Stakeholdling and Corporate Governance in the UK

The 'stakeholder economy' forms a central part of the New Labour programme for reforming both the public and private sectors. The present paper considers the potential of stakeholding to address the weaknesses of corporate governance in the UK. It concludes that stakeholder governance is a concept which owes its appeal to its imprecision, and is unworkable in practice, and that its deployment, rather than imposing accountability on capitalism, merely represents an attempt to make free market capitalism look more acceptable.     

The Curious Incident of Mr Cameron and the United Kingdom Defence Budget: A New Legacy?

During 2015 Prime Minister Cameron found himself under intense domestic and international pressure over his apparent reluctance to maintain United Kingdom defence spending at the NATO target level of 2 per cent of GDP. Most commentators attributed this reluctance to the inevitability of defence cuts if the government wished to meet its deficit reduction targets. However, the aftermath of the general election saw a sudden decision to maintain UK defence spending at the NATO target level. This u‐turn is one of the more curious episodes in recent British defence policy. In this article we explore the reasons why, at a time of continuing cuts and austerity measures and against all the political signals, a decision was made to meet the 2 per cent target, and what this means for the UK's defence policy. In doing so, we analyse why most commentators assumed that defence cuts were inevitable, the domestic and international factors that explain the government's apparent u‐turn and what this revised defence budget settlement meant for the new 2015 National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review.     

Designing effective national aviation security systems: The building blocks for an enhanced global response

By closely analysing Naxalite propaganda material, I explain the functionality of martyrdom in the Maoist movement in India. I show that their concept of secular martyrdom is multifaceted, but can be traced to a mix of several elements in classical Maoist doctrine (sacrifice, dialectics, and critique). As such, the cult of the secular martyr serves both practical and ideological aims. My analysis, tracing martyrdom to secular ideology, opens new possibilities for studying this type of martyrdom, which has come under pressure in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.     

Social cleavages and electoral competition in India

Given the great diversity in language, ethnicity, and caste in India, and the resulting millions of possible winning electoral combinations, why is it that in contemporary India we see large state-wide and inter-state political coalitions built around categories such as “Bahujan” or “Backward Caste” instead of thousands of separate caste parties competing at the regional or zila (district) level? This question is the focus of Christophe Jaffrelot's India's Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in India, Pradeep Chhibber's Democracy without Associations: Transformation of the Party System and Social Cleavages in India, and Anirudh Krishna's Active Social Capital: Tracing the roots of development and democracy. This review assesses how these works address the question of political organization and social cleavages in India, examining the differences in approaches and discussing what still needs to be addressed.     

Political Constitutionalism and the European Union

What kind of constitution is emerging in Europe? There are two approaches to answering this question. The first, a ‘foundational’ approach, rejects the premise: there can be no real constitution in the absence of a ‘demos’, a foundation which exists only nationally. The second, ‘freestanding’ approach, depicts it as paradigmatic of a broader phenomenon of cosmopolitan constitutionalism, based on individual rights guaranteed through a transnational rule of law. Rejecting both for their failure to account for European constitutionalism as a historical process of polity‐building, a third approach, ‘political constitutionalism’, is proposed, capturing the dynamic quality of constitutionalisation in the EU. From this perspective, what is emerging in Europe is a constitution that reflects a common good (predominantly conceived in economic terms), albeit one which is legally, political and socially contested. It is by capturing this complex picture of the political formation of Europe that the constitutional question will be most fruitfully pursued.     

Constitutional pluralism: Chronicle of a death foretold?

What remains of the idea of constitutional pluralism in the wake of the Euro‐crisis? According to the new anti‐pluralists, the recent OMT saga signals its demise, calling to an end the tense stalemate between the ECJ and the German Constitutional Court on the question of ultimate authority. With the ECJ's checkmate, OMT represents a new stage in the constitutionalisation of the European Union, towards a fully monist order. Since constitutional pluralism was an inherently unstable and undesirable compromise, that is both inevitable and to be welcomed. It is argued here that this is misguided in attending to the formal at the expense of the material dimension of constitutional development. The material perspective reveals a deeply dysfunctional constitutional dynamic, of which the judicial battle in OMT is merely a surface reflection. This dynamic now reaches a critical conjuncture, encapsulated in the debate over ‘Grexit’, and the material conflict between solidarity and austerity. Constitutional pluralism, in conclusion, may be an idea worth defending, but as a normative plea for the co‐existence of a horizontal plurality of constitutional orders. This requires radical constitutional re‐imagination of the European project.     

Civil Society and the Re-imagination of European Constitutionalism

Abstract: The twin concepts of constitutionalism and democracy, which offer a complex template for the structural organisation of a polity, can be understood in terms of a dialectic of complementary but competing values, values represented by responsiveness to an existing order and innovation towards a potentially new order. Recognising this necessarily dynamic relationship, an essentialist reading of a constitutionalisation of the demos is abandoned, and an examination of the extent to which the dialectic can credibly or legitimately be played out in a supranational ‘community’ and in the context of an emerging transnational civil society can be undertaken. Rather than seeking credibility or legitimacy through the rationalisation of a community by an ethical consensus as in some forms of republicanism and communitarianism, the dialectic opens up the norms and boundaries of the polity and leads to an understanding of the ‘community’ in less rigid and more diffuse, even plural, terms. Once understood in this way the possibility emerges for legitimacy to be pursued through a public sphere enlarged by a context‐transcending constitutional discourse mediated by transnational civil society. Alternatively the normative ‘openness’ of the polity might be prioritised and with it the uncertainty/fluidity of the constitutional arrangement itself; in this way the legitimate pursuit of constitutionalism is understood in terms of a never‐ending agonistic struggle or experimental practice.