Crafting radical opposition or reproducing homonormativity? Consociationalism and LGBT rights activism in Lebanon

There is little research on the struggles surrounding gay rights in divided societies emerging from intrastate conflict and characterized by consociational power sharing, which allocates rights to the main ethnic groups. While consociational arrangements – predicated on a minority rights regime – theoretically open up constitutional space for LGBT rights, they often negate such possibilities by empowering ethnic hardliners opposed to sexual minorities. This article explores how Lebanese LGBT activists conceptualize rights and craft mobilization tactics and strategies. I focus on an “identity dilemma” faced by Lebanese activists: to create a public identity for rights demands or to elide such a process. While the former strategy seeks openings in the power sharing structure, the latter aims for a radical form of resistance against the sectarianism of consociationalism. Activists pursuing the latter strategy, moreover, see consociationalism as encouraging an LGBT mobilization that reproduces the sectarian system and is complicit with homonormativity.     

What’s Love Got To Do With It?: Emotion,Rationality, and Framing LGBT Rights

Recent years have a seen a dramatic and rapid shift in attitudes about same-sex marriage—quite possibly one of the largest shifts in public opinion ever recorded. Another shift has occurred regarding the framing of persuasive appeals by gay rights advocacy organizations. Earlier campaigns focused on rationality by highlighting the idea of equal rights for Lesbian Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender individuals; more recent campaigns have focused on love and commitment. Is one type of framing more effective than the other? Are attitudes about marriage equality more likely to shift when arguments are framed rationally or when they are framed emotionally? We conducted a series of randomized experiments to explore these questions. We find that rights are more effective in the abstract but that videos highlighting same-sex couples in loving and committed relationships are more effective than videos focused on rights and equality.     

Resisting LGBT Rights Where “We Have Won”: Canada and Great Britain

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) human rights are often assumed to travel from the core to the periphery, namely from the Global North to the Global South. However, these rights flows and resistances are more complex than a unidirectional model might suggest. Using a transnational perspective, we consider resistances to LGBT rights in places where LGBT rights are supposedly assured. In Canada and Great Britain, where various forms of equities legislation for LGBT people have been enacted, there is an increasing opposition to LGBT gains. The transnational circulation of these oppositional discourses can be seen in how Canadian and British organizations talk to, and about, each other and illustrate transnational networks that create resistances in the places where “we have won.” This questions a sole focus on resistances in places that do not have LGBT equalities legislation, usually those outside the Global North and associated with “less developed others.”     

What Role for Human Rights in Business?

The Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) were endorsed by the United Nations Human Rights Council in June 2011, following the six‐year mandate of the Special Representative to the Secretary General (SRSG) on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises. The SRSG developed a framework comprised of three pillars: (1) States have a duty to protect against human rights abuses committed by third parties, including business enterprises; (2) business enterprises have a responsibility to respect human rights; and (3) victims of business‐related human rights abuses need access to effective remedies. In particular, guiding principle (GP) 11 provides that business enterprises should respect human rights, that is, they should avoid infringing on the human rights of others and address adverse human rights impacts with which they are involved. This article considers the implications of the Guiding Principles' framework for business; the continuing role of conventional accountability mechanisms in providing access to remedy for victims under the third pillar of the framework; and developments in ‘hard law', with a particular focus on the approach by the UK, since the introduction of the UNGPs, before turning, briefly, to the future for business and human rights.     

Transition in Post-Communist States: Triple or Quadruple?

When the study of transitions moved from Latin America and southern Europe scholars initially assumed that transition in these two regions would be regime-based 'double transitions' of democratisation and marketisation. Gradually, it was accepted by scholars that many post-communist states inherited weak states and institutions, thereby adding a third factor to the transition process of stateness. This 'triple transition' has been largely accepted as sufficient to understand post-communist transitions and, in some cases, includes nationality questions. This article builds on the 'triple transition' by separating the national and stateness questions within its third aspect and argues that although both processes are interlinked they should be nevertheless separated into separate components (democratisation and marketisation are treated separately but are also closely related phenomena). This article argues two points. First, stateness and the nationality question were until recently ignored by scholars because these were not factors in earlier transitions. Secondly, they were ignored because the relationship of nationhood to the civic state is still under-theorised.     

Community in Public Policy: Fad or Foundation?

Both internationally and within Australia public policy is experiencing a rush back to the idea of community. After 15 years of discourse about the new public management and economic rationalism a much older discourse is slipping back into public policy. It is a normative discourse about changing relations between state democracy, market capitalism and civil society in which the idea of community is a central ‘new’ relation used to manage both state and market failures. Already new policy tools emerging from this discourse can be seen with innovations based on concepts such as partnerships, place management, and a raft of community consultation mechanisms. Much of the rhetoric about community as a new foundation for public policy, however, remains confused. The result is a muddle of ideas in which this potentially useful concept is in danger of becoming just another public policy reform fad. This article looks at what policy makers are saying about community, identifies problems in this current usage and offers ways of thinking about community with a view to establishing its policy utility.     

Justifying Human Rights: Does Consensus Matter?

This paper is a critical examination of a widely accepted method of human rights justification. The method defends the universality of human rights by appeal to diverse worldviews that converge on human rights norms. By showing that the norms can be justified from the perspective of diverse worldviews, human rights theorists suggest that there is reason to believe that human rights are universal norms that should govern the institutions of all societies. This paper argues that the evidence of plural foundations of human rights fails to increase our confidence in the universality of human rights. The paper defends the following claims: (1) the convergence on human rights is better explained as an accidental outcome than as an indicator of the universality of human rights, (2) the plurality of human rights justification is superfluous to the explanation of why human rights apply to all societies, (3) the aggregation of justifications decreases rather than increases the reliability of the universality belief, and (4) the reasonable disagreement among conflicting justifications generates an epistemic dilemma.     

Terrorist threats in Europe: hype or reality?

On 3 October, the American and British governments issued travel advisories on the threat of terrorist attacks in France and Germany. The United States government characterised the threat as ‘high’, while the United Kingdom raised the terrorist threat level for France and Germany from ‘general’ to ‘high’. Shortly afterwards, the French government issued a warning to its citizens about the risk of a terrorist attack in Britain. Within the UK itself, the threat level in respect of Islamist jihadist terrorism has been set since January 2010 at ‘severe’, the second highest level, indicating an attack is likely but not yet judged imminent. This has remained unchanged.     

Administrative reform in Belgium: Maintenance or modernisation?

This article aims to analyse, classify and explain similarities and differences in administrative reform in four separate Belgian administrations along four internationally observed trends in administrative reform: organisation, personnel, strategy, and finance. Comparatively, Flanders can be classified as an early moderniser, followed by the federal government, which had been locked longer in a trajectory of maintenance. The French-speaking governments of the Walloon Region and French Community are late modernisers, and compared to both the Flemish and federal government their reform efforts are more fragmented and incremental. The main factors explaining variations in administrative reform in Belgium are differences in institutional continuity, policy entrepreneurship and policy diffusion, all three of which combined to support administrative reform efforts at the Flemish and, slightly less so, at the federal levels, and were markedly absent in the French-speaking governments. Aggregated indicators of differences in political culture do not convincingly explain differences in public sector reform, but the degree of partisan control over the administration, as a meso dimension of politico-administrative culture, impacts on the French-speaking governments' resistance against certain types of organisational and human resources management reforms.     

Repress or Respect? Precarious Leadership,Poor Economy and Labor Protection

How should insecure leaders deal with labor rights in the face of an economic downturn? Economic theory suggests that suppressing labor rights boosts the economy and that economic growth also dampens violent political opposition. As a result, the suppression of labor rights should contribute to more job security for leaders. However, some other scholars maintain that more repression actually increases the probability of opposition. As a result, the policy implication of this argument is that leaders would be better off if they choose to improve the protection of labor rights. Our simple formal model demonstrates that the second argument is more likely to be the case. The probit analysis of 146 countries from 1984 to 2004 bears out this prediction. We also find that this relationship is stronger in non-democracies than in democracies. Our study appears to provide some support to Bueno de Mesquita et al.’s (2005) statement that policies that are good for political survival may not necessarily be good for the economy.     

Opinion Backlash and Public Attitudes: Are Political Advances in Gay Rights Counterproductive?

One long‐recognized consequence of the tension between popular sovereignty and democratic values like liberty and equality is public opinion backlash, which occurs when individuals recoil in response to some salient event. For decades, scholars have suggested that opinion backlash impedes policy gains by marginalized groups. Public opinion research, however, suggests that widespread attitude change that backlash proponents theorize is likely to be rare. Examining backlash against gays and lesbians using a series of online and natural experiments about marriage equality, and large‐sample survey data, we find no evidence of opinion backlash among the general public, by members of groups predisposed to dislike gays and lesbians, or from those with psychological traits that may predispose them to lash back. The important implication is that groups pursuing rights should not be dissuaded by threats of backlash that will set their movement back in the court of public opinion.     

Rights in Action: The Impact of Chinese Migrant Workers’ Resistances on Citizenship Rights

There have been some debates on Chinese migrant workers’ resistances and their rising rights consciousness in the academia. This paper aims to understand the debates and their problems. This paper investigates the extent to which the forms of Chinese migrant workers’ resistance have diverse impact on their citizenship rights. The conception of citizenship rights can be analytically understood in the individual/collective form and with the passive/active nature; such a dichotomy is also applicable for that of resistance according to the action theory. Both conceptualizations and their linkages constitute an analytical framework in this paper. Within it, the various cases of migrant workers’ resistances and their connections with attainment of rights are discussed comparatively. A main finding in this paper is that the individual resistance, whether passive or active, is almost independent of rights; individuals with the PC model only wait passively for the government’s help; and the AC model (e.g. strike) is much more prospective for the attainment of collective rights, which creates a new power to balance those of state and capital in China.     

Cohesion in the European community: Illusion or reality?

The EC's regional policy is faced with the issue of the impact of market integration on the goals of economic and social cohesion in the Community. There are two major approaches in the literature in predicting the consequences of market integration on cohesion. The first approach stresses the divergence of levels of development while the second predicts that a gradual reduction of disparities will take place. To test these two hypotheses an analysis of regional and national level data covering the first nine member states of the Community over a 40‐year period is conducted. The results demonstrate that there has been a constant and significant convergence in levels of economic and social cohesion in the Community and within nation states during the last 40 years.     

‘Solidity or Wind?’ What's on the Menu in the Bill of Rights Debate?

This article examines the pronouncements and positions of the leading political parties on the Human Rights Act and the proposals for a new British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. It analyses the main arguments made in support of a British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, which are advanced around five main issues: security, the judges, parliamentary sovereignty, responsibilities and 'British rights'. The article was written before the government published the Green Paper Rights and Responsibilities: developing our constitutional framework in March 2009 and provides a political context with which to analyse it.     

The Interventionist Turn of UN Peacekeeping: New Western Politics of Protection or Bureaucratic Mission Creep?

During recent years, the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping system has exerted robust interventions in the domestic jurisdiction of target states for human rights purposes. The existing literature attributes the explanation mainly to the “new politics of protection” pursued by Western governments and thus validates the realist hypothesis. This article analyzes the Côte d'Ivoire and Haiti cases to demonstrate that not only government policies (the realist hypothesis) but also independent bureaucratic powers exerted by senior UN officials (the social constructivist thesis) have contributed to the emergence of interventionist policies at the UN. Moreover, “bottom-up” initiatives stemming from the virtue ethics of senior UN officials have played a much more decisive role in generating the interventionist turn than “top-down” institutional guidelines and doctrines, such as the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) principle. Instead of RtoP, UN officials draw upon broad legitimating principles of the UN, notably human security, to justify their interventionist policies.     

Political Accountability in Hong Kong: Myth or Reality?

This article assesses the practice of political accountability in Hong Kong: whether it has largely been realised in practice, or whether it is merely a political slogan for the government to justify its executive-led governance. The analysis begins with a review of the theoretical concepts of political accountability and ministerial accountability, and then establishes an operational framework to analyse the current practice of political accountability in Hong Kong's political system. It concludes by addressing the degree of political accountability overall.     

Anti-immigrant parties in Europe: Ideological or protest vote?

Abstract. In this article we address the question whether or not the votes for anti–immigrant parties can be considered as protest votes. We define protest votes by the motives underlying electoral choices, building on earlier research done by Tillie (1995) and Van der Eijk & Franklin (1996). That research showed that ideological proximity and party size are the best predictors of party preference. On this basis we designed a typology of motives for party choice and how these motives would manifest themselves empirically. Analyzing the 1994 elections for the European Parliament for seven political systems we show that anti–immigrant parties attract no more protest votes than other parties do, with only one exception: the Dutch Centrumdemocraten. Voting for anti–immigrant parties is largely motivated by ideological and pragmatic considerations, just like voting for other parties. In addition, (negative) attitudes towards immigrants have a stronger effect on preferences for anti–immigrant parties than on preference for other parties. Social cleavages and attitudes towards European unification are of minor importance as determinants of preferences for anti–immigrant parties. The overall conclusion is that a rational choice model of electoral behavior has strong explanatory power for party preferences in general, but also for the support for anti–immigrant parties in particular.     

Science in Policy-Making: Neutral Experts or Strategic Policy-Makers?

Although many policy process and diffusion theories follow the premise that scientific and technological knowledge plays a crucial role in a wide variety of policy fields, very few empirically assess the impact that institutional and process-relevant factors may have on the position of science within a process. The present study addresses the question of what role science plays in policy processes. To answer this, we apply the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) and investigate three complementary assumptions using a qualitative comparison of four cases: the ACF claims that scientific experts can take very different positions in the policy process, depending on how conflictive or consensus-oriented the relations among actors and coalitions are within a so-called policy subsystem. Put differently, the type of subsystem impacts on the position of science within the process. The results show that subsystem-specific factors impact upon whether scientific representatives act at the periphery of a process or as policy brokers seeking feasible policy solutions.