Decentring state categories: diaspora within a Palestinian geopolitical assemblage in Nicosia,Cyprus

With over 50% of Palestinians in diaspora, global constructions of what is Palestinian are central to Palestinian geopolitics. This article examines how the meanings and implications of the label “Palestinian” in diaspora are produced as Palestinians negotiate the politics of migration and citizenship while living in Cyprus. Using the concept of a geopolitical assemblage incorporates the role of state immigration control into a critical discussion of diaspora. Cyprus provides a complex context in which the momentary constructions of a Palestinian diaspora in relation to other geopolitical entities affects Palestinians despite their immigration or citizenship status in Cyprus.     

Globalisation and the (Non‐) defence of the welfare state

This article explores the relationship between globalisation and the development of the British and Norwegian welfare states. Focusing on the welfare state policies of the British and Norwegian labour parties and their relationships to the European Union (an important indicator of the impact of globalisation on West European nation‐states), it argues that despite the growing importance of global dynamics and pressures, national‐level forces were the predominate factors in the development of the British and Norwegian welfare states and relations to the EU in the 1980s and 1990s. Consequently, globalisation does not lead to welfare state convergence, but to divergence, interwoven with national‐level dynamics.     

Deep Presidency: Toward a Structural Theory of an Unsustainable Office in a Catastrophic World—Obama and Beyond

Modern and postmodern theories of the presidency tend to place the American president on a continuum of power, asserting the need for either a more active or less active chief executive. From the seminal work of Richard Neustadt, celebrating the assertive president seeking to maximize power and leadership, through the contrasting view of historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and others who sought to restrict the reach of the executive, scholars have battled over the appropriate balance of power—particularly the executive-legislative scale. From an alternative critical/structural view of the office, this expansive-restrictive debate, while important, misses the central point that regardless of party, personality, or management style, all presidents seek the same structural goals. If, as Theodore Lowi has argued, the president is the “state personified,” then we need to ask how the capitalist state shapes and constrains the imperatives presidents must pursue, given our political economy and the ideology that sustains it. Two core imperatives emerge for the literature on theories of the state: the pursuit of economic growth and the provision of “national security.” This article explores debates over theories of the presidency in the light of twenty-first-century challenges to conventional definitions of “growth” and “national security.” In the face of global climate change and the decline of US military and geopolitical preeminence, can the presidency break free from its imprisonment in orthodox notions of growth and national security to forge a more sustainable path for the nation and the office? And more broadly, if our way of life in fact undermines our way of life in an unsustainable self-defeating logic, absent a cataclysmic crisis, what, if any, role can the president play in fostering a deep change of direction? By challenging the power structure of the political economy, a critical/structural theory of the presidency is best situated to address such questions.     

Space Sustainability and the Freedom of Outer Space

The concept of sustainable development states that every nation is free to determine how to meet its own needs and accrue its own benefits as long as it does not prejudice the ability of future generations to do the same. This end is challenging in the space domain as the existing emphasis on national concerns obscures the larger issues of international structural inequalities—lack of access, barriers to capacity building and technology absorption—while simultaneously magnifying issues related to market protectionism, which are then disguised as security issues. This article makes the claim that it is possible to correct this distortion while safeguarding the focus on global issues, such as space sustainability. While the concept of space sustainability is understood differently depending on the forum for discussion, it is clear that the dominant understanding coincides with the logic for space cooperation as “Governance for Global Security,” and this focuses more on the needs of the present space actors. Analytical tools designed with the “Cosmopolitan Approaches to International Law” express forms of cooperation that produce reciprocal obligations to enable all participants, both present and aspirant, in space exploration and use.     

Globalization and the future of the nation state

This article addresses the issue of whether the nation state has a future as a major locus of governance in an increasingly ‘globalized’ economic and social system. It begins by considering the development of the sovereign state and argues that international agreements between states were important in establishing the power of the state over society. It goes on to consider the changing capacities of the state in the modern world. Extreme versions of the 'globalization' thesis are then challenged, and it is argued that national-level economic processes remain central and that the international economy is far from ungovernable. Major nation states have a pivotal role to play in creating and sustaining such governance. However, their role is less than as autonomous national macro-economic managers, than as agencies that are representative of their populations and sources of legitimacy for new forms of governance. The central function of the nation state is that of distributing and rendering accountable powers of governance, upwards towards international agencies and trade blocs like the European Union, and downwards towards regional and other sub-national agencies of economic co-ordination and regulation.     

Productive work and subjected labor: Children's pursuits and child rights in northern Sierra Leone

The implementation of child rights legislation in the African nation of Sierra Leone has revealed children articulating novel values for education and labor. Corporal punishment was used to reinforce for children the importance of schooling and uncompensated household labor to their development as people. With its legal banning, children are forming values that conflict with those held by elders and with rights doctrine itself. They differentiate between productive “work,” useful because it is remunerated and skilled or improves their social connections, and the drudgery of uncompensated “labor,” which reinforces their low social position. Toil such as road works and mining can be “work” if it is valued and remunerated, while the desultory job market, equally desultory classroom experience, low social status, and poor pay of teachers renders formal education subjected “labor.” This highlights children as strategic users of rights and as agents in determining what comprises their own best interests.     

African states,global migration,and transformations in citizenship politics

Over the past three decades, relations between African emigrants and their home-states have been changing from antagonism to attempts to embrace and structure emigrant behaviors. This transformation in the conception of emigration and citizenship has hardly been interrogated by the growing scholarship on African and global migrations. Three of the most contentious strategies to extend the frontiers of loyalty of otherwise weak African states, namely dual citizenship or dual nationality, the right to vote from overseas, and the right to run for public office by emigrants from foreign locations are explored. Evidence from a wide range of African emigration states suggests that these strategies are neither an embrace of the global trend toward extra-territorialized states and shared citizenship between those at ‘home’ and others outside the state boundaries, nor are they about national development or diaspora welfare. Instead, they seem to be strategies to tap into emigrant resources to enhance weakened state power. The study interrogates the viability and advisability of emigrant voting and political participation from foreign locations, stressing their tendency to destabilize homeland political power structures, undermine the nurturing of effective diaspora mobilization platforms in both home and host states, and export homeland political practices to diaspora locations.     

百年以来中国共产党推进国家现代化的历史演进——基于概念史研究的论析

推进国家现代化是百年以来中国共产党孜孜以求的奋斗目标。为应对资本主义现代化的冲击,中国共产党在长期的革命斗争中逐渐明晰:现代化之于中国的首要意义在于改变落后挨打的命运,赢得国家独立,迎接现代化成为先进政党改变落后国家状态的战略选择。新中国成立后,中国共产党最初将现代化定义为工业化,将其作为摆脱贫穷落后面貌的根本途径,并在探索中逐步明确和丰富了“社会主义现代化”的发展目标与基本内涵,开启了追赶世界现代化的征程。党的十八大以来,中国共产党人愈加自信,“社会主义现代化”就是要实现中华民族的伟大复兴和人民对美好生活的向往,而中国式现代化道路也是可以引领世界现代化前进方向的中国智慧。     

From Resettled Refugees to Humanitarian Actors: Refugee Diaspora Organizations and Everyday Humanitarianism

ABSTRACT

This article describes the everyday humanitarianism of refugees resettled in Australia who form small voluntary organizations to help “their people” displaced elsewhere in the world. The people involved in refugee diaspora organizations (RDOs) are animated by forces that reflect their distinct history, positionality, and relationship to the “suffering others” they help. What the everyday humanitarianism of RDOs suggests is that we live in a world of many-humanitarianisms, where there are different possibilities to care and connect to strangers in need. While “humanitarianism” has become synonymous with a set of dominant practices and actors, there is need for other actors – including refugee diaspora humanitarians – to be given space within both humanitarianism discourse and practice.     

“Europäisierung” der Bundesstaatsreform? Zur Übertragung des EU-Konventsmodells in Deutschland und Österreich

While the European Convention was working on the Draft Treaty, similar bodies for reforming the national state organisation were installed in Germany and Austria. The paper analyses this new form of “Europeanisation” by answering two questions: Why was the Convention considered an attractive model only in these member states of the European Union? And how can obvious differences between the relevant reform procedures be explained? Challenging the well-known thesis that a “misfit” between the national and EU levels poses a necessary condition for “Europeanisation”, it is argued that the isomorphic contexts of the EU and Germany as well as Austria explain the domestic attractiveness of the Convention model; the different ways of its translation are caused by case-specific factors.     

The Role of National Human Rights Institutions in the Implementation of the UN Guiding Principles

National human rights institutions (NHRIs) are key domestic mechanisms for promotion and protection of human rights. The institutions' broad mandate, competencies, and special status between state and nonstate actors on the one hand, and special status between the national and international levels on the other hand enable them to engage effectively in the field of business and human rights. Since 2009, NHRIs have been engaging with the international human rights system in order to increase understanding and raise awareness of their role in addressing business and human rights issues. As a result, they have contributed to the development of the UN “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework and obtained an evolving role within all pillars of the framework and in its implementation. This paper presents how these domestic institutions, bridging the national and international levels, fit into the UN legal regime for corporate responsibility for human rights and what contribution they make to the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles.     

Toward a New Critical Theory with a Cosmopolitan Intent

In this article I want to outline an argument for a New Critical Theory with a cosmopolitan intent. Its main purpose is to undermine one of the most powerful beliefs of our time concerning society and politics. This belief is the notion that “modern society” and “modern politics” are to be understood as society and politics organized around the nation‐state, equating society with the national imagination of society. There are two aspects to this body of beliefs: what I call the “national perspective” (or “national gaze”) of social actors, and the “methodological nationalism” of scientific observers. The distinction between these two perspectives is important because there is no logical co‐implication between them, only an interconnected genesis and history.     

Sudan the Unfinished Project - On Identity,Diversity, and Religion

The assumption of this article is that the “second great transformation” proposed by global actors parallels the one advanced by those who resisted laissez‐faire capitalism in the 19th century. Both dispute the unilateral imposition of a new planetary order and endeavor to modify the rhythm and direction of economic processes presented as either fact or fate. In doing so, they effectively place the question of the political institution of this order on the agenda. I look briefly at the familiar underside of globalism and then move on to develop a tentative typology of initiatives that set the tone for a politics of globalization. These include radical and viral direct action, the improvement of the terms of exchange between industrialized and developing countries, the expansion of the public sphere outside national borders through global networks, the accountability of multilateral organizations, and the advancement of democracy at a supranational level. Participants in these initiatives take politics beyond the liberal‐democratic format of elections and partisan competition within the nation‐state. They exercise an informal supranational citizenship that reclaims—and at the same time reformulates—the banners of social justice, solidarity, and internationalism as part of the public agenda.     

Culture without the State? Reinvigorating Ukrainian Culture with Diasporic Efforts

This article explores the efforts of diaspora groups to reinvigorate culture. Cultural policy studies tend to focus on efforts of the state to fund and support the maintenance, enhancement, and preservation of national culture(s). This article contributes to this area of research by noting the effects of diaspora groups in achieving many of the same ends as official cultural policy through unofficial means. Using Ukraine as an interpretive case study, the article explores diasporic efforts to respond to a lack of cultural policy at home by invigorating Ukrainian culture abroad. Through the use of social networking tools, Ukrainian diaspora groups in the United States and Canada have been successful in maintaining their culture without the state. This study suggests that cultural policy research should involve not only official state‐centric efforts, but nonofficial diaspora‐centric efforts of cultural invigoration.     

In the name of the nation: reflections on nationalism and patriotism1

Treating nationhood as a political claim rather than an ethnocultural fact, this paper asks how “nation” works as a category of practice, a political idiom, a claim. What does it mean to speak “in the name of the nation”? And how should one assess the practice of doing so? Taking issue with the widely held view that “nation” is an anachronistic and indefensible or at least deeply suspect category, the paper sketches a qualified defence of inclusive forms of nationalism and patriotism in the contemporary American context, arguing that they can help develop more robust forms of citizenship, provide support for redistributive social policies, foster the integration of immigrants, and even serve as a check on the development of an aggressively unilateralist foreign policy.     

Citizenship,identity and transnational migration: Arab immigrants to the United States

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the changing relationships between identities, citizenship and the state in the context of globalisation. We first examine the ways in which scholars discuss changes in the ways in which citizenship and political identity are expressed in the context of international migration. We argue that much of the discussion of transnationalism and diaspora cling to an assumption that citizenship remains an important—though not defining—element of identity. Our position, by contrast, is that migration is one of a number of processes that transform the relationship between citizenship and identity. More specifically, we argue that it is possible to claim identity as a citizen of a country without claiming an identity as ‘belonging to’ or ‘being of’ that country, thus breaking the assumed congruity between citizenship, state and nation. We explore this possibility through a study of Arab immigrants in the US. Our findings, based on interviews with activists and an analysis of Arab American websites, suggest that concerns with both homeland and national integration are closely related to each other and may simultaneously inform immigrants' political activism. These findings indicate a need to identify multiple axes of political identification and territorial attachment that shape immigrants' sense of political membership. We argue for the importance of thinking about transnationalism as a process—and perhaps a strategy—as migrants negotiate the complex politics of citizenship and identity.     

Europäische Identifikation im Spannungsfeld regionaler und nationaler Identitäten. Theoretische Überlegungen und empirische Befunde

In contrast to the latest steps towards deeper integration of the European Union in structural terms, the development of an European identification seems to stagnate, whereas at the same time national identities persistently maintain their position and regional identities seem to gain more and more ground in some EU member states. Thus the idea of an “European Nation” has been replaced by other concepts as for example “Europe of Nations” or “Europe of Regions”. Also, the argument of a democratic dilemma of the EU has experienced new actuality. The article is interested in the relationships between regional, national and european identification. Three different heuristic models (concurrence-, concordance-, and sandwich-model) are discussed. Analyses on the basis of Eurobarometer-surveys show strong relationships of the identification to the situative context and to satisfaction with democracy. This is interpreted as a need for a less ambiguous EU-policy concerning the role of the nation and the EU and a need for a democratization of the EU, in order to develop a more stable and democratic European identity.     

Getting Carded: Border Control and the Politics of Canada's Permanent Resident Card

This article is concerned with the ways in which border control has been reconstituted through Canada's Permanent Resident Card (PRC). Some questions examined with this paper include: how did the PRC come to exist as a technology of border control? Does it function as a symbol of the Canadian nation-state's imperative to manage transnational movement and access to the geopolitical space of the nation and, if so, how? Through what means does the PRC and the events surrounding its introduction and use facilitate processes of serialization and racialization? Does the PRC, as a technique of reason of state, do the work of producing the category “responsible immigrants”? The notions of “economies of bodies” and “bordering” are important here. “Bordering” opens up the concept of the border from a fixed place to a verb, or a process. Given this, bordering does not only occur at the territorial boundaries of the nation-state, it can also be internal to it. By examining how the category of “permanent resident” is organized, gains meaning and is maintained, this article demonstrates how the technology of the PRC and similar technologies of the regulation of mobility operate as practices of bordering and nation-making and constitute Canadian citizenship.