‘Irish Republic’, ‘Eire’ or ‘Ireland’? The Contested Name of John Bull's Other Island

One of the less visible consequences of the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement of 1998 was that it finally put to rest a fifty year dispute between Ireland and the United Kingdom about the names of the respective states. This article begins by outlining the constitutional background to this complex terminological dispute, and then examines it from three perspectives. The first is that of the Irish state itself, which in recent decades has opted unambiguously for 'Ireland'. The second is the British government, which until the end of the twentieth century preferred the labels 'Eire' or 'Irish Republic'. The third is the militant nationalist republican movement, whose terminology was designed to deny the legitimacy of the existing state. The article concludes by examining the political significance of this issue, arguing that while its most obvious importance is symbolic, it has also had real meaning for the identity and for the geographical definition of the state, as well as for the British-Irish relationship.     

The ‘Othering’ of ‘Red Ed’, or How the Daily Mail ‘Framed’ the British Labour Leader

This article takes as its starting point the attack on the late Ralph Miliband, the left‐wing intellectual and father of the current Labour leader Ed Miliband, by the Daily Mail in late 2013. It argues that this attack was a response by the Mail to its failed campaign to dub the Labour leader ‘Red Ed’. The article demonstrates that ever since Miliband won the Labour leadership in 2009, the Mail has sought to ‘other’ him by presenting him as ‘alien’—this by constant references to his Jewish background, his upbringing in a wealthy North London intellectual milieu, his supposed extreme left‐wing views and his ineffable ‘oddness’—at least, an oddness as characterised by the newspaper. The paper will conclude by asking why the Daily Mail's ‘Red Ed’ moniker failed to catch on, while noting that their ‘Odd Ed’ moniker seems to have had more resonance.     

Putting ‘projectized’ development in perspective

The project approach to development assistance has been attacked for its inability to make results self-sustaining. This has been attributed to a short time horizon, an inability to pick up recurrent costs, and a tendency to either by-pass or fragment local institutions and therefore to neglect the need for local capacity building. At the same time, claims have been made that projects are politically advantageous due to quick high visibility results and they are useful instruments for experimentation, social learning and capacity building. This article examines both arguments and concludes that there is a need for radical changes in project development processes, but that there should not be a rush to abandon the project as an instrument for development.     

From ‘Judicial Mind’ to ‘Democratic Soul’: Law and Politics on the Bureaucratic Frontline

This article considers the relationship between law and democratic politics as manifest in the practice of ‘street‐level bureaucracy’. By glancing back to debates about citizenship and public administration between the two world wars, it sets contemporary concerns about the political constitution in broader context. In doing so, it discloses a fundamental division between conceptions of the state derived from Roman jurisprudence on the one hand, and ancient Athenian political practice on the other. It finds in the tragic dilemmas posed for street‐level bureaucrats—by the competing claims on their values—a test of individual moral agency and of democracy as the management of diversity. It concludes that what is at stake in our estimation of street‐level bureaucracy is not so much the purity of the ‘judicial mind’ as the complexity of the ‘democratic soul’ and the ‘connected society’.     

‘No‐one likes us; we don't care’: ‘Dissident’ Irish Republicans and Mandates

The episodic dissident republican activity evident in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement has been accompanied by regular assertions from the police, politicians and commentators that dissidents have no backing. This article examines the historic importance of mandates and support for previous and contemporary republican armed campaigns. It explores whether violent republicans have ever enjoyed widespread support in Ireland and assesses the extent to which a lack of backing has precluded violent campaigns. The piece analyses the evidence regarding the lack of sympathy for current dissident violence, assessing the degree to which armed republicanism has reached a new level of isolation.     

Kenyanization and African capacity ‘shuffling’

Cohen (1992) discusses in detail the problem of 'Kenyanization' of positions filled by expatriate advisors in the Kenyan civil service. He outlines six possible solutions to the problem, four of which involve the funding by donors of higher than civil service level salaries to attract Kenyan staff to the donors' particular projects. While Cohen is critical of these options he does not discuss the most serious danger in their use, the danger that resources will be seriously misallocated. In this article the traditional approach of supplying new resources to Kenya is compared with this new alternative of using donor funds to induce the reallocation of existing Kenyan staff. It suggests that donors must be extremely careful in using their funds to entice workers to their own projects without consideration of where these resources are drawn from. An alternative explanation to those discussed by Cohen for the lack of success with ‘Kenyanization’ is also proposed.