Environmentally friendly food initiatives in Iran: between environmental citizenship and pluralizing the public sphere

In this article I analyze acts of citizenship within environmentally friendly food initiatives in Iran. I show that act of environmental citizenship intersects with politics of pluralizing the public sphere within these initiatives. I present original research that shows how these practices are determined by state-society relations. It is shown that the main objective of most of the initiators of these enterprises is to provide a source of information about healthy and environmentally friendly food as well as providing access to such food. In contrast, many consumers also use these initiatives as spaces where they can experience and make a more pluralistic public sphere. This article contributes to a better understanding of the concept of environmental citizenship and demonstrates the relevance of the concept to broader notions of citizenship.     

Power,politics and perception: the impact of foreign policy on civilian–peacekeeper relations

This article responds to a recent call for increased empirical evidence on the ‘local turn’ in the peacebuilding literature and discusses the impact of the international on local consent for peace operations. Using fresh empirical material this article examines the case of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). It shows how local perceptions of the foreign policies of peacekeeping contingents matter, and how this affects the functionality of the mission. This article highlights the heterogeneity of both United Nations peacekeeping missions and local populations, an issue that is insufficiently discussed in the literature on local engagement in peacebuilding/peacekeeping.     

Building peaceful citizens? Nation-building in divided societies

ABSTRACT

Interventions aimed at citizenship formation and nation-building in divided and post-conflict societies place great emphasis on promoting and entrenching peace as a cornerstone of economic development and statehood. Such efforts are multi-scalar, encompassing interventions to build democratic institutions and responsible citizens with the pursuit and maintenance of peace at the heart of these ideals. Dominant international pedagogies and policies for liberal-peace-building in divided societies can be used to maintain existing power relations and hierarchies, and may prevent the realization of social (and other forms of) justice while stifling dissent and criticism through exhortations to patriotism, unity, civility, and nation-building. Thus, the ‘goodness’ of peace makes this concept particularly useful as a technique of governance. However, ‘peace’ can also be reworked to suit counter-hegemonic political purposes that open up rather than shut down the question of what peace means. Through an exploration of contestations around the notion of ‘peace’ and its deployment in efforts to promote particular foreign policy agendas we highlight the incongruities in civil society actors’ approaches to peace, and their efforts to achieve sometimes conflicting aims, within divided societies.     

Militarizing civilians in Singapore: preparing for ‘Crisis’ within a calibrated nationalism1

The Singaporean polity has created the ‘militarized civilian’. This policy phenomenon beckons the question: How is this cross-fertilization carried out in Singapore's civil–military relations? Militarization is in the first sense meant to inculcate a calibrated dual personality within the civilian whereby being an effective soldier requires indulging in simulated military suffering as a badge of pride; at the same time, the citizen soldier has to believe that military and civilian values are perfectly interchangeable and contribute equally to the maintenance of peace. In a second sense, militarization is equally about permanently ritualizing sacrifices for a communitarian defence. We argue that while mostly successful, militarization also produces the tension arising from the need to appear pugnaciously vigilant while avoiding the casualties that must logically arise from heightened simulated combat. This tension is explained through two dimensions of ongoing crises: the parameters of a politically dramatized National Service ritual; and the constant propaganda of geopolitical dangers threatening the Republic.     

Points of departure: re-examining the discursive formation of the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990

Leung’s article re-examines the political and legislative history of the debates that led up to the passage of the 1990 Hate Crime Statistics Act, in particular the 1980 House committee hearing on Increasing Violence against Minorities and a 1983 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report entitled Intimidation and Violence: Racial and Religious Bigotry in America. Both identify organized white supremacy as the cause of the nation’s epidemic of racial intimidation and violent bigotry in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many significant recommendations were made, but data collection became the first piece of legislation to address the national problem of hate violence. Leung seeks to explain why. By analysing the relationship between committee hearings, the key report and the political context of the Reagan administration, he demonstrates how ‘hate crime’ became an object of knowledge, and how its definition had implications for policy development.     

From Media Attention to Negotiated Peace: Human Rights Reporting and Civil War Duration

Violations of human rights in the context of a conflict have in recent years received an increasing amount of attention from the international media. Yet how such media attention influences conflict remains understudied and, a priori, uncertain. On the one hand, media coverage of human rights abuses may constitute “naming and shaming” that might temper hostilities. On the other hand, such coverage might spark intransigence and complicate negotiations among conflicting parties, thereby hindering rather than hastening peace. This article tries to adjudicate among these and other possibilities by exploring how media reporting on human rights abuses influences the development of conflicts. The analysis reveals that such reporting is associated with shorter conflicts and negotiated agreements between fighting parties.     

Promoting competition or cooperation? The impact of EU funding on Czech advocacy organizations

What impact does European Union (EU) funding of advocacy organizations have? To address this question our article turns to the post-communist Czech Republic, an ideal laboratory for studying externally dependent non-governmental organizations. Employing social network analysis, the main objective of this article is to analyse the effect of EU funding on the cooperation networks of Czech advocacy organizations. Our source of data is a survey of these organizations. We aim to figure out whether there is an association between the dependency of advocacy organizations on EU resources, and their cooperation with other organizations. Contrary to the prevailing interpretation based on the competition argument, our hypothesis is that the greater the dependency on EU funding, the greater the cooperation capacity on the part of advocacy organizations.     

Is the Sum Greater than the Parts? The Terms of Civil War Peace Agreements and the Commitment Problem Revisited

The dominant theoretical approaches to civil war negotiations in the field of political science have sought to explain both the scarcity and high failure rates of negotiated agreements in civil conflicts. This historical pattern, however, has fundamentally changed in the last two decades as changes in international norms and laws, as well as the increased prevalence and competence of peacebuilding professionals, now require conflict actors to have a greater commitment toward negotiations and the enforcement of agreements. While actors in interstate wars seek to avoid accountability, civil war actors seem to embrace the opportunities that these new dynamics create to achieve broad‐based reforms across numerous areas of policy and government. The result, we suggest, is that stakeholders evaluate agreements based on their potential to accomplish an array of sociopolitical objectives. In addition, for strategic and practical reasons, they perceive that those agreements that include more reforms across multiple policy sectors will have the greatest potential. Our examination of nearly two hundred agreements found evidence that the peacemaking potential of a negotiated agreement between civil war adversaries is greatly enhanced when reforms are pursued across many different policy domains. Conversely, our analysis suggests that the greater the number of policy areas left untouched by a peace agreement, the more likely the stakeholders will be to follow that agreement with additional negotiations to enhance that agreement, or, alternatively, the more likely that violence will resume.     

民事庭审质证的基本要素研究

民事庭审质证是质证双方在法庭主持下就证据的证明力和可采性进行相互辩驳的诉讼行为,其基本要素包括质证主体、质证客体、质证内容和质证方式四个方面。质证主体应是证据或其形成过程的认识者、质证意思的独立表示者、质证程序的参与者、质证行为的实施者、与质证相关的程序性权利的享有者或程序性义务的承担者,其不但包括当事人,而且包括广义上的证人。质证客体的范围应限于“当事人提出质疑的证据”,过宽或过窄均不利于兼顾司法公正的实现和诉讼效率的提升。质证内容应限于证据的真实性、关联性和合法性三个方面,证据的客观性缺乏质证意义,充分性只有在证据链中才有质证意义。质证方式亦即质证的行为方式,其有别于质证的基础性工作,是质证双方针对证据的证明力及其可采性展开的法庭论辩。     

Crowding Out Meritocracy? – Cultural Constraints in Chinese Public Human Resource Management

This paper seeks cultural explanations of the pervasive norm violations against the principle of meritocracy in Chinese public human resource management especially at local levels. It reveals that a bureaucratic culture of patrimonial individualism, including favouritism, nepotism, localism, and factionalism prevailing within Chinese officialdom as the ethos, value, psychological disposition, and behavioural orientation of civil servants, has undermined the development in China of a modern meritocracy‐based civil service system. With 14 case studies, this research demonstrates that the Chinese civil service institutions, derived from an opposite culture of hierarchical collectivism, failed to address the cultural constraints over the implementation of the meritocracy principle. The conceptual framework, as well as the case findings, points to legislative and policy reforms in China that would address the problems derived from the unique Chinese bureaucratic culture through further institutional design and capacity building.