What can we do to help and understand survivors of suicide in Hong Kong?

Survivors of suicide or people bereaved by suicide are underresearched and underserviced. This report contains preliminary data, collected from a psychological autopsy study, which examines the characteristics of suicide survivors in Hong Kong. This paper considers the preliminary data currently available and attempts to suggest a way forward toward understanding and help for this underrecognized group of individuals in Hong Kong.     

Things Can Only Get Better? Changing Views of the Past,Present and Future in the Former Soviet Union

Previous research has reported substantial levels of nostalgia for the Soviet era among citizens of some of the independent republics that emerged from its collapse. We report new analyses from eight former Soviet republics, and from two surveys, in 2001 and 2010, comparing attitudes to government in the Soviet period and at the time of the surveys, as well as expectations for the future. Everywhere, views of the past have become less positive and those of the present more positive. However, both the views in each survey and the change between each of them vary among countries and socio-demographic groups.     

Lawyers and Hong Kong’s democracy movement: from electoral politics to civil disobedience

Research on Hong Kong lawyers has so far focused on their internal differences and the rise of cause lawyering. Not much has been done on their role in promoting political liberalism. This paper fills a gap by reviewing the history of lawyers’ political activism before and after Hong Kong’s sovereignty shifted from a liberal-colonial to an authoritarian regime in 1997. It argues, first, that Hong Kong’s post-colonial constitutionalized politics and prolonged democratic deficit have given the legal complex—which includes lawyers and also increasingly legal academics—a key role in its pro-democracy movement, and second, critical political junctures have driven activist lawyers to use various means, from electoral politics to civil disobedience, to defend the rule of law and Hong Kong’s tortuous democratization.     

Political repression in a sub-national hybrid regime: the PRC’s governing strategies in Hong Kong

Existing literature has long recognised that the Beijing government has utilised different strategies to suppress the opposition in Hong Kong. However, with the rise of localism against the Chinese government, the implications of such political repression require new exploration and insight. This article adopts Hale’s analytical framework on political repression and argues that the Beijing government can comparatively tolerate an opposition fighting for democratisation, but the localists who advocate self-determination or separatism are harshly condemned and suppressed. In Beijing’s approach, this ‘red line’ was adopted to place national security, territory integration and sovereignty as the top considerations. Theoretically, this paper contributes to distinguishing between two types of opposition groups within sub-national hybrid regimes and analyzes different responses from the sovereign state. Empirically, the case of Hong Kong will help enrich the existing literature by comparing Beijing’s strategies of repression in regard to the democratic opposition and localists.     

Forward to the Past? Loyalist Paramilitarism in Northern Ireland Since 1994

This article considers in detail loyalist paramilitary activity in Northern Ireland since the paramilitary cease-fires of 1994. The continuing nature of contemporary loyalist violence is documented with reference to sectarian attacks against members of the “Other”/Catholic community and associated symbols of that community, violence directed at other loyalists, and the potential for future violence given constitutional uncertainty regarding Northern Ireland's position within the United Kingdom. The article also challenges assumptions within the broader literature of an inability within loyalist paramilitary groups to move beyond violence in the post-cease-fire period with particular reference to their conflict transformation efforts.     

A Post-development Hoax? (Re)-examining the Past,Present and Future of Development Studies

Because of the absence of evidence to show for its utility, the notion of ‘development’ has been fraught with many debates over the years. This paper is concerned with re-examining the future of development studies, based on its past and present trajectories. The argument here is that development may be useful if its norms and practices become context-specific and are made to benefit its purported beneficiaries. The chronology spans the period after World War II to the present day, and thus covers theories that envision alternatives. While this chronology is overlapping, we hope to show that development studies has been marked by both continuities and discontinuities.     

The Coming Genocide? Burundi's Past,Present, and Potentially Deadly Future

The Great Lakes region of Africa is the most conflict-prone region of the world and one current concern is political violence in Burundi. This research investigates whether Burundi is on the precipice of a genocide. Burundi's weak democratic norms, genocidal history, and the impact of contagion and diffusion of violence in the region provide a number of the conditions that could contribute to a genocide. This research investigates the past and present conflict variables of the Great Lakes region with a focus on Burundi and assesses the potential that the ongoing political violence in Burundi will lead to genocide.     

Postnational Relations to the Past: A “European Ethics of Memory”?

In nation-building processes, the construction of a common past and references to a shared founding moment have played a well-documented role in fostering notions of a collective political actor. While notions of unreflective national collective memories no longer hold in an age of a postheroic “politics of regret”, the preferred subject of collective memories nevertheless often remains the nation, both in academic literature and in public debates. In this paper, my aim is to establish the role of collective memory in self-proclaimed “postnational” approaches—specifically in the context of European integration—and to assess in how far these approaches can claim to go beyond notions of memory handed down to us from earlier accounts of nation-building processes. I start by laying out two different approaches to a postnational collective memory as they emerge from the literature. The first approach aims at overcoming national subjectivities by focusing on a specific content: a shared, albeit negative, legacy for all Europeans. The Holocaust plays a particularly prominent role in this discourse. The second approach sees and seeks commonalities not so much on the level of memory content but rather on the level of specific memory practices (a “European ethics of memory”). While it is not aimed at dismantling the nation as a political subject per se, it also creates a European self-understanding that makes the symbolic borders of Europe look more porous: potentially everyone can employ these memory practices. However, as I will show, this approach knows its own attempts to define a postnational “essence”, most notably by tying the ethics of memory to a specifically European cultural repertoire.     

National Museums in Southeast Europe: (En)countering Balkanism?

The collapse of sclerotic and dysfunctional one-party regimes in central and eastern Europe, associated with the end of the USSR, and in parts of the Balkans, with the death of President Tito of Yugoslavia in 1980, was followed by violence and war, which brought the region to the world’s attention. These events, and inevitably the historical causes, were and still are interpreted to an international audience, largely through a global media, over which Balkan countries have limited influence. Todorova (Slavic Review 53(2):453–452, 1994, 2009, 1997) identified a trend or convention in these interpretations which was largely negative, which she called ‘Balkanism’, and which was at least partly constructed ‘from the outside’ (1994, p. 445). She argued that our knowledge of the Balkans is mediated through a distorting lens: we see it as a dark ‘other’. By contrast, national museums funded by national governments would seem to offer a channel through which the states in the region might be able to tell their own stories, in their own way. This survey of national museums attempts to map these stories against specific aspects of Balkanism. Are they complicit in its construction, or do they run counter to or align with it? It is argued that the key elements of these displays counter some aspects of Balkanism but align with it or reinforce it in other ways.     

Informal Archives: Historical Narratives and the Preservation of Paper in India’s Urban Slums

Historical research is challenging when studying informal spaces like urban slums, where extant scholarship is limited, government data are sparse or absent, and populations change rapidly due to eviction, environmental shocks, and the everyday churn of migration. Moreover, written materials and political ephemera generated within slums are rarely preserved in accessible state archives, limiting the usefulness of conventional archival research. In such contexts, the discovery of informal archives—unmapped, non-systematized collections of materials kept by individuals and groups in the spaces under study—can contribute to the reconstruction of local histories. This article draws on 20 months of fieldwork in India’s urban slums to offer insights on the collection and use of informal archival materials. These materials afford an intimate look at how the urban poor organize and make claims on the state. Their analysis, however, involves inferential challenges. Researchers must consider how processes of production, preservation, and provision shape the content of gathered historical materials and thus the inferences that can be drawn from them. Beyond urban slums, informal archives are likely to be useful sources of historical data for a range of studies in comparative politics, especially those that focus on informal institutions and local quotidian politics.     

War and state formation in Lebanon: can Tilly be applied to the developing world?

State formation in the developing world can be explained as growing centralisation and institutionalisation. To understand why some states struggle with state formation, or the processes of centralisation, the model provided by Charles Tilly, in his analysis of state formation in Western Europe, is applied to Lebanon, starting at the onset of the 1975 civil war and concluding with an analysis of the post-Syrian occupation environment. With the appropriate conditions it is possible to use Tilly’s model of war making and the state to measure state formation, or the lack thereof, in the developing world. Conclusively, in the case of Lebanon, it is evident that progress towards strong state formation has been made because of processes of war that are similar to those Tilly outlines in his historical analysis of Western Europe.     

Can Museums Help Build a European Memory? The Example of the Musée de l’Europe in Brussels in the Light of “New World” Museums’ Experience

The important role museums played in the construction of nation-states in the late 18th century and in the 19th century generated an abundant literature. In today’s word, these institutions of knowledge are unanimously recognized as lieux de mémoire, capable of generating publics and, more or less successfully, self-identifying (mostly national) collectives. The present chapter intends to analyze how two history museums are projecting a questioning a sense of belonging and its problematic relation to a common present through the celebration of a common past. In particular, we are interested in how supra-national identities are negotiated through these traditionally national agencies of culture in the exhibition C’est notre histoire!, held in 2007–2008 at the Musée de l’Europe in Bruxelles and at the National Museum of Australia, opened in Canberra in 2001. The National Museum of Australia will be regarded as an example of recent negotiations and dissents on an alternate post-national identity construction. It can allow us to revisit the idea of Europe’s museums made of new uses, practices and discourses on multiple identities and groups who were traditionally forgotten in or excluded from a clear-cut national identity. It will also allow us to examine the scenographic representations of a European identity which can not be summarized as the juxtaposition of fixed national narratives and artefacts.     

From the Colony to the Post-colony: Sufis and Wahhâbîsts in Senegal and Nigeria

Conflicts and encounters between Sufis and Islamists have persisted throughout much of Islamic history in areas such as the Middle East, the North Caucasus, and the Indian sub-continent. In this context, two cases from West Africa are particularly interesting. In colonial Senegal, Wahhâbî influences were common, and during the 1950s, they even seemed to pose an alternative to the hegemony of Sufism in the colony of Senegal. Yet in the creation and development of the post-colonial state, the centrality of Sufism has apparently confined the influence of the Wahhâbîsts to the margins. In Nigeria, on the other hand, the influence of the Wahhâbîyah was marginal in the colonial period and the Sufi tarîqas maintained their status and appeal to the masses; from the 1960s onwards, Wahhâbî influences gradually diminished the power of Sufism amongst Nigerian Muslims. This article explores and compares the dynamics that developed between Sufis and Wahhâbîsts in Senegal and Nigeria, from the colony to the post-colony. Inasmuch as Senegal and Nigeria represent the Francophone and Anglophone colonies and postcolonies, analyzing the historical development of different colonial heritages will clarify the apparent similarities and differences in relations between Sufis and Wahhâbîsts in these two spheres of influences.     

Localism and Accountability in a Post-Collaborative Era: Where Does It Leave the Community Right to Challenge?

Since the establishment of subsidiarity in the early 1990s, the European-wide move to devolve governance has been interpreted by previous and present UK governments adopting differing ideological positions within a ‘localism agenda’. Interpretations have changed the dynamics of the community right to challenge, as well as the structure and mechanisms for community accountability. This article adopts the typology of forms of local governance developed by Lowndes and Sullivan (2008, How low can you go? Rationales and challenges for neighbourhood governance. Public Administration, 86 (1), 1–22) to explore the hypothesis that the localism agenda realigns the synergy between neighbourhood rationales; citizen engagement in service delivery and the opportunity for public scrutiny and accountability. It concludes that opportunities for communities to challenge service delivery and ensure increased accountability to the local level will be tempered by increased complexity and demands on local authorities to develop new relationships with both service users and providers.     

Is School the Best Route to Skills? Returns to Vocational School and Vocational Skills in Egypt

This paper tests the assumption that formal education is the best route to job skills. The returns to formal vocational secondary schooling are compared to the returns to acquiring skills outside the education system, such as undertaking an apprenticeship, for male wage workers in Egypt. A unique longitudinal dataset with information on schooling and skills allows for causal inference about returns by comparing siblings. For recent cohorts, the estimated returns to formal vocational secondary education are the same as attaining no formal education. However, the returns to skills obtained outside of formal education are substantial.     

Competition and Contracting in the Transition from CCT to Best Value: Towards a More Reflexive Regulation?

Following publication of the government’s proposals for a statutory framework of Best Value, and the introduction of regulations increasing the flexibility of CCT pending its abolition, this paper examines the relationship between the compulsory regime and its likely successor. First, the paper suggests that the Best Value frame-work is likely to impose a range of regulatory, monitoring and enforcement constraints similar in effect to the formal requirements that operate under CCT. Continuity with Conservative policy will be reinforced practically through transitional arrangements for the gradual abolition of CCT and the phased introduction of its replacement. Second, the paper argues that contracting is likely to continue to have a significant role under the new regime as the natural adjunct to the voluntary competitive processes that will be the preferred management tools for securing improvements in service performance. Open tendering and public-private sector partnership arrangements, both of which imply contractual governance, are given explicit priority in the consultation document over benchmarking, performance indicators and other comparative public management mechanisms. Third, the paper argues that local authorities are likely to want to retain and develop contracting arrangements that potentially permit a degree of control over service provision that might not be available were more radical service-providing alternatives to be adopted, involving the complete transfer of functions outside the public sector and/or their vesting in independent companies. Finally, the paper assesses the transition from CCT to Best Value from the theoretical perspective of responsive and reflexive regulation. Following a brief account of the reflexive failures of CCT, the paper argues that, although the Best Value framework is characterized by inherently reflexive processes involving self-review, consultation and standard-setting, its relative success is likely to depend ultimately both on the tightness with which legislation is drafted and on the manner of its practical interpretation, implementation and enforcement.