Administrative Innovations and Accountability Failures: The Termination of the Spanish Telecommunications Agency

We discuss how far accountability practices may be relevant to the success of independent regulators in countries without a tradition of administrative autonomy. We develop a conceptualisation of agency accountability failures and develop an analytical framework to examine the life and termination of the Spanish regulatory agency for telecommunications, CMT (Comisión del Mercado de las Telecomunicaciones - Telecommunications Market Commission). We argue that the CMT’s termination was related, among other reasons, to accountability failures in its institutional design. The paper relies on a variety of sources, including legislation, literature, media coverage, and semistructured interviews with agency officials and several stakeholders.     

Calling Attention to the Importance of Assisting Male Survivors of Sexual Victimization

ABSTRACT

Most of the research focusing on sexual victimization on college campuses has focused on females as victims. This attention is warranted given that studies have consistently found that females are at more risk of experiencing victimization compared to males. However, a drawback of this emphasis is that laypersons may incorrectly believe that men cannot be victims too. This belief is directly challenged by various findings that indicate college men are also sexually assaulted. In order to draw attention to this under researched topic, we used data from a recent climate survey conducted at a mid-sized rural institution of higher education. The results of this study indicated that males, in addition to females, experienced various types of sexual victimization in this setting.     

The Symbolic Life of Law: The Instrumental and the Constitutive in Scheingold's The Politics of Rights

Stuart A. Scheingold's, ThePolitics of Rights, has left a considerableimprint on sociolegal scholarship. A centralfigure in the intellectual genealogy ofsociolegal studies, Scheingold has contributedto both instrumental and constitutiveapproaches to the study of law. Informing aninstrumental perspective, Scheingold's focus onlaw's symbolic life provides the foundation forexamining rights discourse and litigation aspolitical resources. Informing a constitutiveoutlook, Scheingold encourages an understandingof how law shapes our imaginations,aspirations, and expectations. After reviewinghis contribution to instrumentalism andconstitutivism, this essay suggests howScheingold offers the grounds for seeing theseoften divergent approaches as complementary.     

‘The beneficent and legal godfather’: a history of the guardianship of unaccompanied immigrant and refugee children in Australia, 1946–1975

Abstract

In Australia in 1946, the Immigration (Guardianship of Children) Act was passed. This Act was intended to support the postwar migration to Australia of British children, unaccompanied by their parents, and provided them a guardian in Australia: the Immigration Minister. This key provision of the Act continues into the present, covering all unaccompanied child migrants, including refugees. Starting with the parliamentary debates which occurred at the formation of the Act in 1946, this article traces a history of the Act until its first High Court challenge in 1975. In doing so, a focus is placed on a series of key questions raised by its production of categories: How does the Act construct ideas of migranthood? What do the discussions it has provoked have to say about notions of parenthood and the ideal family? And, finally, what concepts of the child have been produced through this legislative and legal history? Through an examination of archival materials, parliamentary debates, court records, and newspaper coverage, this article explores the discursive productions of the Act, following the understanding that ideas of the family, of parenthood, of guardianship, of migrant status, and of the child are not natural, but instead are historically created and produced, here through racialized techniques of governmentality.     

Civil liberties and the left

Mzwanele Mayekiso, Township Politics: Civic Struggles for a New South Africa. Monthly Review Press: New York. 1996. pp. 288. (foreword by Mel King)

Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, Edited by Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky. (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995)

Modernization and the Production of Power

Kevin A. Yelvington, Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Caribbean Workplace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 286 pp.

Milagros Pena, Theologies and Liberation in Peru: The Role of Ideas in Social Movements (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 222 pp.

Partha Chatterjee (ed), Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 220 pp.

Carol A. Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in South Asia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 261 pp.

Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right‐Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States. (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995. pp. 445. $19.95.)     

Medical technology in combatting terrorism

State‐sponsored terrorism is a form of coercion, backed up by the threat and use of violence, to achieve political ends. These terrorist tactics also involve signaling of intentions and responses between the terrorist sponsor and those whom it targets. Accordingly this study examines Iranian state sponsorship of anti‐U.S. terrorism in the period of 1980–1990 as an example of political communication aimed at manipulating U.S. policy through the threat and use of violence. Official Iranian media are quantitatively content‐analyzed to demonstrate their systematic use of threat‐projections as warnings and indications to the U.S. in this period.     

EU agencies' involvement in transboundary crisis response: Supporting efforts or leading coordination?

EU agencies have emerged as entities offering technical coordination to member states and support to the European Commission in different policy areas. Their expertise may play a role in responding to unexpected crises. Against this backdrop, we examine under which circumstances EU agencies, through their specialized expertise, are involved in transboundary crisis responses, and when they acquire a leading position in coordinating those responses. To do so, we study four agencies which faced crises: the EBA and the 2012 banking crisis; the ECDC and the 2014 Ebola outbreak; EFSA and the 2011 E. coli outbreak; and Frontex and the 2015 refugee crisis. Our findings discuss to what extent agencies' involvement in transboundary crises is related to functional (sector characteristics) and institutional (delegation of authority) variables. We also identify that under certain political conditions EU agencies' coordination capacity is activated, allowing them to emerge as leading institutions in transboundary crisis resolution.