Meeting the Challenges of Industrial Restructuring: Labor Reform and Enforcement in Latin America

Despite a strengthening of collective labor rights in Latin America over the last 15 years, most labor movements in the region have lost power because neither the content nor the enforcement mechanisms associated with the labor reforms fully took into consideration the challenges presented by economic restructuring. Reforms facilitating union formation did not strengthen unions but instead increased union fragmentation. Collective bargaining structures did not respond to the exigencies of international outsourcing; and the initial round of reforms in the 1990s did not contemplate the need to strengthen labor law enforcement mechanisms at a time when heightened international competition created a need for greater state vigilance of labor standards. Recent reforms or proposed reforms hold more promise for labor, but truly union‐friendly labor relations regimes require deeper changes. A review of several Latin American cases is followed by a closer examination of Brazil and El Salvador.     

Exploring the Myth of the Bobby and the Intrusion of the State into Social Space

This paper aims to increase the reader’s understanding of how the notion of the ‘bobby on the beat’ has been elevated to iconic, if not mythical, status within British policing. In doing so, the article utilises the semiotic idea of myth, as conceptualized by Roland Barthes, to explore how through representations of the ‘bobby on the beat’ police officers have been projected in a more avuncular re-assuring role to a public fearful of crime, which fails to do service to the signifying practices that accompany and embody the visible police patrol. Indeed, police patrol work secures social space for the State and although it does re-assure anxious members of society that their social world is safe and secure, for others, it further illustrates how their social space is fragile and troubled. On another level, the ‘bobby’ narrative has also been harnessed as part of a broader mythologizing of ‘Englishness’ and quintessential British characteristics.     

Responses to Emery

Richard Neely, Take Back Your Neighborhood New York: Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1990, 224pp.     

The illicit arms trade: Cold War and Post-Cold War

This article considers the principal changes that haveoccurred in the illicit arms trade across the Cold Warand post-Cold War periods. It discusses the changednature of demand and the sources and means ofillicitly supplying arms to areas of conflict. Througha number of case studies it highlights the declininguse of illicit arms supply as a foreign policy tool,and the extent to which involvement in the trade isnow determined more by profit than policyconsiderations, with all the implications thesechanges have for control initiatives.     

Deciding to Keep Peace: An Analysis of International Influences on the Establishment of Third-Party Peacekeeping Missions

Since the end of World War II, and particularly since the end of the Cold War, there has been an expansion in the number of third-party peacekeeping missions established throughout the world. Most of the expansion in peacekeeping missions in the past decade or so has occurred in states experiencing intrastate or civil conflicts. The questions addressed in this study are under what conditions do third-party actors either decide to establish or decide not to establish peacekeeping missions in intrastate disputes, and specifically, what effect do international-level factors have on the likelihood that third-party peacekeeping personnel will be deployed in an intrastate dispute? The previous literature on third-party peacekeeping and interventions is used to derive a set of theoretical arguments and hypotheses regarding the establishment of peacekeeping missions by third-party actors (the United Nations, regional organizations, and ad hoc groups of states) during the post-World War II period. Specifically, I argue that several factors originating at the level of the international system influence the occurrence of third-party peacekeeping missions. The results of statistical analyses of the hypotheses largely support the notion that a set of international-level factors significantly influences the decisions of third-party actors to establish or not establish third-party peacekeeping missions, that international-level factors are more important than state-level factors, that these factors often have different effects on the likelihood of different types of third-party peacekeeping.