Within cities and suburbs: Racial residential concentration and the spatial distribution of employment opportunities across sub‐metropolitan areas

This article examines and compares the spatial distributions of new jobs and people across sub‐metropolitan areas for Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles. The jobs data come from the Multi‐City Study of Urban Inequality and the data on people come from the U.S. Bureau of the Census. The results indicate that less‐educated people, public assistance recipients, and especially poor females with children mostly reside in areas heavily populated by minorities where the availability of less‐skilled jobs is quite low, while the availability of these jobs relative to less‐educated people in suburban areas heavily populated by whites is high. Large fractions of the less‐skilled jobs in these metropolitan areas are not accessible by public transit. Furthermore, there is significant variation within both central cities and suburbs in the ethnic composition of residents and in less‐skilled job availability. The ability of various minority groups to gain employment in each area depends heavily on the ethnic composition of the particular area. © 2000 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The Politics of Postcapitalism: Labour and our Digital Futures

This article introduces the special issue on the politics of postcapitalism. Considering the theoretical foundations, empirical perspectives and political ramifications of claims made about a coming ‘post-work’ or ‘postcapitalist’ society, it maps existing debates through a discussion of two key recent texts, Paul Mason’s Clear Bright Future and Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism. It first surveys how the relationship between labour market trends, technological change and wider political-economic shifts is articulated in the postcapitalist literature. It then explores how concepts from Marx are deployed to depict social relations as a constraint on technological development and its utopian potentialities, leading to political demands for new class actors and electoral blocs centring on the new forms of economic and political activity associated with digital networks. It also considers the role of the state and how this theoretical and political approach envisions historical change, situating utopian visions of an incipient postcapitalist alternative to capitalism within the contemporary political context of authoritarian populism and challenges to liberal democracy. Finally, it explores the continuing relevance of humanism as a critical counterpoint to the social and philosophical agenda of present day ‘posthumanism’. It concludes that, in unfavourable political conditions, it would be strategically unwise to stake too much on an over-optimistic approach to the unfolding future. This outlook, it is suggested, carries considerable risks and consequences for a contemporary left in search of a viable electoral coalition and route back to power.     

Socio‐legal Scholarship in Canada: A Review of the Field

This article is the second in an occasional series dealing with the development, current status, and future of socio‐legal studies in selected countries. It follows Kim Economides's review of socio‐legal studies in Aotearoa/New Zealand.     

The colony of the colonized: the Duchy of Courland's Tobago colony and contemporary Latvian national identity

This paper examines the legacy of the Duchy of Courland's overseas colony of Tobago as it relates to present-day Latvian national identity using the ethno-symbolist approach of Anthony D. Smith and comparative cases. As Latvia is a small nation that has been an independent nation-state for only two short periods, national legitimacy and pride pose particular problems for Latvians. To this end, Latvian historians have worked to reinterpret the Baltic German-dominated Duchy of Courland as a positive period of Latvian national history and have sought to emphasize ethnic Latvian involvement in the Duchy's colonial endeavors, especially on the island of Tobago. Their efforts have then filtered into the general Latvian consciousness through books, film, plays, and place names. Since Latvia's independence from the USSR, the former colony of Tobago has gained renewed importance for Latvians who are experiencing a widely perceived notion of postcolonialism. This paper concludes that the appropriated colony of Tobago will continue to rise in importance as a component of Latvian national identity.     

Behind China's World Trade Organization agreement with the USA

The ‘war on terror’ is widely regarded as instigating a major regression within the development of the international system. Processes of globalisation are being challenged, it is argued, by a reassertion of the sovereign power of nation-states, most especially the USA. In more overt terms this regression is represented as a ‘return’ of a traditional form of imperialism. This ‘return of imperialism’ thesis challenges the claims of theories developed during the 1990s which concentrate on the roles of deterritorialisation and the development of biopolitics in accounting for the constitution of the contemporary international order. In contrast this paper seeks to detail the important respects in which biopolitical forces of deterritorialisation continue to play an integral role within the strategies of power that make the war on terror possible. Rather than understanding the war on terror as a form of ‘regression’ it is necessary to pay heed to the complex intertwinings that continue to bind sovereign and biopolitical forms of power in the 21st century. Such an understanding is urgent in that it provides for different grounds from which to reflect on the processes by which international order is currently being reconstituted and to help think about how to engage in reshaping them.     

Assessing civil society impact for democracy programmes: Using an advocacy scale in Indonesia and the Philippines

Democracy assistance programmes have always been notoriously difficult to measure in terms of outcome, but the need to show their impact (or lack of it) remains critical. This article represents part of a continuing endeavour to develop a tool for measuring civil society programme impact in the form of an advocacy scale encompassing democracy's critical components of participation, accountability and contestation. The scale is tested in the context of USAID-assisted initiatives in the Philippines and Indonesia, where it demonstrates a capacity both to monitor donor assistance outcomes and to suggest future programme initiatives.