Between self-promotion and cultural politics: Murakami Haruki's travelogues

Through a close reading of contemporary Japanese novelist Murakami Haruki's accounts of his travels in Southern Europe, the United States, and Australia, this article analyses the ways in which this author uses travel writing to promote his self-image as a cosmopolitan and culturally sensitive writer. At the same time, examining the complex dynamics of identification and differentiation at play in the narratives, it highlights the texts’ potential to generate critical reflections on both Japanese and global cultural and social formations. By looking at Murakami's distinctive combination of self-promotion and cultural critique, the article's overarching goal is to complicate the current understanding of the genre travel writing and its colonial legacy.     

Supporting children of parents with mental health problems through professionally assisted lay support – the “godparents” program

Children with parents with mental health problems have an increased risk of adverse developmental outcomes. Nonetheless, services for these children are still scarce in Switzerland. Therefore, an innovative program was developed, implemented, and evaluated in close practitioner-researcher cooperation. The program aims to support these children by providing lay supporters as so-called “godparents” to them. The program evaluation shows that the continuity of contacts between children and godparents builds the ground for a relationship that fosters the children’s development and relieves their parents. A carefully undertaken process of matching families with godparents appears to be crucial for a lasting godparenthood. However, a main challenge is the acquisition of godparents, who engage on a voluntary basis in the program.     

US Media and Post-9/11 Human Rights Violations in the Name of Counterterrorism

This article adds to earlier research revealing that the American news media did not discharge their responsibility as a watchdog press in the post-9/11 years by failing to scrutinize extreme and unlawful government policies and actions, most of all the decision to invade Iraq based on false information about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction arsenal. The content analyses presented here demonstrate that leading US news organizations, both television and print, did not expressly refer to human rights violations when they reported on the torturing of foreign detainees during “enhanced interrogations” in US-run prison facilities abroad and the killing of civilians, including children, in US drone strikes overseas and outside theaters of war. Moreover, by framing torture and the “collateral damage” caused by drone-launched missile attacks episodically rather than in the context of human rights, the news media failed to alert the American public to the grave humanitarian violations in the so-called war on terrorism during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.     

The strong German state and the weak feminist movements

This article examines the causes of the marginalisation of women in political and economic decision‐making processes that are part of the ‘routine’ policy‐making process of the German state. The larger theoretical question is whether there is a ‘gender bias of the German state’ that has made its institutional structures less amenable to women's participation and their political agenda. Given the evidence, the answer is ‘yes’. There are specific exclusionary mechanisms that characterise the German polity, and these are antithetical to women's participation and concerns. These mechanisms act as gatekeepers of both legislation and discursive practices and are constitutive of the German Fraktionstaat and the corporatist system of economic bargaining.     

The policy origins of the European economic constitution

This article traces the origins of the European economic constitution in the debate on Article 30 of the EC Treaty (general rule on the free movement of goods) between 1966 and 1969, which resulted in Directive 70/50. In this, the first archive‐based analysis of the policy origins of the Court's Dassonville (1974) decision, the article demonstrates that there was a strong continuity in the investment by a number of key actors in focusing on Article 30 to create the single market from the mid‐1960s. These civil servants and lawyers provided the backbone for the Commission's transformation of the Cassis de Dijon judgment (1979) into a powerful tool, driving back the need for legislative harmonisation and making it a cornerstone of the Single European Act of 1986. The article therefore analyses one of the key moments in the transformation of European law.