The Day the World Changed: A Pomo Primer

This paper begins with a famous comment by Virginia Wolfe about the world changing ??on or about December, 1910?? when, she argued, modernist thought became dominant and changed human relations. My paper suggests that postmodernism begins in the Sixties, offers a definition of postmodernism taken from the French scholar, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and contrasts modernism with postmodernism. It offers an analysis of Disneyland as a postmodern entertainment and concludes with a discussion of whether postmodernism is now passé and has been succeeded by something else??namely post-postmodernism.     

The Cultural Foundations of the Modern Militia Movement

When Timothy McVeigh lit the fuse that fired the bomb that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, OK on April 19, 1995, most Americans asked, "Why?" "Why," people wondered, "would anyone do such a thing?" This paper explores the way(s) in which key dimensions of American political culture support and inspire the kinds of hate and paranoia that culminated in Timothy McVeigh's horrible act. It is based on social movement theory's insight that challenges to the established order are informed by and shape the broader culture in which the challenge is pursued. Thus, in order to explore the relationship between culture and the militia movement, this paper focuses on militia ideology, circumstances of militia formation, and organizational structures. Each arena is shown to relate to and derive from the general character of public American political culture. Cumulatively, the cultural place of the militia is one of self-described individualists struggling against cultural opponents--the representatives of the New World Order. As Americans, militia members insist that only their specific brand of individualism is "real" Americanism. Thus their disputes with the federal government are not disagreements of policy, or interpretation, or degree. They are culturally-based conflicts over the meaning of America.     

World Bank Technical Assistance: The Relational Dynamics of Policy Movement

The World Bank has been widely critiqued as a global governance actor capable of coercing and persuading its developing member countries to accept its policy recommendations. This article contributes to academic discussion by drawing upon the policy transfer and policy mobilities literatures to analyse the World Bank's two main pillars of technical assistance (TA): TA components (advisory services contained within lending operations) and stand‐alone TA projects (loans and credits that solely finance TA). Beginning from the constructivist position that ‘development’ is a social construct, the article argues that relational dynamics between TA provider and recipient affect the perception of the legitimacy of policy norms transferred from the ‘international’ to the ‘domestic’. The value added of the article is thus that policy legitimacy is not simply conferred by whether advice is technically sound but moreover through the social and political interactions—the relationship—between TA provider and recipient. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

"The World Changed Today": Agenda-Setting and Policy Change in the Wake of the September 11 Terrorist Attacks

The September 11 terrorist attacks constitute a focusing event that have been said to have “changed everything” in America. However, the literature on focusing events, policy change, and the policy process suggests that the “windows of opportunity” opened by focusing events like the September 11 attacks do not automatically equate to policy change. This paper considers whether and to what extent the agenda and policies have changed as a result of the attacks. While the events of September 11 provided the impetus for change, the threat of terrorism was already well established in the policy stream, and September 11 only threw open the window of opportunity for policy change based, in large part, on preexisting ideas; many of these ideas were enacted. And in the case of aviation security, some innovation is evident in the area of cockpit security.