A changing world: is the UN development system ready?

This article examines five contemporary areas of development concern that have become major drivers of global transformation since the turn of the millennium: the plight of fragile states; the emergence of new powers and new development funds in a changing aid landscape; the need for developing countries to manage the growing resources at their disposal; encroachments on the political sovereignty of states; and new global challenges that demand global action, including climate change, migration, and food security. These drivers of change call for responses from the UN – and in particular its development system of some 30 organisations. The ongoing protracted debate on the future UN development agenda should take cognisance of these changes if the system is to remain relevant after 2015. But the signs are not promising that either the agenda or the UN development system are up to the task.     

Miss Reading

Against the backdrop of western culture's strong investment in gendered clothes, Stockton looks at clothing's intricate relations to shame and, for some queer women and men, the surprising value of these humiliations, especially in the service of sexual attraction. The word 'martyrdom', with its associations to bodily wounding and psychic pain, is not too strong for the acts of clothing and sartorial preference she discusses. Working through concepts that emerge from Sigmund Freud on femininity, Georges Bataille on sacrifice and Leo Bersani on debasement, along with debates among feminist thinkers about the New Woman, Stockton takes up 'martyrs' from three distinct histories, martyrs as diverse as the mannish lesbian of Great Britain's 1920s, American butches and femmes of the 1960s, and even the sailors of post-war France. How public self-betrayal and self-debasement in terms of clothes can offer creative social formations is the focus of this article. The highly famous novels of three queer authors provide the means for this surprising look: Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues and Jean Genet's Querelle.     

Britain, the United States and the Syrian crisis, 1957

This paper seeks to analyze the Syrian Crisis in 1957 and its impact on the Anglo-American reconciliation after the dispute over Suez in the previous year. The Middle East remained at the forefront of British and American continued regional instability and led to close allied cooperation over the perceived Soviet threat in Syria. This ensured that by the time of the Washington Conference in October 1957 both Macmillan and Eisenhower agreed that the Middle East required a joint Anglo-American policy to safeguard vital regional interests.     

Conceptualizing Neoliberalism: Foundations for an Institutional Marxist Theory of Capitalism

This article argues that the common understanding of neoliberalism as a set of state policies emerges out of the problematic characterization of power within dominant mainstream and critical paradigms. Working from critical realist social theory and Marxian state theory, it presents an alternative theoretical framework to properly account for the complex unfolding of objective history. From this Institutional Marxist perspective, neoliberalism is theorized as a trend in the institutional organization of interlocking state and corporate power.     

Physically violent husbands of the 1890s and their resources

This article applies Goode's Resource Theory of wife beating to Lane County, Oregon from 1891 to 1900. The sample population consists of 56 women who appeared in divorce suits and claimed that their husbands had physically abused them. The study's findings largely support Resource Theory, although biases in the sample population make it more suggestive than conclusive. Wife beaters of the 1890s tended to be relatively low in economic and social resources, particularly when compared to their wives. The violent husbands' resources appear particularly slight when their psychological resources are considered. The article closes by suggesting that Resource Theory is not necessarily at odds with feminist interpretations of wife battering. Social scientists who assert that husbands' physical violence is more likely when their dominance is pronounced rather than fragile need to define more carefully and detect the actual level of power and resources that particular husbands enjoy.