New alliances in global environmental governance: how intergovernmental treaty secretariats interact with non-state actors to address transboundary environmental problems

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics - The past few years have witnessed a growing interest among scholars and policy-makers in the interplay of international...     

The normative threat of subtle subversion: the return of ‘Eastern Europe’ as an ontological insecurity trope

Abstract

A combination of undemocratic developments in Hungary and Poland as well as Eastern Europe’s reluctance to engage in solidary burden-sharing at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe has brought back familiar allusions of Eastern Europeans as troublemakers for European unity and peace. This article offers a discursive dissection of ‘Eastern Europe’ as a subtly subversive challenge to Europe’s security of ‘self’, entailing a fear of being overrun by an ‘other’ perceived as endangering one’s normative and cultural order. Proceeding from Ingrid Creppell’s (2011 Creppell, Ingrid (2011) ‘The concept of normative threat’, International Theory, 3:3, 450–487[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) notion of normative threat, this article argues that the reappearance of ‘Eastern Europe’ as an ontological insecurity trope is indicative of deeper anxieties within Europe, some of which are systemic (such as doubts about the efficacy of integration and the legitimacy of the European Union) and some of which are contingent (such as concerns about defending the European political order from populist upsurges amidst ‘resurgent nationalism’).     

Reading level and the prevalence of a dyslexic profile among patients in a forensic psychiatric clinic

This study aims to investigate Swedish language reading ability of forensic patients and the number of them that present a dyslexia profile. Another aim is to compare the reading level in different subtypes of psychiatric diagnoses. Assessments were made of 185 patients by a battery of reading tests. They were also interviewed about their schooling and their self-estimated reading and writing ability. The results show that the patients’ reading level is below average for grade six children in Swedish compulsory school, and that 16 per cent show a dyslexic profile. Male patients with an immigrant background and a diagnosis of psychosis and anxiety disorders perform the lowest when measuring literacy skills. This proportionately low reading ability can cause difficulties in understanding texts as presented in broadsheet newspapers, civic information and patient records, and might even jeopardize the understanding of adult spoken language.     

“I No Longer Let Anyone Hit Me for Free”: Affective Identificatory Practices of Women Imprisoned for Violent Crimes

This article explores the ways in which Finnish women serving prison sentences for violent crimes attach meaning to their violence and to themselves in relation to it. The analysis is based on a study involving 20 imprisoned women, who either sent a written account or were interviewed. The analysis draws upon critical discursive psychology and Sara Ahmed’s theorization of emotions. Hence, it focuses on the affective and discursive processes through which the women participating in the study enact identities in their narratives about their involvement with violence. These enactments are conceptualized as affective identificatory practices in which gendered, socio-culturally circulating meanings and valuations become entwined with personal histories in locally variant ways. Four different groups of selves that emerged from the participants’ narratives are discussed: victimized selves, defender selves, lost selves, and rehabilitated/unrehabilitatable selves. By looking at the constitution of these selves in close detail, I put forward a reading in which the participants are seen as primarily striving to enact autonomous identities and hence to subvert devaluation by distancing themselves from vulnerability, which threatens their integrity as subjects.     

Reframing Gender Equality in Finnish Online Discussion on Immigration: Populist Articulations of Religious Minorities and Marginalized Sexualities

Gender equality is an essential part of Finnish self-understanding. The public discussion on equality does not, however, only focus on gender; it is also used to promote anti-immigration-minded, homophobic opinions. In the article, the coexistence of contradictory discourses on gender equality is interpreted as populist rhetoric. The articulations of gender equality in online debates on gender, sexuality, and immigration are analysed. The main questions are: How is gender equality reframed in anti-immigration-minded online debate? How are the notions of sexuality and gender fixed in order to oppose immigration? How are gender, sexuality, and immigration articulated intersectionally? The investigation focuses on an article on Muslim homosexuals, published in the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat in March 2013, and the discussion that followed on blogs and in online discussion fora. The logic of the articulation in the empirical material is analysed by identifying five discursive modes for discussing gender equality in opposing Muslim immigration: The Finns Party as defenders of sexual and gender equality; Equality for Muslim women; “The Tolerant” as scapegoats in risking achieved equality; Othering Islam; and Equality for the Westerners. The analysis indicates how the subjects of sexual and gender equality are produced, and illustrates the ability of populist rhetoric to adopt topics, agendas, and ideologies from other discourses and reframe them to promote its political aims. The article discusses how equality is used changeably, referring to varying groups of people. In populist rhetoric, the themes traditionally associated with sexual and gender equality in the Nordic welfare states can be ignored; the concept is detached from all its emancipatory meanings. In populist rhetoric, equality becomes a tool used to promote hegemonic power relations.     

“But how to speak of such things?”: decolonial love,the coloniality of gender,and political struggle in Francisco Goldman's The Long Night of White Chickens (1992) and Jennifer Harbury's Bridge of Courage (1994) and Searching for Everardo (1997)

This article presents an analysis of works by Francisco Goldman and Jennifer Harbury, which deal with “cataclysmic moments” of recent Guatemalan history. It explores gender relations in these works with reference to three themes: storytelling, communication and affective relationships. Conceptually, I draw on the notions of decolonial love, the coloniality of gender, and the world gender order as categories of analysis. I take Chela Sandoval's methodology of the oppressed as a guideline for my analysis, and look at the ways in which different types of storytelling perpetuate or question the coloniality of gender, at the consequences of intercultural misunderstandings produced by different readings of the coloniality of gender and the world gender order, and at the significance of a critical and liberatory practice of gender roles for decolonial love. The practice of decolonial love is an alternative to what Tzvetan Todorov has called “the dreadful concatenation,” which is a result of cultural encounters during the conquest of the Americas and which conceptualizes as “love” a feeling that sidesteps equality, an exercise in destruction and possession. The coloniality of gender and decolonial love are explored through their interactions with masculinities and femininities across the different case studies.     

Some Talk,No Action (Yet): Interdependence,Domestic Interests and Hierarchical EU Governance in Climate Policy

This article analyses why Switzerland has so far remained outside the European Union's emissions trading system (EU ETS), the centerpiece of the EU's efforts to combat climate change. In doing so, it contributes three insights to the literature on the EU's external governance. First, it shows that interdependence is of limited explanatory power in predicting EU–Swiss interactions. Secondly, it identifies domestic interests in the non‐member state, Switzerland, as the key factor in explaining the EU's external governance structures concerning emissions trading. Thirdly, it highlights the EU's limited flexibility in dealing with third countries in areas where its internal governance mode is hierarchical. The article presents a hypothesis about the future development of emissions trading in Switzerland and discusses implications for both the external governance literature and the development of global carbon markets.     

The Mix of Media Use Matters: Investigating the Effects of Individual News Repertoires on Offline and Online Political Participation

In contemporary high-choice media environments, people increasingly mix and combine their use of various news media into personal news repertoires. Despite this, there is still limited research on how people compose their individual news repertoires and the effects of these news repertoires. To address this and further our understanding of how media use influences political participation, this study investigates (a) how people combine the use of offline and online media into personal news repertoires and (b) the effects of different news repertoires on both offline and online political participation. Based on a two-wave panel study covering the 2014 Swedish national election, this study identifies five news repertoires, labeled minimalists, public news consumers, local news consumers, social media news consumers, and popular online news consumers. Among other things, the results show that social media news consumers are more likely to participate in politics both offline and online.     

Cooking the books: Bureaucratic politicization and policy knowledge

Accurate knowledge about societal conditions and public policies is an important public good in any polity, yet governments across the world differ dramatically in the extent to which they collect and publish such knowledge. This article develops and tests the argument that this variation to some extent can be traced to the degree of bureaucratic politicization in a polity. A politicized bureaucracy offers politicians greater opportunities to demand from bureaucrats—and raises incentives for bureaucrats to supply—public policy knowledge that is strategically biased or suppressed in a manner that benefits incumbents reputationally. Due to electoral competition, we suggest that the link between bureaucratic politicization and politicized policy knowledge will be stronger in democracies than in autocracies. A case analysis of Argentina's statistical agency lends credence to the underlying causal mechanism. Time‐series cross‐sectional analyses confirm the broader validity of the expectations and show that the relationship is present only in democracies.