The 1998 State Council Organizational Streamlining: Personnel reduction and change of government function

The two goals of the 1998 State Council organizational streamlining were personnel reduction and a change of government functions. It is argued that the methods being used to achieve personnel reduction do not constitute a real reduction but largely involve transferring staff to other public institutions. Real personnel reduction could not be achieved without a major change of government function. Institutional reforms of both the central and local governments since the 1980s have been adaptations to the changing economic structure from a planned to a market economy. Government functions have served both existing economies. Cadres cannot be reduced unless the government function of direct management of state-enterprises is completely severed. The major contents of the 1998 institutional reform are examined and evaluated. The prospects for the success of the reform are also assessed.     

Political Consequences of the New Inequality

This article proposes agendas for teaching and research about shifting global patterns of equality and inequality, a very different agenda than was appropriate when the last undergraduate professor was president of ISA, almost forty years ago. Today, unlike in that Cold War world, formal democracy is flourishing, state power is diminishing, gender inequality has diminished, and income inequality has risen. Consequences of these new patterns that demand our attention as teachers and scholars include: (1) more frequent protracted social conflicts, (2) a newly politicized sphere of international public health, (3) the new global gender politics, (4) the new global politics of the super-rich, and (5) the new politics and ethics of the world's privileged, a group that includes most ISA members and most of our students. Our responsibilities as teachers have grown, in part, because popular media present a decreasingly coherent picture of each of these patterns; and that incoherence, itself, may help sustain global inequalities.     

International NGOs and the challenge of modernity

The forces associated with economic globalisation and the apparent supremacy of market forces have unleashed a range of political and social processes that have served, and were indeed designed, to enrich and empower the few at the expense of the majority. These include phenomena such as the rise in armed conflict, threats to food security, the loss of livelihoods and traditional ways of life of millions of people worldwide, the commodification of social provision, assaults on national sovereignty, and the privatisation of citizenship. However, the author argues, the most significant impact of globalisation is the 'localisation' of social and political struggle, and the emergence of new forms of international solidarity. Many NGOs have too readily succumbed to the view that globalisation in its present form is inevitable and irreversible, and have accommodated to it by trading their essential values for technical professionalism, often imported from the private sector. However, if NGOs are to assume their place as part of a transformational movement for social justice, they must rediscover and foster the values of citizen participation and develop a genuine respect for diversity.     

A Study of the Background Levels of Male DNA on Underpants Worn by Females

This study is the first to examine the background level of male DNA on underpants worn by females in the absence of sexual contact. Here, we examined 103 samples from the inside front of underpants from 85 female volunteers. Samples were examined for the presence of male DNA using NGM SElect and PowerPlex Y23 kits. Only five samples gave a “complete” Y-STR profile, even though 83.5% of our volunteers cohabited with a male. In all cases where a partner reference sample was available, the Y-STR profile matched the cohabiting partner. We have demonstrated that a Y-STR profile is not expected on the inside front of underpants worn by females after social contact alone. The results of this study are informative for evaluating the significance of a Y-STR profile on underpants in cases of alleged sexual assault.     

Modern poetry,popular song and their dangerous liaisons

Abstract

In this article, Tsuboi Hideto examines the mutually entwined pursuits of modern poetry and music in interwar Japan, focusing especially on the work of Nakahara Chūya, Kitahara Hakushū, and the People's Poetry group. Cutting across their respective distinctions within the poetry establishment, Tsuboi draws attention to these figures’ shared investment in symphonic, folk and popular music. In so doing, he identifies among them a prevailing concern for curating a poetic voice that might harmonize the conflictual registers of individual and collective expression and thereby attune the work of the poet to that of the ‘people’ more broadly. Meanwhile, the essay traces the currents of modernist and avant-garde thought in Japan and Europe that framed these poets’ engagements with music and sound. Tsuboi then illustrates the varying degrees to which these voices, forged within the cosmopolitan milieu of the Taisho period, bent toward the nationalizing project and later gave way to the chorus of wartime fascism and imperial expansion.     

The In-securitisation of Youth in the South and East Mediterranean

The securitisation of youth as a social category has been well-documented. For the South and East Mediterranean (SEM) countries, moral panics over demographic youth bulges, Islamist radicalisation and protracted conflicts have placed youth centre-stage as a threat to the security of states and societies. Rejecting such assertions as themselves being what Foucault might have termed ‘technologies of power’ in a neoliberal order, and instead taking a critical approach to security, the spotlight is turned towards youth themselves as the referent object of study. This reveals the multidimensional hyper-precarity and insecuritisation of young peoples’ lives which derive from that same neoliberal economic order and the political structures that sustain it in the SEM countries. The finding resonates with other studies of new, insecure, formats for adulthood in Africa and suggests that we should look at the insecurity of young people today to understand global neoliberal futures in countries beyond the post-industrial ‘core’.