience, the European Union possesses greater avenues for international cooperation. 

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2012/12 – Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS); Author: Helle Malmvig
In this paper, Senior Researcher Helle Malmvig examines how EU initiatives for promoting democracy and political reform in the Arab World have shaped relations of power and subjectivities between the EU and Arab governments over the last two decades including the Post-Arab Spring era. The author makes two main claims: first that the liberal character of EU reform programmes has conditioned and enabled Arab resistance to political reform, and secondly that political reform has become a simulacrum that necessitates a seduction of reform both by Arab incumbents and by EU reform managers.
Helle Malmvig argues that Arab governments neither have been all-powerful as often presumed by post-democratization literature, nor completely subjectified. Rather they have been able to subtly resist and counter EU reform initiatives by taking use of the EU’s liberal reform rationalities and technologies themselves. 

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