Martin Mulligan

African Studies in the Digital Age: DisConnects?

ideas had to be abandoned as people came to see that they were counter-productive. Some, like Jawaharlal Nehru, were spared the full realisation by death, though his nonaligned foreign policy had already been called into question by India’s humiliating defeat at Chinese hands in 1962. I would have expected that the authors would consider Lee Kuan Yew and Deng Xiaoping to be exceptions to the inevitable disappointments. But Michael Barr argues that, despite all Singapore’s many achievements since independence, Lee has left Singapore a sterile, uncreative autocracy. Odd Arne Westad makes clear that Deng never expected the dramatic results made possible by China’s opening to the world over which he presided after Mao’s death. Farzana Shaikh shows that Bhutto was an unprincipled demagogue and Srinath Raghavan’s chapter demonstrates that, although Indira Gandhi had more achievements to her credit than we often admit, she was not ‘up to the job’ of leading India. Jay Taylor makes the case that, given the chance, Chiang Kai-shek was more successful economically than many commentators have suggested. He could also be brutal, though nothing like as inhumane or as incompetent economically as his enemy, Mao Zedong. It would have been useful if the collection could have been expanded to take in Japanese, Korean and Malaysian leaders, but this is a tribute to the quality of the chapters we do have. Always thought-provoking, these analyse the family background of the various leaders, make clear the difficulties they faced and try to balance their achievements and failures. This is a valuable collection of insights into a crucial period of Asia’s history.

Littscapes: Landscapes of Fiction from Trinidad and Tobago

SADC summit and in every SADC document) is the fact that neo-patrimonial systems tend to lead to considerable gaps between stated and actual commitments to reform. This is because reforms have within them measures that would considerably cut the opportunities for informal manipulation over economic resources, rent-seeking and the ability to show favour to clients by state actors. Thus, what occurs is the partial reform syndrome where aid-recipient administrations manipulate the reform process in order to protect their patron–client bases. Energies directed into this are at direct odds with the expressed prescriptions and conditionalities advanced by the donors or by organisations such as the SADC Secretariat. Government reluctance to go along with the commitments they have signed is expressed through selective application, delayed implementation or just simply non-compliance. SADC is a classic example of this and Nathan is fundamentally right in confronting the Pollyannas who believe that the region is on the road to a security community. Where the continued existence as a Big Man hinges on satisfying patrons and retaining authority over clients, the elites will always choose the partial reform measures of token implementation of reforms, delivering just enough in order to give the illusion of compliance. African elites are masters at such strategies and long ago learnt that donors very rarely if ever walk away from recipient countries, however non-cooperative they may be in applying reform measures—hence why the EU continues to pour millions into SADC. This is not to say that SADC is totally pointless in the security realm, but when one looks at SADC’s role as a mediator (in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar and Zimbabwe) there are very few success stories and far more procrastinations and unfulfilled commitments and empty promises. It remains the case that SADC does not even have any regional mediation architecture to address security problems. This is not a question of capacity but is about a lack of political will at the highest level. The issue of agency and leadership is at the heart of policy decisions that may lead to a nascent security community. In Southern Africa, as Nathan convincingly demonstrates, this is lacking in the region and is unlikely to be remedied in the near future.

Moocs: Educational Breakthrough for Small Island States or the Next Massively Overblown Tech Bubble?

A spectre is haunting education worldwide—the spectre of Moocs. ‘Mooc’ is an acronym for ‘massive open online course’. It refers to a web-based class designed to support a large number of participants. Moocs make high-quality education accessible to the masses, but there are doubts in some quarters that these online platforms can maintain rigorous standards online. For the time being, Moocs are free. Whatever their market prospects, Moocs have already given fresh life to the debate about distance learning, which has for at least a decade been touted at intervals as a remedy for educational deficits in some of the world’s poorest places. The momentum of the Moocs/distance learning movement just now is so great that some are hailing it as a disruptive innovation that will transform education everywhere. It is also seen to be boosted by an expanding middle class in emerging markets that is able and willing to pay for Western education. Some 6.7 million students or 32% of those in higher education in the US now take one or more of their courses online, according to a Babson survey. The phenomenon is also spreading from the US. The Open University, the British distance-learning university, has integrated 10 UK universities, including Exeter, Bristol and Southampton, into a fresh venture, Futurelearn. Moocs have scored spectacular and widely publicised early successes. A course by Stanford on artificial intelligence in 2011 attracted 170,000 students. Battusig, a 15-year-old Mongolian boy, achieved perfect scores in a demanding circuits course offered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At first glance, this does look like a prayer that has been answered for small island states and others left behind in the global education competition. The argument was memorably spelt out by the development academic and technology expert Keith Yeomans: ‘More than half the Commonwealth’s membership is made up of small island states (a particular sub-set that is deprived)’. Yeomans reckoned that island states are ideally placed to reap the benefits of the information age. ‘The

On the trail of Malaysia's weirdest animal: The GONGO

Abstract The rainforests and mangrove wetlands of Malaysia and Southeast Asia are among Earths most naturally rich environments; temperate countries are poor by comparison. A high proportion of animals and plants in these tropical rainforests, the outcome of 60 million years of evolution, live nowhere else. So the importance of work to conserve this region is apparent. Yet much of this work is left to the so-called GONGOS—or government-owned non-governmental organizations. The GONGO is a species of organization that is found world-wide wherever democracy is new or fragile or otherwise less than fully functioning. Despite frustrations and constraints, however, tiny groups of idealists within this framework may influence and even transform government policy.