Dangerised youth: the politics of security and development in Timor-Leste

International organisations, the national government and civil society alike have identified youth as a potential threat to the stability of the young state of Timor-Leste over the last decade. In this article, I ask how these actors define the danger of youth and what reasons they identify for the potential threat of young citizens for the society and state. Guided by a theoretical framework of Critical Security and Development Studies, I argue that while political manipulation as reason for youth violence was a prominent part of the security discourse in the years after the crisis in 2006, the discourse on the danger of youth in very recent international and national documents has been depoliticised. Despite decreasing numbers of youth-related violence, the threat construction has not vanished; rather, the language on youth has been adapted to the existing international discourse on violent youth as a threat to successful development. In this way, international and national actors have sustained the image of a society in need of management.     

Bribery and public procurement: an experimental study

A procurement contract is granted by a bureaucrat (the auctioneer) who is interested in a low price and a bribe from the provider. Procurement is thus a multi-dimensional bidding contest with one-dimensional type space (the privately known cost). The optimal price and bribe bid is derived based on an iid private cost assumption. In the experiment, bribes are negatively framed to capture that society is better off if bribes are rare or low. Although bid prices are lower than predicted, behavior is qualitatively in line with the linear equilibrium prediction. When bribes generate a negative externality, there is a significant increase in the variability of the data.     

History,texts and feminism: An interview with Genevieve Lloyd

In 1993, the Social Democratic Party in Sweden adopted the zipper system, a gender quota system whereby women and men are placed alternately on all party lists. The National Federation of Social Democratic Women had, however, as early as in 1928 proposed that the Social Democratic Party introduce gender quotas so that women would be placed in safe positions on the party lists. In this article, the struggle of The National Federation of Social Democratic Women for an increased parliamentary representation of women and its demand for gender quotas during the period 1970–1993 is analysed. Its strategies to put the issue of women's under‐representation on the political agenda are outlined as well as the major discursive frames that the debate was embedded within. The article suggests that the discursive controversies over gender quotas can best be understood in the context of competing conceptions regarding historical development, equal opportunity, local autonomy and cooperation between women and men. One main point is that the zipper system, despite its radical institutional effect, can be seen as a discursive solution to the norm of cooperation.     

Some Talk,No Action (Yet): Interdependence,Domestic Interests and Hierarchical EU Governance in Climate Policy

This article analyses why Switzerland has so far remained outside the European Union's emissions trading system (EU ETS), the centerpiece of the EU's efforts to combat climate change. In doing so, it contributes three insights to the literature on the EU's external governance. First, it shows that interdependence is of limited explanatory power in predicting EU–Swiss interactions. Secondly, it identifies domestic interests in the non‐member state, Switzerland, as the key factor in explaining the EU's external governance structures concerning emissions trading. Thirdly, it highlights the EU's limited flexibility in dealing with third countries in areas where its internal governance mode is hierarchical. The article presents a hypothesis about the future development of emissions trading in Switzerland and discusses implications for both the external governance literature and the development of global carbon markets.     

Basic concepts for the evaluation of technology transfer benefits

This paper considers the problems of the evaluation of the benefits that may be derived from technology transfer. When intangeable benefits are considered the evaluation process becomes more costly and often less reliable. A model is developed that should assist in the evaluation of externalities and other intangeable benefits.