Anticorruption agencies: expressive,constructivist and strategic uses

This article explores the reasons for the introduction of anticorruption agencies of a specific type in Eastern Europe. It is argued that one of the important functions of these agencies—which are stronger on information gathering, coordination and strategy rather than on investigation of concrete cases—is to give to the government some leverage over the anticorruption discourse. Presenting the anticorruption commissions and agencies as (discourse-controlling) instruments gives an answer to the troubling question why governing parties are at all interested in the introduction of such bodies. Apart from instrumentalization in political discourse, anticorruption bodies in Eastern Europe have had other effects as well. As shown in the Baltic case, institutional engineering provides for a brief window of opportunity during which political forces committed to integrity could gain the upper hand. The problem in Eastern Europe, however, is not the lack of such windows of opportunities—it is more the lack of really committed political forces capable of continuous and consistent anticorruption effort.     

Constructing Population Control: Social and Material Factors in Norm Emergence and Diffusion

To demonstrate that norms have independent causal power, constructivists de-emphasise material factors related to state interests and highlight social factors. Similarly, they conceptualise international organisations as autonomous from state influence, and focus on cases featuring non-state actors that stimulate a “tipping point” of norm diffusion among states in advance of state sponsorship. By contrast, this article utilises an historical materialist approach that admits both social and material data to examine the contrasting case of population control. It finds that US corporate foundations, eugenist demographers, feminist birth control activists and related NGOs conceptualised and promoted population control in the United States, at the United Nations, and across developing countries. However, the tipping point of norm diffusion occurred only after the United States publicly advocated population control. Indeed, material and social factors were inextricably bound together.     

The Australian Welfare State: Has Federalism Made a Difference?

This paper examines the historical development of the Australian welfare state with a view to identifying the role that Australia's federal constitutional arrangements have played in shaping that development. Theoretical paradigms have been unanimous in their prognoses: that federal states are likely to be slow in developing welfare state programmes and typically spend less on them than unitary states. But recently it has been argued that federal institutions may have a “ratchet effect” of slowing down the pace of change, irrespective of its direction. The purpose of this chronological account of significant stages in the development of the Australian welfare state is to use the unfolding of historical events — far too rich in nuance and detail to be captured in quantitative modelling — as a test‐bed for establishing whether, and, if so, to what extent, federalism has impacted on the trajectory of Australian welfare state development.     

Juvenile Criminality And Semi-Criminality: Learning From Victorian Perceptions And Responses

This article focuses on media reportage of offensive juveniles, past and present, to elicit lessons that the twenty-first century can learn from the Victorian past in terms of diversionary responses. How to prevent vulnerable juveniles sliding into dangerous criminality is a continuing preoccupation: the issue explored in this article relates to the creation of the identity of the criminal juvenile. In utilising the concept of semi-criminality to label certain types of juvenile anti-social behaviour the Victorians avoided actual criminalisation of socially offensive but, in legal terms, minor behaviours. The reasons for and negative consequences of the abandonment of this concept by the modern age are explored, including the reconceptualisation of where responsibility for juvenile offending lies in the modern era.     

Miscarriage of Justice? Postcolonial Reflections on the ‘Trial’ of the Maharajah of Baroda, 1875

This article revisits the Baroda Incident 1875, providing a detailed examination of the Enquiry or ‹trial’ for the first time, and locating that examination in the wider socio-cultural context of the nineteenth century British Empire (especially the Raj) and the exporting of the ‹British’/English legal culture to the Empire. The implications of the establishing of British principles of justice, including the value placed upon Indian-generated evidence and testimony by the courts, are explored, in order to establish the Baroda Incident as a significant miscarriage of justice. Using historical methodologies as well as postcolonial insights, it demonstrates that the concepts of justice on which the British prided themselves were intrinsincally racialised as well as gendered, with profound modern resonances. Dr. Judith Rowbotham is a Reader, School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University.