‘Finishing the Job’: the UN Special Committee on Decolonization and the politics of self-governance

This article examines the modern day role and purpose of the UN Special Committee on Decolonization. Since its establishment in the 1960s the Committee has helped numerable former colonies achieve independence. Today, with very few ‘colonised’ Non-Self-Governing Territories remaining its work appears almost complete. However, serious flaws have always pervaded its decolonisation strategy; which are now more apparent than ever. The Committee retains narrow and outdated understandings of colonialism and, as a result, fails to recognise how widespread and pervasive global colonial forces remain. This makes its goal of universal decolonisation both unsatisfactory and misguided. The Committee’s problematic approach towards decolonisation stems from its participation within the ‘North–South Theatre’, in which antagonism is perpetuated between the world’s developed and less developed states. The paper argues that the Committee has not prioritised colonised peoples in the way it has always claimed, but instead worked principally in the interests of itself and its members.     

Liberal intervention in the foreign policy thinking of Tony Blair and David Cameron

David Cameron was a critic of Tony Blair's doctrine of the ‘international community’, which was used to justify war in Kosovo and more controversially in Iraq, suggesting caution in projecting military force abroad while in opposition. However, and in spite of making severe cuts to the defence budget, the Cameron-led Coalition government signed Britain up to a military intervention in Libya within a year of coming into office. What does this say about the place liberal interventionism occupies in contemporary British foreign policy? To answer this question, this article studies the nature of what we describe as the ‘bounded liberal’ tradition that has informed British foreign policy thinking since 1945, suggesting that it puts a distinctly UK national twist on conventional conservative thought about international affairs. Its components are: scepticism of grand schemes to remake the world; instinctive Atlanticism; security through collective endeavour; and anti-appeasement. We then compare and contrast the conditions for intervention set out by Tony Blair and David Cameron. We explain the similarities but crucially the vital differences between the two leaders' thinking on intervention, with particular reference to Cameron's perception that Downing Street needed to loosen its control over foreign policymaking after Iraq. Our argument is that policy substance, policy style and party political dilemmas prompted the two leaders to reconnect British foreign policy with its ethical roots, ingraining a bounded liberal posture in British foreign policy after the moral bankruptcy of the John Major years. This return to a pragmatic and ethically informed foreign policy meant that military operations in Kosovo and Libya were undertaken in quite different circumstances, yet came to be justified by similar arguments from the two leaders.     

Political impediments to the resumption of labour migration to Western Europe

This article argues that traditional, labour migration flows to Western Europe are unlikely to resume in the near future and the commitment of the European Community to the free movement of labour is likely to erode as a consequence of anti‐immigrant illiberalism in Western Europe. Anti‐immigrant illiberalism in several, major labour‐importing states is evident in: the semipermanent politicisation of state immigration policy; increasing popular support for xenophobic political forces; the appropriation of anti‐immigrant votes by established political parties of the right; and the abandonment by left‐wing parties of liberal immigration and immigrant‐welfare policies.     

Relational representation: an agency-based approach to global justice

This paper argues that Amartya Sen’s comparative approach to justice requires a politics that is attentive to the agency of the other. Rethinking representation as a relational, rather than a sovereign, concept captures the relationship between agency and justice that is emerging in global politics today. It is increasingly common that non-governmental actors engage with communities through practices of trust and responsibility without appeal to political authority. Relational representation helps clarify the dynamics of these relationships and provides a way to think about their purpose. That purpose is to effect changes that ameliorate suffering and injustice, working to re-present the represented persons as more capable persons, more free to use their agency.     

Non-Compliance with EU Directives in the Member States: Opposition through the Backdoor?

To what extent are European rules complied with, and what are the reasons for non-compliance with EU law? According to an intergovernmentalist perspective, implementation problems should occur when member states failed to assert their interests in the European decision-making process. Focusing on 26 infringement procedures from the area of labour law, we show that such ‘opposition through the backdoor’ does occur occasionally. However, we demonstrate that opposition at the end of the EU policy process may also arise without prior opposition at the beginning. Additionally, our findings indicate that non-compliance is often unrelated to opposition, and due to administrative shortcomings, interpretation problems, and issue linkage. This study is based on unique in-depth data stemming from a ground-level analysis of the implementation of six EU Directives in all 15 member states.     

A comparison of rapists and sexual murderers on demographic and selected psychometric measures

This study compared 58 sexual murderers and 112 rapists who were about to undergo treatment in prison for their sexual offending behavior. The two groups were compared on background, personality, offense, and victim characteristics. The sexual murderer group were less likely to have been involved in a relationship at the time of their index offense, generally attacked older victims, and had higher self-esteem. The rapist sample were found to have more violent previous convictions and scored higher on measures of historical deviance (nonsexual), paranoid suspicion, and resentment. No differences were found on the personality or clinical syndrome scales of the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-III. However, the rapist sample had significantly higher mean scores on the Paranoid Suspicion, Resentment, and Self-Esteem subscales of the Antisocial Personality Questionnaire. Future research should compare the two groups on dynamic or changeable factors to determine differential treatment needs.     

Effective use of a Strategic Issue Management System (SIMS): combining tools and approach

• Ideally, issue management can prevent an issue from becoming an actual threat. But in reality, a company or group should be prepared to face issues that threaten a change in their status quo. This paper discusses the authors' experiences with blending the right tools with the right approach to successfully address issues that are imminent.
• If the proper balance between process, interpretation and creativity is maintained, Strategic Issue Management Systems (SIMS) with their component tools can be used effectively to provide a more objective understanding of the issue and to shape a more effective strategic objective and tactical plan.
• Key components of the SIMS presented include: issue characterization, strategic objectives, force field analysis, stakeholder assessment, scenario mapping, key player assessment and SWOT Analysis. Each can be used independently, but this paper focuses on how, when used in combination, each can build upon the other and produce an obtainable strategic objective and targeted tactical plan.
• Although each component of the SIMS represents a stage in a process, the emphasis of the issue team should not be on completion of the process, but instead on what is learned from each stage and how the stages can then lead to a successful resolution of the issue.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Less fighting than expected

While all-pay auctions are well researched experimentally, we do not have much laboratory evidence on wars of attrition. This paper tries to fill this gap. Technically, there are only a few differences between wars of attrition and all-pay auctions. Behaviorally, however, we find striking differences: As many studies, our experiment finds overbidding in all-pay auctions. In contrast, in wars of attrition we observe systematic underbidding. We study bids and expenditures in different experimental frames and matching procedures and tie in with the literature on stepwise linear bidding functions.