Nation-building and communities in Oman since 1970: The Swahili-speaking Omani in search of identity

Since 1970, building a new national identity by reunifying Oman'sethno-linguistic groups has been at the heart of Sultan Qaboos'spolitical project. This paper focuses on the place of Omaniwho returned from the former colonies of Zanzibar and East Africa,responding to Sultan Qaboos's call to ‘nationals’abroad. While they played a leading role in the modernizationprocess of the Sultanate, these Swahili-speaking Omani facedprejudices from the population who stayed at home and were forcedto give guarantees to the others of their full belonging tothe nation. As a consequence, despite their internal differences,they have progressively developed a new collective identity,which has its raison d'être within the framework of themodern Omani State, and can only be explained by the necessityto find their place in it.     

Child's play: The political imaginary of international relations and contemporary popular children's films

Many scholars in International Relations (IR) have drawn from popular films to examine various problématiques that have informed the discipline's main theorisations. As Cynthia Weber remarks, popular films are powerful because they engage in the very ‘serious political work’ of mythologising the ‘truths’ and ‘realities’ which provide the foundation for many of IR's main theoretical envisionings of our world. To date, however, children's films have received very little attention. For the purpose of this paper, three have been isolated: Toy Story (1995), A Bug's Life (1998) and Rescue Heroes: The Movie (2003). Children's films, it can be argued, help to craft and restore certain perspectives for each new generation of young minds during the crucial years when the world is being textualised for the first time. The objective of this paper, therefore, is to read these films as working towards producing and sustaining the power/knowledge that seeks to defend contemporary forms of world order while concurrently extending and disseminating the rule of these forms of world order through the medium of children's popular cinema.     

In-Between Worlds: Marleasing and the Emergence of Interlegality in Legal Reasoning

Abstract Lawmakers and scholars are so busy looking for new ways to develop a European private law that they are failing to see the virtues of an already existing private law harmonisation tool. This tool is the requirement of interpretation in conformity with directives as it has been designed by the Court of Justice in Marleasing and its progeny. In this paper, it is submitted that this case law operating at the level of rules on legal reasoning, and not at the level of substantive law, is a far more sophisticated means of private law harmonisation than all the measures discussed in the last years. Namely, the requirement of interpretation in conformity with directives is allowing the Common Market to develop coherently without neglecting the significance of national legal cultures. How this difficult equilibrium between harmonisation and legal pluralism might be maintained by the tool the Court of Justice developed in Marleasing is explained in this paper with the help of evolutionary jurisprudence.     

The generality of criminal behavior: A confirmatory factor analysis of the criminal activity of sex offenders in adulthood

The presence of a general construct of deviance had not been investigated in sex offenders in spite of the presumption of specialization that characterized them. Consequently, the aim of this study was to investigate whether sex offenders' criminal behavior could be explained by a general construct of deviance. A semi-structured interview was conducted with each subject in order to assess deviant behavior during the life course. The official criminal behavior of 388 convicted sex offenders was analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis. The pattern of covariance observed showed that the onset, frequency, and variety of criminal activity in adulthood could be explained by a general construct of deviance in sexual aggressors. The results, however, also suggested that child molesters' frequency of sexual crime was not part of a general construct of deviance. In other words, the offending behavior of sexual aggressors of women was predominantly versatile, whereas that of sexual aggressors of children tended to be more specific, at least for one dimension of their criminal activity.     

Expectations regarding development during adolescence: Parental and adolescent perceptions

The aims of this study were (1) to compare the age-related expectations of parents and adolescents concerning the timing of achievement in a number of developmental tasks, (2) to examine whether personal characteristics of the adolescent affect developmental expectations, and (3) to examine whether discrepancies between the adolescents and the parents expectations are related to the amount of parent-adolescent conflict. The sample consisted of 508 families with adolescents (12–18 years old). During a home visit, a battery of questionnaires was administered individually to mothers, fathers, and adolescents. A new 24-item instrument to assess expectations for adolescents mastery of developmental tasks was developed for this study. Analyses showed that when the expectations of adolescents and those of their parents are compared at aggregate level, parents consistently indicate later ages for the achievement of developmental tasks than adolescents. Although parents have later timetables, parents and adolescents have strikingly similar views of the sequence in which achievement of developmental tasks should occur. The adolescents age appears to be the most potent predictor of developmental timetables, followed by gender, pubertal timing, and temperament, respectively. The amount of conflict within the parent-adolescent relationship was associated with differences in developmental expectations. The utility of the new instrument for research and clinical work is discussed.This research was supported by a grant from the Ministry of Health and Culture (PCOJ).     

Corporate Environmentalism, Regulatory Reform, and Industry Self-Regulation: Toward Genuine Regulatory Reinvention in the United States

Increasingly, corporations are proactively managing environmental impacts in response to pressures from the consumer, business-to-business, financial, and government procurement markets. In many cases, these efforts have produced results well beyond what could be required under public regulations. Although the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began a process of regulatory reinvention in the 1990s as a means of promoting such innovations, the results have been somewhat disappointing. This article examines the recent trends in corporate environmental management and regulatory reform. It concludes with a discussion of changes in regulatory design that could promote ongoing gains in corporate environmental performance through the creation of a hybrid system combining elements of public regulation, government-supervised corporate self-regulation, mandatory information disclosure, and green procurement.     

Social Competence in Late Elementary School: Relationships to Parenting and Neighborhood Context

Despite evidence that neighborhoods confer both risk and resilience for youth development, the existing neighborhood research has a number of methodological limitations including lack of diversity in neighborhoods sampled and neighborhood characteristics assessed. The purpose of this study was to address these methodological limitations of existing research and to examine the relationship of neighborhood structural and social characteristics to family-level social processes and teacher-reported social competence during early adolescence. The study sample of 3,624 fifth graders (51?% girls) was ethnically diverse, including roughly even proportions of non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, and Hispanic youth. Neighborhood measures included economic disadvantage derived from the U.S. Census, physical and social disorder obtained by direct observation, and social capital from parental reports. Family-level social processes included parent reported family cohesion and youth reported maternal and paternal nurturance. We found that neighborhood factors significantly associated with youth social aggression and social competence but not social withdrawal, after controlling for individual demographic characteristics and parenting factors. There was limited evidence of moderation of family influences by neighborhood characteristics as well as the moderation of neighborhood effects by children’s gender. Neighborhood physical disorder was associated with increased social aggression among boys but with increased social withdrawal among girls. Implications of the study’s findings for research on neighborhoods and adolescent development and the development of preventive interventions are discussed.     

Emancipatory rural politics: confronting authoritarian populism

A new political moment is underway. Although there are significant differences in how this is constituted in different places, one manifestation of the new moment is the rise of distinct forms of authoritarian populism. In this opening paper of the JPS Forum series on ‘Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World’, we explore the relationship between these new forms of politics and rural areas around the world. We ask how rural transformations have contributed to deepening regressive national politics, and how rural areas shape and are shaped by these politics. We propose a global agenda for research, debate and action, which we call the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI, www.iss.nl/erpi). This centres on understanding the contemporary conjuncture, working to confront authoritarian populism through the analysis of and support for alternatives.