Negotiating one position: Switzerland at the Global Forum on Migration and Development

The paper explores intra-governmental processes in migration policy-making, using the example of Switzerland and examining its preparations for chairing the Global Forum on Migration and Development 2011. Switzerland's “one joint position”, presented at the forum, required intensive negotiations and cooperation between different Swiss federal offices. The paper highlights how and why Switzerland achieved this joint position. It analyses the intra-governmental tensions between national securitisation and global migration and development debates and how they were overcome. This experience of a “whole-of-government approach” offers an insight into politics underlying migration and development debates within donor countries, and its implications for global migration debates.     

Soilwater Conductivity Analysis to Date and Locate Clandestine Graves of Homicide Victims

In homicide investigations, it is critically important that postmortem interval and postburial interval (PBI) of buried victims are determined accurately. However, clandestine graves can be difficult to locate; and the detection rates for a variety of search methods (ranging from simple ground probing through to remote imaging and near‐surface geophysics) can be very low. In this study, simulated graves of homicide victims were emplaced in three sites with contrasting soil types, bedrock, and depositional environments. The long‐term monthly in situ monitoring of grave soil water revealed rapid increases in conductivity up to 2 years after burial, with the longest study evidencing declining values to background levels after 4.25 years. Results were corrected for site temperatures and rainfall to produce generic models of fluid conductivity as a function of time. The research suggests soilwater conductivity can give reliable PBI estimates for clandestine burials and therefore be used as a grave detection method.     

Laws without teeth: An overview of the problems associated with corruption in Ukraine

This paper presents an overview of the current problems of corruption in Ukraine. It provides an example of specific corruption practices in the country and describes the general provisions related to the fight against corruption in Ukraine. The paper presents preliminary results of a pilot study of corruption in Ukraine to examine the impact of corruption on thefinancial markets. We support the proposition of Claessens, Djankov, andKlingebiel (2000) that the development of financial institutions and the improvement of financial market services in a nation can be viewed as indicators of the effectiveness of the economic, political, and legal reforms and the dedication of the government to these reforms. The paper ends with a discussion of the role of the international community in the fight against corruption in Ukraine.     

Writing and the flesh of others

Prologue: Feminism and Fictocriticism in Australia The article that follows makes use of a selection of psychoanalytic writings to explore what theoretical writing on intertextuality so often occludes: that is, the dynamics of the passionate dimension of intertextual practices, by which I mean the fantasies of writers (and readers) that attend the actual practices of literary borrowings, in.uences, apprenticeships, and hauntings—by other writers, by the music of words, by memories. For the author may be dead, but writing subjects are very much alive and embodied—capable of moving and being moved, of remembering and forgetting, of relationships both real and imaginary with other writers living or dead, of love and of murder.     

On money and memory: Political economy of cross-border engagement on the politically divided Armenia-Turkey frontier

Complicated historical memories and mutual distrust coupled with decades of Cold War separation have prevented the Iron Curtain from lifting on the border between Turkey and Armenia. Indeed the end of the Cold War has seen tension between these two countries escalate further over the conflict between the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh and the republic of Azerbaijan. Turkey, having allied itself with Azerbaijan in this dispute, has made diplomatic engagement with Armenia conditional on the settlement of this conflict. Paradoxically, despite a trade and transport blockade imposed on Armenia by Turkey and Azerbaijan, economic ties in the region have not disappeared. This discrepancy between the political and diplomatic rhetoric and the economic and developmental realities on the ground motivates the present study. Drawing from the Armenian context the study illustrates how the tension between political interests and business interests are manifested and managed in Armenia. Generalising from this study, the work presented here maintains that weak cross-border governance capacities in the developing world can influence abilities to utilise, leverage and manage globalisation and, further, in politically divided regions they can undermine prospects of constructive engagement between the conflicting sides. It argues that the promotion of liberal statehood in developing countries characterised by small governments does little to assist the development of cross-sectoral links between the public and private sectors within a region, such cross-sectoral links being important ingredients in the promotion of cross-border regionalism.