Letter from the editors

Abstract

In the second issue of Volume 36 of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, we are very pleased to host a Special Section that continues CRIA’s longstanding engagement with scholarship on Uneven and Combined Development (UCD). The Special Section presented in the current issue was edited alongside the UCD Special Issue in CRIA Volume 34, Issue 2, with Justin Rosenberg as guest editor. That issue, in turn, built upon the works on UCD published in CRIA Volume 22, Issue 1, of March 2009. The four articles in the present Special Section continue to push the boundaries of UCD scholarship and interrogate its central concepts: Dabney Waring argues for a distinct social multiplicity by using archaeological research, while Aslak-Antti Oksanen makes a normative contribution to UCD scholarship by building on Dussel’s liberation philosophy to include stateless peoples as agents in UCD ontology. Lastly, David Zeglen and Daniel P. G amez’ articles both explicitly challenge UCD Eurocentrism—while the former critiques ‘development’ as UCD’s temporal ideology, the latter brings UCD’s concept of ‘interaction’ in dialogue with theories of ‘relational’ processes of colonisation and racialisation from Critical Race Theory and indigenous thinkers. We are also proud to present three standalone research articles in this issue. Daniel Arbucias compares bargaining power in strife between governments and multinational corporations (MNC) in oil-rich Venezuela versus diamondrich Tanzania. Gregory P. Corning studies Japan’s negotiations on regulatory convergence with the US in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and with the EU in the Japan-EU Economic Partnership Agreement (JEEPA), and highlights the importance of path dependence created by existing interstate institutional arrangements. Lastly, Daniel Morales Ruvalcaba presents a theoreticalmethodological framework for assessing distribution of power within the periphery and the rise of fall of peripheral (or ‘weak’) states. Lastly, this issue features three book reviews: Mohamed Alrmizan reviews Turkey in Africa Turkey’s Strategic Involvement in Sub-Saharan Africa by Federico Donelli, Nick Cheesman reviews Edward Schatz’ Slow anti-Americanism: Social movements and symbolic politics in Central Asia, and Hani Raci Shillova reviews Principled Pragmatism in Practice: The EU’s Policy towards Russia after Crimea, edited by Fabienne Bossuyt and Peter van Elsuwege. We would like to thank the contributors for choosing CRIA as the outlet for their path-breaking research. We also thank all the reviewers, whose work remains indispensable to our journal. Lastly, we thank our excellent editorial team, as well as previous editorial members of CRIA, who not only were instrumental in editing this present issue, but who also continue to inspire and share their experience in our day-to-day work with CRIA. CRIA welcomes proposals for special issues (directed to the Editors in Chief). The journal is especially interested in work that offers deep theoretical and historical analyses of global issues, rethinks our understandings of