City-State Ideological Incongruence and Municipal Preemption

A growing concern among municipal officials across the United States is that their policymaking capacity is under attack by state legislatures who are increasingly likely to preempt those municipalities. However, determining the extent to which municipalities are preempted is challenging. We overcome this by surveying a large sample of municipal officials from across the United States. We find that officials from municipalities that are more ideologically distant from their state overall are more likely to report being preempted by their state government. Moreover, this pattern is driven by more liberal municipalities in both Republican and Democratic states reporting higher rates of preemption. Additionally, municipalities under unified state governments are more likely to report preemption, especially those under unified Republican control. These findings have important implications for the quality of representation in our federalist system and indicate that preemption is not just an issue between Republican states and liberal urban cities.     

Disputing the geopolitics of the states system and global capitalism

Alex Callinicos's intervention in the debate on the geopolitics of the states system and capitalist modernity provides a crucial wake-up call to International Relations theory and practice. Yet, within the contending positions he outlines disputing the political economy of geopolitical conflict, inter-state rivalry and capitalist imperialism, the insights of Antonio Gramsci are notably absent. This article contributes to the debate by elaborating how the theory of passive revolution reveals the political rule of capital, thereby internally relating the states system to capitalist modernity within a focus on uneven development. This concern is evident in Gramsci's analysis of the labour process of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and the geopolitics of the states system contained within his survey of 'Americanism and Fordism'. Theorization on the passive revolution of capital might then provide a fruitful basis from which an empirical research agenda on social development could be advanced with reference to post-colonial state formation processes.

The Italian bourgeoisie succeeded in organizing its state not so much through its own intrinsic strength, as through being favoured in its victory over the feudal and semi-feudal classes by a whole series of circumstances of an international character (Napoleon III's policy in 1852-60; the Austro-Prussian War of 1866; France's defeat at Sedan and the development of the German Empire after this event). – Antonio Gramsci, `Origins of the Mussolini Cabinet', Letter to the Fourth World Congress of the IIIrd International (20 November 1922).     

Preliminary trials of low volume AmpFlSTR Profiler Plus amplification using AmpliGrid (AG480F) slides

Low volume PCR using the AmpliGrid (480F) slide system can potentially enhance the generation of more complete profiles from trace samples, in addition to providing a more cost-effective alternative for typing standard samples. Based on our preliminary results, implementation will require a reasonable investment in optimisation and validation for the intended purpose.     

Mechanisms of environmental policy change in a federal system: The case of open federalism and the 2006–15 Harper government

Between 2006 and 2011, the Canadian Conservative government advocated the concept of ‘open federalism’ which sought to minimize the role of the federal government in areas falling under provincial jurisdiction. Environmental policy-making was particularly impacted with the passage of the highly contentious 2012 omnibus Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act, commonly known as Bill C-38. This paper argues that environmental policy needs to ‘bring back federalism’ into their analysis. In order to do so, a mechanisms approach is employed and focuses on the role of both macro and meso level historical institutionalism mechanisms in explaining policy layering and policy dismantling during this period.     

Strategic Ignorance and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Critiquing the Discursive Segregation of UFOs from Scientific Inquiry

Since the late 1940s, a tenacious disconnect between popular interest and professional disinterest in unidentified flying objects (UFOs) has typified the controversy surrounding the subject. Numerous high-profile scientists have seen the topic of UFOs as an opportunity to denounce and rectify a popular, yet allegedly misguided, conviction—that some UFOs are physical anomalies indicating the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence—and thus to advance the explanatory authority of science. Rather than constituting rigorous, informed, and effective assessments, however, the ways in which many prominent scientists publicly address the UFO question often exemplify both the problematic “boundary-work” of scientific discourse in this area and, more specifically, the role that logical fallacies can play in the rhetorical construction of scientific authority in public domains. Through a critical discourse analysis, this article argues that ignorance of UFO phenomena is socially and discursively constructed in ways that are conducive to the public faces of individuals and institutions. More broadly, it suggests that the rudimentary standard of science communication attending to the extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) hypothesis for UFOs inhibits public understanding of science, dissuades academic inquiry within the physical and social sciences, and undermines progressive space policy initiatives.     

Black Disembodiment in the Age of Ferguson

One of the more striking features of the Black Lives Matter movement against racialized police brutality has been the focus on violence inflicted on “black bodies.” On one hand, the language of “black bodies,” as opposed to simply “black people” or “black personhood,” makes the issue of racial violence more visceral and immediate to white audiences otherwise indisposed to perceive black pain as a moral problem. On the other hand, it represents a theoretical challenge to dominant understandings of pain, suffering, and individuality based on liberal subjectivity. Exemplifying both of these aspects, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent work, Between the World and Me, provides a deep philosophical reflection on the moral and political problem of “black disembodiment.” This article tracks the theme of disembodiment in Coates’s book by foregrounding the role that feminist theories of embodiment play in his exploration of the contemporary black condition in America.     

How can we better align private security with the public interest? Towards a civilizing model of regulation

How can we better align private security with the public interest? This question has met with two answers in the literature on private security regulation, one seeking to cleanse the market of deviant sellers, the other to communalize the market through the empowerment of buyers. Both models of regulation are premised upon a limited neoclassical economic conception of how market transactions map onto the public interest. This article makes the case for a new model of regulation, one that seeks to civilize the market. Drawing upon the insights of economic sociology, our model regards the market for security as a moral economy in which commodity and non‐commodity values jostle and collide. On this basis, we propose a regulatory architecture where buyers and sellers are cast not only as economic actors but also as moral actors, revealing new avenues through which to encompass private security within the democratic promise of security.