The role of citizens in the “soft law” of select social policy areas in Canada and the European Union

This article compares the role of citizens in public reporting exercises of Canada's National Child Benefit and health care service delivery to that of the European Union's open method of coordination (OMC) for social protection and social inclusion. It finds that the institutional infrastructure providing for coordination across social policy areas and possible roles for non‐governmental actors in policy development is more extensive in the OMC than in the “new modes of governance” in Canada. However, there are obstacles to developing such infrastructure in Canada, given the different histories and political contexts of the European community and the functioning of federalism in Canada.     

The politics of ethnicity and post-conflict reconstruction: The case of Northern Ghana

Taking into account the complexity of contemporary ethnic conflicts, this article examines the construction and politicisation of ethnicity to understand a recent case of post-conflict reconstruction. More specifically, the article considers theories of post-conflict reconstruction, particularly the conflict transformation school that claims to respond to the hybrid nature of recent ethnic conflicts. By adopting a constructivist perspective, this article argues that post-conflict reconstruction in ethnically-fragmented areas is largely about the problem of de-politicising essentialist discourses of historically constructed ethnic identities. In order to explore this key theoretical issue, the article analyses the 1994-95 case of conflict and reconstruction in the Northern Region of Ghana. This analysis draws on archival research and 21 interviews with individuals representing nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), traditional authorities, religious leaders, opinion leaders, and the state conducted from August to October 2006 in Accra, the capital of Ghana, as well as Tamale, the capital of the Northern Region. Because very little research is available on post-conflict reconstruction in Northern Ghana, this analysis fills a major gap in the contemporary literature on ethnic conflict and post-conflict reconstruction in West Africa. At a broader level, the article suggests that contemporary theories of post-conflict reconstruction would gain from taking a more systematic look at the social and political construction of such identities.     

Gang change and evolutionary theory

While most street gangs are temporary and disorganized, some have institutionalized, and a number of these show signs of evolving into more serious criminal enterprises, becoming more networked, technologically savvy and internationalized, less visible, more predatory and sometimes more violent. The boundaries that researchers have drawn between gangs and other types of criminal groups, particularly organized crime, are becoming blurred. Understanding why this is happening is crucial to planning effective responses. This article suggests that evolutionary theory, involving processes of variation, selection and replication, would constitute a valuable tool for this purpose. Using an evolutionary framework would enable the application of a longitudinal perspective to the microsocial level of analysis, the gang itself, which until now has not had as much attention as other levels of analysis in gang research. Taking inspiration from evolutionary theories in organizational sociology and economics, this article explores how evolutionary theory might be used to understand gang change and locate gangs within evolutionary sequences. It argues that adopting an evolutionary perspective will improve the capacity of law enforcement agencies to focus scarce resources where they are most needed and to plan and implement successful interventions.