Can Policy to Address Some Disability Rights Mitigate Weak Approaches to Others?

Governments prioritize some rights over others because of policy constraints. We ask whether differential disability policy priorities can readdress other unrealized rights when applied to services for people with disabilities in boarding houses in Australia. The housing is inappropriate to their support needs and breaches their immediate right to unsegregated housing. Findings about the government-funded support showed that their well-being improved, but the housing increased their support needs and reduced their eligibility for suitable housing, implying that support policies that prioritize progressive realization rights are not successful where immediate realization rights to housing remain unaddressed. These findings about the negative social outcomes from ignoring human rights hierarchies have implications for policy priorities.     

“If You Want to Be Russian Go to the United States”

Abstract

The latest and largest group of Russian immigrants arrived in the United States after 1983, when the Soviet Union collapsed. This was the first time in over seventy years that Russia's Jews were allowed to leave Russia. Unlike many other immigrants, this group had lived in a country where little or no contact had been allowed with the outside world. Not unlike Plato's characters living in a cave, the Russian Jews saw the outside world only as it had been portrayed in Russian propaganda. Mistrust of the Soviet regime led to fantasies and confusion about it.

Understanding this group of immigrants requires knowing something of Jewish life in Russia during the last hundred years. In an enclosed, totalitarian, oppressive society, individuals developed character traits that were necessary for survival. Some of these will be discussed in this article. Lack of knowledge on the part of the immigrants as well as on the part of American human services professionals has often led to culture shock for both groups. Misunderstandings, unrealistic expectations, and difficulties with language have caused frustration, anger, and hurt.

Increased cultural knowledge has been necessary to open up communication between immigrant clients and American service providers. Many signs have begun to point the way to different attitudes and greater     

To History or to Hollywood? Monuments to Foreign Celebrities in Twenty-First Century Balkans

The article identifies an emerging trend in the reconstruction of identities in the Balkans which involves the memorialisation of foreign celebrities, including Rocky Balboa, Tarzan, Bruce Lee, Bob Marley, Tupac Shakur, and Samantha Fox. The article aims to understand the meaning and the purpose of foreign celebrity monuments to the local communities. The findings suggest that the monuments represent radical political statements by emerging civil societies in a process of transition from Yugoslav socialism, 1990s nationalism, and foreign-led liberalisation and democratisation in post-conflict times. The monuments are constitutive in themselves as democratic expressions and examples of citizens performing political acts.     

Hurdles to peace: a level-of-analysis approach to resolving Sudan’s civil wars

Why do some peace agreements end armed conflicts whereas others do not? Previous studies have primarily focused on the relation between warring parties and the provisions included in peace agreements. Prominent mediators, however, have emphasised the importance of stakeholders at various levels for the outcome of peace agreements. To match the experience of these negotiators we apply a level-of-analysis approach to examine the contextual circumstances under which peace agreements are concluded. While prominent within the causes of war literature, level-of-analysis approaches are surprisingly scant in research about conflict resolution. This article compares two Sudanese Peace Agreements: the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (2005) that ended the North–South war and led to the independence of South Sudan, and the Darfur Peace Agreement (2006) which failed to end fighting in Darfur. We find that factors at the local, national and international level explain the different outcomes of the two agreements. Hence, the two case studies illustrate the merit of employing a level-of-analysis approach to study the outcome of peace agreements. The main contribution of this article is that it presents a new theoretical framework to understand why some peace agreements terminate armed conflict whereas others do not.     

“Forward to David the Builder!” Georgia's (re)turn to language-centered nationalism

After the Rose Revolution, President Saakashvili tried to move away from the exclusionary nationalism of the past, which had poisoned relations between Georgians and their Armenian and Azerbaijani compatriots. His government instead sought to foster an inclusionary nationalism, wherein belonging was contingent upon speaking the state language and all Georgian speakers, irrespective of origin, were to be equals. This article examines this nation-building project from a top-down and bottom-up lens. I first argue that state officials took rigorous steps to signal that Georgian-speaking minorities were part of the national fabric, but failed to abolish religious and historical barriers to their inclusion. I next utilize a large-scale, matched-guise experiment (n?=?792) to explore if adolescent Georgians ostracize Georgian-speaking minorities or embrace them as their peers. I find that the upcoming generation of Georgians harbor attitudes in line with Saakashvili's language-centered nationalism, and that current Georgian nationalism therefore is more inclusionary than previous research, or Georgia's tumultuous past, would lead us to believe.     

Is School the Best Route to Skills? Returns to Vocational School and Vocational Skills in Egypt

This paper tests the assumption that formal education is the best route to job skills. The returns to formal vocational secondary schooling are compared to the returns to acquiring skills outside the education system, such as undertaking an apprenticeship, for male wage workers in Egypt. A unique longitudinal dataset with information on schooling and skills allows for causal inference about returns by comparing siblings. For recent cohorts, the estimated returns to formal vocational secondary education are the same as attaining no formal education. However, the returns to skills obtained outside of formal education are substantial.