Navigating the space between politics and administration: The informal practices of Ontario school board trustees

Through interviews with 25 school board trustees in Ontario, this article contributes to the growing literature that explores the politics-administration dichotomy at the local government level in Canada. While existing literature is oriented from the perspective of the local government administrator, we examine the relations between local government politicians and administrators from the orientation of the former to determine how they navigate the dichotomy, particularly in a context where it is arguably more contested. We identify six informal practices trustees adopt in representing constituents and confronting tensions inherent in their role, namely: navigating, influencing, listening, translating, informing, and uploading.     

Oil,Coalitions, and Regime Durability: the Origins and Persistence of Popular Rentierism in Kuwait

While the canonical literature on oil wealth suggests that hydrocarbon windfalls encourage repressive despotism, Kuwait provides a case of an oil-rich autocracy governing instead through popular rentierism—that is, through a broad coalition of social forces, one that furnishes enduring loyalty from below while constraining abuses of state power from above. This paper provides a theoretically guided explanation for this exceptional outcome. I argue that the Kuwaiti regime’s coalitional bargains originated in the pre-oil era, when domestic opposition and geopolitical constrictions compelled it to forge new social alliances at the dawn of modern statehood. This inclusionary strategy mediated the subsequent effect of oil rents, which the regime used to institutionalize its mass base with costly material and symbolic side payments. Such popular incorporation bound large constituent classes to the regime’s survival, precluding the need for widespread repression. After 50 years, these coalitional bargains have also proven remarkably resilient, as social actors have continued to endorse the autocratic leadership despite economic crisis and wartime defeat.     

Forensic Applicability of Femur Subtrochanteric Shape to Ancestry Assessment in Thai and White American Males

Ancestry assessment from the postcranial skeleton presents a significant challenge to forensic anthropologists. However, metric dimensions of the femur subtrochanteric region are believed to distinguish between individuals of Asian and non‐Asian descent. This study tests the discriminatory power of subtrochanteric shape using modern samples of 128 Thai and 77 White American males. Results indicate that the samples' platymeric index distributions are significantly different (p ≤ 0.001), with the Thai platymeric index range generally lower and the White American range generally higher. While the application of ancestry assessment methods developed from Native American subtrochanteric data results in low correct classification rates for the Thai sample (50.8–57.8%), adapting these methods to the current samples leads to better classification. The Thai data may be more useful in forensic analysis than previously published subtrochanteric data derived from Native American samples. Adapting methods to include appropriate geographic and contemporaneous populations increases the accuracy of femur subtrochanteric ancestry methods.     

Massacre of the Doves?: Interpreting Israel's 2003 Elections

This article argues that Israel's 2003 elections are best understood as a deeper embedding of neoliberalism in the Israeli polity. It is argued that the most accurate characterization of the elections is as an articulation of Polanyi's Phase I of the double-movement. The argument is developed in four stages. First, the Israeli elections are understood as a local reaction to the multilayered processes of globalization. The Israeli state and its elections are located in the neoliberal ideology which underwrites the phenomenon broadly defined as globalization. Second, the election results are reviewed. Third, the dominant interpretations of the elections are critically examined. Specifically, representations of the elections as a defeat of the parties of peace and as a rebuke of Sephardim/ultra-Orthodox influence in Israeli government are interrogated. Fourth, the coalition negotiations of February 2003, the constitution of Israel's 30^th government and some of the initiatives undertaken by Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are explicated through deployment of Polanyi's double-movement framework.     

Bounded by the Reality of Trade: Practical Limits to a South American Region

This article argues that regionalism in South America will meet with limited success because continental and subregional integration projects lack the necessary economic underpinnings. The result is an incomplete form of regional integration that, while offering some rewards to the participating countries, predominantly serves the energy security needs of the region's major players. Brazil, in particular, benefits from this process and also is the prime reason that regionalism in South America will not deepen. Without a major state to absorb the costs of region-building the process will stall. As the evidence in this article implies, Brazil is not willing to absorb these costs, placing severe limits on the region and regional acceptance of Brazilian leadership.     

Particularizing the Universal: Dave Eggers Writes Human Rights

This article examines the ways in which two literary texts by the American author Dave Eggers, his novel You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002) EGGERS, Dave. (2002) You Shall Know Our Velocity (San Francisco, CA: McSweeney's). [Google Scholar] and his short story “Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly,” interrogate the abstract humanism that underlies universalist rights and explore the reasons for their ineptitude at effecting their promise of universalism when faced with the particularity of individual cultures. Thematically, Eggers's stories test the limits of promoting rights on the basis of an innate shared humanity by exposing how such a basis easily slides into other universalist practices such as those of neocolonialism and neoimperialism. At the character level, these narratives consider the possibilities for meaningful cross-cultural relationships within the context of these discourses, revealing the ease with which they in turn can slip into hierarchical relations that reaffirm existing divisions. In doing so, they also engage and challenge the conclusions of cosmopolitan thinkers such as Kwame Anthony Appiah or Jürgen Habermas who have influentially proposed cross-cultural dialogues as a means of overcoming the tension between universalism and particularity. Interestingly, then, even as interdisciplinary research on literature and human rights has begun to etch out the coalescence of the two, Eggers provides an important example of how literary texts can also critique human rights discourses and can explore questions pertaining to their global reach.