‘Activating’ those that ‘lag behind’: space-time politics in Dutch parenting training for migrants

Space and time (or rather space-time) are crucial concepts in the legitimation of policy interventions into citizens' private lives. Across Europe, social policy measures to promote ‘activation’ among migrant communities—employment guidance, parenting training, youth work and so on—have proliferated, aiming to ‘move’ the Other into the here-and-now of European modernity. Van den Berg brings together theories of space-time, alterity and ‘cultural lag logics’ in an analysis of a contemporary case of such a policy: parenting training in the Netherlands. Based on ethnographic research, her study shows how certain societal problems are translated into problems of difference, and how that difference is in turn conceptualized as distance in space and time to be overcome through professional intervention.     

Western Political Research Approaches and the Development of Political Science Methodology in China

The restoration and development of political science as a discipline in China since 1980 benefits from its methodological improvements that were made largely by introducing research approaches from western academia. The aim of this paper is to examine the evolution of the introduction based on articles published in Chinese academic journals since 1990. There exists a wide diversity in research approaches in political science, and the authors try to explain why each approach has a different impact on Chinese political studies and how the introduction of such knowledge has changed the way Chinese political researchers understand the methodology and political science as a discipline.

The Spaces of Democracy and the Democracy of Space: A New Network Exploring the Disciplinary Effects of the Spatial Turn

There is much concern in the social sciences and humanities today about how people are connected with and responsible to those who live in distant places. Recent examples are abundant: from climate change to the cyclone that hit Burma in 2008. At the same time, new forces and personalities in the social sciences and humanities are seeking to ‘open out’ understandings of ‘the spatial’ as a concept. There is a movement to view ‘space’ as something which is more than a pre-defined container of territorial politics; instead, as often the sphere of multiplicity, difference, affect and/or post-territorial interconnections. This brief paper talks about the “Space of Democracy and the Democracy of Space” global network, which seeks to explore how these new forces of interrogation into the spatial, materiality, political and ethical connectivity are having an influence upon how people perceive of and constitute new spaces of politics and democracy today.     

Viewpoint: Extraterrestrial National Territory and the International System

Analysis of the probable effects of ending the prohibition against sovereign national extraterrestrial territory in the Outer Space Treaty points to large increases in the total territories of a small number of spacefaring states as they compete in a succession of annexations that move from celestial body to celestial body. Rather than result in an increased chance of war between spacefaring states—an argument deployed by defenders of the Outer Space Treaty—extraterrestrial annexations would instead reduce its likelihood, both in the near-term because of the mutual vulnerability of human spacecraft and bases, and over the long-term by making spacefaring states less vulnerable to terrestrial warfare.     

Intelligence writings in Australia

Andrew Moore, The Secret Army and the Premier, Conservative Paramilitary Organisations in NSW 1930–32 (Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1989). Pp.312. $19.00 (paperback).

Michael Cathcart, Defending the National Tuck Shop, Australia's Secret Army Intrigue of 1931 (Melbourne: Penguin, 1988). Pp.216. $14.99 (paperback).

Robert Manne, The Petrov Affair, Politics and Espionage (Sydney: Pergamon, 1987). Pp.310. $43.00 (paperback).

Mark Aarons, Sanctuary, Nazi Fugitives in Australia (Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1989). Pp.365. $24.00

Desmond Ball, Pine Gap, Australia and the US Geostationary Signals Intelligence Satellite Program (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988). Pp.121. $15.00 (paperback).

Desmond Ball, A Base for Debate, the US Satellite Station at Nurrungar (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987). Pp.122. $15.00 (paperback).

Desmond Ball, Australia's Secret Space Programs (Canberra: Australian National University, 1988). Pp.86. $15.00 (paperback).

Peter Morton, Fire Across the Desert, Woomera and the Anglo‐Australian Joint Project 1946–1980 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1989). Pp.561. $99.95.     

The Demise of US Spacepower: Not with a Bang but a Whimper

Spacepower is a critical element supporting the US national security strategy. As more nations gain access to technology, there is growing concern that space capabilities will be increasingly vulnerable to attack. However, a more insidious problem looms. For the last decade, the development and acquisition of US national security space systems have become more and more troubled with cost overruns and schedule delays. This grave situation has caught the attention of national security leadership and the US Congress. Panels of experts have proposed a litany of remedies. In this paper we explain and illustrate the importance of enhancing space power to better support national security needs and caution that many of the proposed acquisition solutions address symptoms, not the primary cause.

As history as shown…if the US offers an inviting target, it may well pay the price of attack. With the growing commercial and national security use of space, US assets in space and on the ground offer just such targets. The US is an attractive candidate for a ‘Space Pearl Harbor’. ¹ Report of the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, Pursuant to Public Law 106–65, January 11, 2001, available at <<http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/space20010111.html>. This report is often referred to as the Space Commission Report.

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper. ² T.S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’, 1925.      

Law of Space Resources and Operations on Celestial Bodies: Implications for Legislation in the United States

The U.S. assertion of a right to own resources harvested from space is consistent with the distinction in international law governing analogous res communis areas between resources harvested from a common area and the common area itself. Under the Outer Space Treaty regime, private entities do not have any more right to appropriate celestial bodies than governments do. However, U.S. law does not give private entities such a right. The U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act’s chapter on Space Resource Commercial Exploration and Utilization generally avoids taking a position on exactly how to deal with disputes in the event the activities of entities from the United States and other states interfere with each other. The U.S. law does not assert a right to declare safety zones or otherwise exercise jurisdiction outside space objects, but doing so can, under some circumstances, be consistent with international law. Many of the specifics of what rules will govern the gathering of space resources remain undetermined, yet the act’s basic premise is correct: international law and the treaty obligations of the United States allow for the U.S. government to authorize its citizens to own resources obtained from space.     

Evaluating Decision-Making Modalities and Risk Acceptance Behavior after a Major Mishap: The Case of NASA and the Space Shuttle Columbia Accident

The February 2003 loss of the space shuttle Columbia on mission STS-107 was a mishap that stunned both NASA and the world. This research examines the pre-NASA and post-NASA decision-making modalities and risk acceptance behavior for the safe and reliable operation of the space shuttle through the lens of hazard analysis. Interviews with NASA administrators and senior Space Shuttle Program managers bring back to life their views from the 2003 through 2005 timeframe, during which NASA returned the space shuttle back to a flight status. Lessons from their effort have broad applicability to other organizations recovering from—and attempting to prevent—a major accident.     

Educational Space Settlement: Mantavya

The goal of the Educational Space Settlement proposed herein, which is called Mantavya (Hindi for “to prepare the preliminary sketch”), is to act as an all-encompassing education and training hub in space. The structure is designed with an awareness of the physiological, psychological, and aesthetic needs of future colonists in space to offer an almost Earth-like environment. There are six segments of the settlement serving educational, residential, and agricultural needs, which are built up around a central axis. These segments will be used to provide education in various research and development areas, which include study of agriculture, communication, life support systems, robotics, medical sciences, material sciences, and astronomy. The variable gravity at different locations will provide new horizons of research for the inhabitants. An unpressurized region below the segmented parts of the hub will provide a microgravity training zone for space walks and disaster management.     

After Columbia: The Space Shuttle Program and the Crisis in Space Access

The loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia on 1 February 2003 brought to the fore the sad history of the Space Shuttle's origins, evolution, operation, and the continuing challenge of space access. The crisis that emerged in human access to space because of the accident was greater than any experienced since the end of the Apollo program more than thirty years earlier. This essay explores the origins and operations of the Space Shuttle, the varied efforts to build a successor vehicle versus upgrading the shuttle fleet, and suggests that the first decade of the twenty-first century promises to offer both serious challenges and enormous potential for the development of new launch vehicles that may finally achieve the long-held dream of reliable, affordable access to space. The essay ends by asking whether or not the half-hearted quest for a shuttle replacement might not portend the demise human spaceflight for the United States.     

Leadership and standards in American universities

This was the final address on education given by A. Bartlett Giamatti prior to his untimely death in 1989. It was delivered at the Gannett School of Journalism of Columbia University. Before becoming commissioner of major league baseball, he was president of Yale University from 1978 to 1986. His most recent book is A Free and Ordered Space.     

Congress,the Supreme Court,and Judicial Review: Testing a Constitutional Separation of Powers Model

Recent scholarship suggests that the U.S. Supreme Court might be constrained by Congress in constitutional cases. We suggest two potential paths to Congressional influence on the Court's constitutional decisions: a rational‐anticipation model, in which the Court moves away from its preferences in order to avoid being overruled, and an institutional‐maintenance model, in which the Court protects itself against Congressional attacks to its institutional prerogatives by scaling back its striking of laws when the distance between the Court and Congress increases. We test these models by using Common Space scores and the original roll‐call votes to estimate support in the current Congress for the original legislation and the Court's preferences over that legislation. We find that the Court does not appear to consider the likelihood of override in constitutional cases, but it does back away from striking laws when it is ideologically distant from Congress.     

Reflections on Leadership: An Interview with Sean O'Keefe

This interview with Sean O'Keefe by PAR Associate Editor W. Henry Lambright is a departure from traditional Administrative Profiles. It represents an opportunity to elicit from a man who has held executive positions in government, industry, and the university lessons he has learned about leadership from those experiences. It is his perspective, in his own words, about a host of questions of interest to scholars and practitioners of public administration. These include commonalities and differences in leading organizations in various sectors. O'Keefe discusses how executives can deal with people and get the most from them, how executives use administrative power in achieving organizational goals, and why executives sometimes make the wrong calls in key decisions. He comments on what he learned about leadership from mentors during his formative years. He explains the limits he faced in making controversial decisions, such as his termination of a Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission.     

Popular science,social science,metaphor and deception

He written widely on a variety of topics and is author or co-author of many books and articles. Among his books are Address Unknown: Homelessness in America; Homelessness and Health; After the Clean-Up: Long Range Effects of Natural Disasters; Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Firearms; Under the Gun: Weapons Crime and Violence in America;and The State of the Masses.His current research focusses on adolescent violence and on treament programs for homeless alcohol and drug abusers.     

Religion,Violence and Cities: An Introduction

Abstract

The catalyst for this special issue was a symposium entitled Religion, Violence and Cities, held under the auspices of a five year inter-disciplinary research project on ethno-nationally divided cities.¹1. Conflict and Cities and the Contested State: Everyday Life and the Possibilities of Transformation in Belfast, Jerusalem and Other Divided Cities (2007–2013), ESRC Large Grant No. RES-060-25-0015. Principal Investigators were: Wendy Pullan (University of Cambridge), Liam O'Dowd and James Anderson (Queen's University, Belfast) and Mick Dumper (University of Exeter). The ‘Contested State’ of the title refers to states where the central political dynamic concerns the boundaries, or even the existence, of the state itself. While this project expressly addressed cities divided by ethno-national conflict, it was clear from the beginning that there was an important religious dimension to such conflicts in most, if not all, the cities being studied.²2. The two main cities studied were Belfast and Jerusalem while other cities researched by project personnel included Vukovar (see Baillie, 2013 Baillie, B. (2013) Structural Violence and the (Re)construction of Vukovar's Churches, Space and Polity, 17(3). [Google Scholar], this issue), Beirut, Kirkuk, Nicosia, Mostar, and Brussels. The rationale of the Special Issue is to examine how this religious dimension exacerbates (or moderates) urban violence within a broad comparative context. Although three of the following articles are informed by Project research, we draw the net wider to encompass a broader geographical spread from the Balkans, the Middle East, Nigeria and Japan.     

The Attitudes of the Chinese Middle Class Towards Democracy

Little has been done to quantitatively establish the connection between the middle class and a specific regime type. In an effort to fill in the gap, this study uses Asian Barometer survey dataset to examine the attitudes and orientation of China’s rising middle class. We find that the Chinese middle class does show higher democratic orientation than those we categorize as lower class, but only if class is defined by occupation or by self-identification, and not by income level. We interpret this result to mean that economic development offers new life experiences with the creation of new types of professions and enhances people’s agreement with modern democratic values by arousing people’s consciousness of their new social class status.

Generational equity or privatization of social security?

He is primary author of Ties That Bind: The Interdependence of Generations,a study that examines the framing of the generational equity debate. He is currently doing research for a book concerning the planning of retirement of the baby boom generation.     

America’s First Cosmonauts: Reflections on the Human Cost of Shuttle-Mir

Shuttle-Mir, the joint space exploration effort between NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), faced a wide variety of challenges throughout its five-year run between 1993 and 1998. These included institutional differences, high costs to both the American and Russian governments, and poor public reception. The focus herein is on the personal reflections and experiences of American men and women who participated directly in the program: the seven Shuttle-Mir astronauts from the United States. These men and women joined an unprecedented exchange in which they had to train for and serve aboard a foreign space station for extended periods of time. This article utilizes archival records, official oral histories, and personal memoirs to outline three specific challenges faced in common by all of the U.S. astronauts. Primarily, they had to master both the everyday and technical intricacies of the Russian language, live in Russia during the post-Soviet economic collapse, and adapt to new institutional procedures and training methods under Roscosmos. Combined, these experiences presented serious difficulties in working with their Russian counterparts aboard the space station Mir, and made crisis situations even more hazardous. Overall, these experiences introduced yet another cost to the Shuttle-Mir program—a human one.     

The Search for Comparability: Response to Binder

Lawrence S. Rothenberg Department of Political Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627 e-mail: lrot{at}mail.rochester.edu (corresponding author) Binder (n.d., Taking the measure of Congress: Reply to Chiouand Rothenberg. Political Analysis. Forthcoming) highlightsareas of agreement and disagreement with our discussion of preferencemeasurement and legislative gridlock. We now both agree thatW-NOMINATE scores—employed in Binder (1999, The dynamicsof legislative gridlock. American Political Science Review 9:519–33)to measure key independent variables, including bicameral differences—shouldnot be used when examining multichamber legislatures over time.We continue to disagree over whether Common Space scores orBinder's conference vote measure is superior. In this response,we show that, although several of the theoretical and statisticalobjections that Binder (n.d.) raises to our Common Space measuredo not apply, they are all relevant for her conference voteanalog. Additionally, we detail how, despite protests to thecontrary, the conference vote measure is plagued by insufficientdata. Finally, we demonstrate how new efforts to show that Binder's (1999)results continue to hold are not robust.     

Enforcing Social Europe through Labour Inspectorates: Changes in Capacity and Cooperation across Europe

Despite its central importance for the implementation of EU social policy, the issue of member state enforcement of European regulations has attracted little academic attention. This paper analyses changes in national enforcement systems and horizontal cooperation between them by comparing labour inspectorates in the EU-15 member states over time (2000 versus 2010). Starting from the assumption that, as administrations, enforcement systems are strongholds of national sovereignty, it is argued that member states’ interest in creating a level playing field and in enabling free movement in accordance with the ‘four freedoms’ should nevertheless bring about change. The results show insufficient enforcement capacity overall, but also that important changes have taken place regarding the coordination, steering and pressure capacity of national labour inspectorates, and also regarding cooperation amongst them. This points to the emergence of horizontal cooperation as a distinct feature of the European Administrative Space.