Who wants to be a woman? young women's reflections on transitions to adulthood

The focus of this article is on how Finnish young women construct their transitions to adulthood and how they imagine their futures as women. Tensions in this process are analysed: many young women want to accelerate their shifts towards independent adult status. At the same time, some of them attempt to postpone the point of being locked into the lives of adult women. They look forward to acquiring the legal status of an adult citizen and to moving to homes of their own. But they want to stay young, which means time for relationships, studying, work and travel, and definitely not children at an early age. Being an adult woman does not seem to be a very tempting position for some young women; being a girl is considered by them to open more possibilities. Those young women who are keener to embrace female adulthood are also discussed, focusing on ways in which they envisage their futures, and what contradictions they experience. These tensions are explored drawing from the research project ‘Tracing Transitions — Follow-Up Study of Post-16 Students’. In the study, 40 young women and 23 young men aged around 18 years were interviewed individually, in paris or in groups of three. The project is grounded on ethnographic research in which the same young people were followed when they started secondary school at the age of 13 years.     

Is There Demand for Radical Right Populism in the Finnish Electorate?

Since the 1980s, the main interest in radical right-wing studies has been on occurrences of the phenomenon. Non-occurrences have not received much attention, although they could have something to offer the field as well. This article focuses on the 'Finnish exception' and by approaching the theme in terms of single-issue and protest voting theories, asks to what extent the electorate in Finland differs from those of other European countries with respect to the two crucial sets of attitudes for radical right-wing parties: those towards the political system and those towards immigration. After the country comparison, the focus turns to the Finnish case to explore where in the electorate anti-system and anti-immigrant appeal would find the strongest support. The data used in the study is taken from the European Social Survey 2002–2003, which is analysed by principal component analysis and linear regression. The country comparison shows that in the light of single-issue and protest voting theories, the attitudinal atmosphere in Finland provides a breeding ground for radical right populism as fertile as that in most other West European countries. Second, the case analysis of Finland reveals that anti-immigrant attitudes and dissatisfaction with the political system are most accentuated among older, poorly educated men with no interest in politics.     

The more the merrier? Sino-Japanese security relations in the context of complex interstate rivalry in the Asia-Pacific region

Abstract

This paper analyses the evolution of Sino-Japanese rivalry in the security sphere concentrating on the Chinese perspective, and placing it within the wider context of complex interstate rivalry between China, Japan and the United States. From a theoretical viewpoint, this research contributes to the literature on interstate rivalry from multiparty perspective, which has been overlooked in existing research. China–Japan–US complex interstate rivalry includes elements of positional, spatial and ideological rivalry simultaneously. When rivalries mix two or more rivalry types, they become more difficult to resolve. The two broad trends of China’s military build-up and deepening US–Japan alliance evolve in tandem intensifying rivalry dynamics and increasing positional elements of rivalry. There are many indications on various levels that for China, controlling Japan’s international ambitions has become less important and more attention is paid to ways in which Japan helps the United States in reaching its objectives in Asia through their alliance agreement. The cases analysed to display complex interstate rivalry include the Taiwan question, territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas, and the North Korean nuclear issue.     

Measuring the Extent of Party Institutionalisation: The Case of a Populist Entrepreneur Party

The consensus among Finnish commentators is that the True Finn Party (PS), which grew dramatically to become the second largest electoral party in 2011, is an institutionalised party – that is, it is ‘here to stay’. Although led for virtually the whole of its 19-year existence by Timo Soini, the PS, unlike say Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and Popolo Della Libertà, is not viewed as a ‘personal party’ in which its expected lifespan is dependent on the political lifespan of its founder-leader. But how institutionalised really is it and when can a party be said to be institutionalised? Building on the syndrome of properties widely ascribed to the process in the literature, the theoretical contribution of this article is to provide a composite definition and the first systematic operationalisation of the notion of party institutionalisation. The empirical section measures the extent of party institutionalisation using the populist-entrepreneur True Finn Party as a test case whilst the concluding discussion considers the wider question of the conceptual utility of institutionalisation for the analysis of party change.     

Law,Genre and the Voice of the Friend

The article attempts to think friendship in its relation to law and justice and provides some arguments for the importance of this concept in Derrida’s ethical, legal and political philosophy. It draws on early texts such as Of grammatology and reads them in conjunction with later texts such as The animal that therefore I am. The relation of friendship to law and justice is explored by means of Derrida’s notion of “degenerescence” understood as the necessity or law of indeterminateness that cuts across, both limiting and de-limiting, all laws, types and generic partitions, for instance, juridical (natural and positive right), humanistic (human and animal), anthropological (sexual difference), philosophical (physis and nomos). Drawing on Derrida’s readings of “sexual difference” in Heidegger and the latter’s evocation of “the voice of the friend” in Being and time, the article addresses the theme of Geschlecht and articulates the exigency to think sexual difference beyond duality together with the exigency to rethink law and right otherwise than on the ground of nativity and “natural fact” and in terms of what Derrida calls “a friendship prior to friendships” at the origin of all law and socius.