Negotiating justice: legal pluralism and gender-based violence in Liberia

The plural legal system in post-conflict Liberia expresses tensions between modern and customary institutions. This article seeks to understand how Liberians navigate choices in the plural legal system to address gender-based violence cases. By asking how and why people make the choices they do, we highlight how Liberians solve tensions between institutions, by creating flexible categories that allow them to pursue a course of action that does not compromise their ability to access social networks and resources.     

Judicial Decisions Involving Questions of Private International Law

Netherlands International Law Review -     

Do ideological and political motives really matter in? the?public choice of local services management? Evidence from urban water services in Spain

This paper studies the influence of ideology and political motives on the choice of management for urban water services. Our contribution is two-fold. Firstly, we use a considerably more detailed set of variables to represent ideological and political motives than previous research. Secondly, the variables that explain local politicians’ decisions are observed at the time decision-making occurs, rather than at a later date. Beyond pragmatic reasons, we find that ideological and political motives also matter when explaining decisions regarding the management of water services. Furthermore, considering the time dimension of decision-making noticeably improves the explanatory power of our model.     

From Renascer to Velho Chico: negotiations between cordiality and modernity in the Brazilian telenovela

ABSTRACT

This article takes as its focus the main Brazilian cultural and media product, the telenovela or soap opera, to discuss the characteristic of the Brazilian personality referred to as the homem cordial (“cordial man”). The article analyses two telenovelas: Renascer (1993) and Velho Chico (2016), which, written by the same author, but in very different historical contexts, sought to recover the trait of cordiality in its essence. In its comparison of the two telenovelas, this study presents and discusses the changes, permanencies and negotiations of a cordial tradition in the face of a particular aspect of modernity represented by both the process of urbanisation and by television itself.