The Case of Nord-Ost: Dubrovka and the Search for Answers

The paper reviews the experience of the group Nord-Ost (The Regional Social Organisation for Assistance and Defence of the Victims of Terrorist Acts) as an example of an NGO that has taken a rights advocacy position which has led it into confrontation with the state. Nord-Ost demands the state's accountability for the consequences of its response to the 2002 Dubrovka terrorist attack. Thus, it confronts challenges common to other rights advocacy groups in Russia today.     

Negotiating the EU–U.S. Open Aviation Area Agreement 2007 in the Context of Transatlantic Airline Regimes Since 1944

Between 1944 and 2002, the United States sought to create a competitive and commercially driven international civil aviation regime. It tried to peel away politically inspired regulations, which fragmented the marketplace, and deliver efficiencies and consumer benefits. In contrast with the American liberal tradition—albeit with limitations—the industry in Europe was over-regulated and largely based on subsidised state-owned carriers with international market quotas. Thus for many years Europe and the U.S. followed different paths; but political and economic dynamics conspired together in the 1980s and early 1990s to produce remarkable change in the European Community and, by 1997, there were the makings of a competitive and lightly regulated single market, which brought it close to U.S. practice. Since 2002, the United States has been less liberal in its airline policies; the EU has been more liberal. It would be an irony indeed if the great regime liberaliser since 1944 were now to become a force of regulatory conservatism that denied consummation to the vision of a transatlantic open aviation area that could be a magnet to draw in the rest of the world into a truly global commercial airline market.     

The social logic of political choice: Picking a political party in the context of immediate social circles

The Social Logic of Politics places social learning at the center of political choice. People develop their political preferences, knowledge, values, perceptions of ability, and decisions about political behavior in interactions with others, usually members of their social circles. Political attitudes and goals are not derivatives of exogenous economic preferences. They are not the results of careful calculations, in which optimization of personal needs guides the mode of reasoning. This theoretical stance draws sustenance from recent work across the social science, even as it harkens back to established, if neglected principles of political analysis. My thanks to Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck for his encouragement and for the critical comments of several anonymous referees and to Josip Dasović and Jennifer Fitzgerald, my co-authors of Partisan Families: the Social Logic of Bounded Partisanship in Germany and Britain (Zuckerman et al. 2007). Material from that book appears in this essay.     

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.