From Small Streams to Pipe Dreams – The Hydro-Engineering of the Cyprus Conflict

A 2008 water crisis triggered collective fears of droughts and long-term scarcities both north and south of the buffer zone dividing the Mediterranean island of Cyprus since 1974. Tectonic shifts in the island’s water management were the result. Central to export oriented agricultural production since British colonial days, water has always been a policy priority throughout independence, conflict and division for all administrations on the island. With discourses of scarcity and impending doom on the rise, policy makers north and south of the buffer zone started investing heavily in non-conventional high capacity water resources. Since October 2015 an underwater pipeline from the Turkish mainland supplies the north of the island with freshwater while the Republic of Cyprus has commissioned desalination plants through public private partnerships. This article argues that both the construction of the motherland’s “umbilical water cord” in the north as well as the “desalination rush” in the south are not just reactions to issues of environmental scarcity. It shows that Malthusian narratives of water scarcity leading to conflict are just as mistaken as liberal notions of scarcity leading to cooperation. Instead, relationships of power, rooted in post-colonial state formation, development, conflict and division have motivated financially costly but politically expedient investments in excess capacities, rather than improvement of water management. Both the northern and southern water infrastructure boom is understood within its geopolitical context of creating water as political capital in the peace process. This geo-politically conditioned over-engineering of water resources, finally, provides ample grounds for rethinking the relations between water, conflict and division more generally.     

'Settling Accounts' Revisited: Reconciling Global Norms with Local Agency

In the mid- to late-1980s, the discourse of transitional justicewas shaped above all by the experience of countries in LatinAmerica, where military forces continued to exercise autonomouspower even after ceding formal authority to democratically electedgovernments. In this setting, while human rights professionalsagreed that fledgling democracies should undertake prosecutionsin accordance with their international legal obligations, theywere divided over the question of whether further developmentof international obligations in respect of punishment was desirable.Nor was it clear what, precisely, international law alreadyrequired. Writing in the early 1990s, the author of this essay concludedthat States parties to certain international treaties were ingeneral required to prosecute specific crimes. More generally,she argued, wholesale impunity for atrocious crimes was generallyincompatible with States’ responsibility to ensure thatindividuals subject to their power enjoyed fundamental rights.But these duties, she wrote, should not be interpreted to requireaction incompatible with a nascent democracy's political orlegal capacity. In this essay, the author describes how her views have evolvedin the past 15 years. Noting that international legal normsagainst impunity have grown increasingly strong and arguingthat this trend has itself proved a powerful antidote to impunity,the author nonetheless affirms ‘the central importanceof promoting the broad participation of victims and other citizensin the process of designing as well as implementing programmesof transitional justice’ and addresses the inherent tensionbetween these values and norms.     

How Capital Budgeting Helped a Sick City: Thirty Years of Capital Improvement Planning in Cleveland

During the 1970s, Cleveland's capital improvement plan (CIP) was scorned as a bad joke, and the city's roads, bridges, and public buildings fell into disrepair. The city's default on its fiscal obligation in 1978 seemed to cap the city's infrastructure problem; there was no comprehensive strategy for capital spending and in a bankrupt city, no money to spend in any event. Yet, during the 1980s, with support from the administration, the business community, and the innovations of a small group of dedicated urban planners, the CIP was restructured and hundreds of millions were systematically invested in public infrastructure. By the 1990s, most of the innovative changes of the 1980s seemed to be institutionalized, but there were ominous clouds on the horizon.     

transcending the impact of the financial crisis in the United Kingdom: towards plan F—a feminist economic strategy

This paper sets out a framework for understanding the impacts of the financial crisis and its aftermath that is based on the idea of three interacting spheres: finance, production and reproduction. All of these spheres are gendered and globalised. The gendered impact of the current crisis is discussed in terms of the impact on unemployment, employment protection and security, public sector services, social security benefits, pensions, and the real value of wages and living standards. Drawing on the analysis of the UK Women’s Budget Group, the paper demonstrates that the biggest falls in disposable income as the result of austerity policies by the Conservative-led government since 2010 have been borne by the most vulnerable women—lone mothers, single women pensioners and single women without children. Working-age couples without children have been least affected. The paper then goes on to discuss what an alternative economic strategy, based on feminist political economy, might look like. It utilises the notion of the ‘reproductive bargain’, first developed to understand the transition in Cuba in the 1990s. It sets out a possible feminist economic strategy that insists on the incorporation of reproductive and care work into the analysis of alternative economic policies and links employment, wages and social security payments to public provisioning of trans-generational reproductive services. It suggests feasible strategies to finance the proposed Plan F—a feminist economic strategy.     

Reds Need Not Apply: Communism and the FCC, 1940-60

New communication technologies—particularly the Internet—have drastically complicated the problem of preserving privacy. As a result, a multitude of solutions for this increasingly complex area of the law have been put forth in recent years. This essay concludes, however, that changes in technology do not warrant altering the underlying constitutional balance that was arrived at decades ago in the tort law of privacy. The free speech limits on privacy law were imposed for good reason, and steps to protect the interest in the new online environment should not be ones that upset that careful balance.     

The Contours of “Cap and Trade”: The Evolution of Emissions Trading Systems for Greenhouse Gases

This article documents the evolution of “cap and trade” as a policy response to global climate change. Through an analysis of 33 distinct policy venues, the article describes how the cap and trade policy domain has developed along spatial, temporal, and institutional dimensions. This discussion demonstrates that following initial discussions of cap and trade in the Kyoto Protocol negotiations, the idea quickly spread to other policy venues, creating a complex system of multilevel governance, where many questions about how to govern emissions trading remain contested. The analysis contextualizes recent questioning of emissions trading as an appropriate mechanism for controlling GHG emissions, as well as the ongoing debates about who should govern cap and trade and how it should be carried out. The findings highlight the value added of a domain‐level perspective and suggest the need for future research on the sociopolitical nature of cap and trade policy debates.