Youth culture and European integration in Germany: back to European basics?

Using data of a representative survey among young people in Germany, the present article detects significant shifts in attitudes towards European integration over a relatively short time-span. Surveying these changing attitudes, the article explores the idea that these changing attitudes could signal more than mere short-term reactions to singular political events, but rather point to a reorientation towards the initial conceptualization of European integration as a peace project. Gudrun Quenzel is Lecturer at the Institute for Sociology at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Mathias Albert is Professor of Political Science at Bielefeld University.     

Does transnational private governance reduce or displace labor abuses? Addressing sorting dynamics across global supply chains

The attention of practitioners and scholars of private regulation of working conditions is focused on whether and how corporate buyers can help improve labor and safety standards in the factories that supply them by adopting codes of conduct, joining social certification schemes, participating in social audit processes, and financing safety improvements. I argue that more attention should be paid to the possibility that private regulation schemes – whatever degree of compliance they achieve – mostly result in a displacement effect or sorting dynamic that leaves the overall level of working conditions unchanged. I sketch a research agenda aimed at identifying the conditions under which a sorting dynamic can occur and at conceiving innovative private governance designs that could avoid it.     

On Where We Differ: Sites Versus Grounds of Justice,and Some Other Reflections on Michael Blake’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Justice and Foreign Policy</Emphasis>

Blake’s book conveys a straightforward directive: the foreign policy of liberal states should be guided and constrained by the goal of helping other states to become liberal democracies as well. This much is what we owe to people in other countries—this much but nothing more. The primary addressees are wealthier democracies, whose foreign policy ought to be guided by the idea of equality of all human beings. My approach in On Global Justice bears important similarities to Blake’s, but with those similarities also come equally important differences. The purpose of this piece is to bring out these similarities and differences and in the process articulate some objections to Blake.     

Civil Society in the Shadow of the Neoliberal State

International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society - In this paper, I outline an approach to civil society that is in contradistinction to the dominant liberal conception of civil society as a...