No Country for Made Men: The Decline of the Mafia in Post‐Soviet Georgia

This article studies the decline of a long‐standing mafia known as thieves‐in‐law in the post‐Soviet republic of Georgia. In 2005 an anti‐mafia campaign began which employed laws directly targeting the thieves‐in‐law. Within a year, all Georgia's thieves‐in‐law were in prison or had fled the country. This article looks at the success of the policy by investigating how Georgia's volatile socio‐economic environment in the 1990s affected the resilience of the thieves‐in‐law to state attack. The article presents data showing that the chaos of this period impacted on the ability of thieves‐in‐law to coordinate activities, regulate recruitment, and protect their main collective resource—their elite criminal status. Due to this, the reputation of the thieves‐in‐law as a mafia drastically declined creating vulnerability. The article adds to the literature on resilience in criminal networks and the study of organized crime in the post‐Soviet space.     

Are Alternative Livelihood Projects Alleviating Poverty in Mining Communities? Experiences from Ghana

This paper critiques the approach being taken in Ghana to implement Alternative Livelihood (AL) projects in mining communities. The rapid insurgence of illegal artisanal gold mining has forced policymakers to think more creatively about ways in which to deal with mounting unemployment in the country's rural areas. Most of the economic activities being promoted, however, have proved highly unpopular with target groups. The adopted policy approaches reflect how little in tune the organisations championing AL activities are with the mindsets and ambitions of rural populations.     

The Politics of Time on the Frontline: Street Level Bureaucracy,Professional Judgment,and Public Accountability

This article reports on a study carried out on the impact of quality assurance mechanisms on street-level bureaucrats in Northern England (teachers, nurses and social workers). A key aim of the research was to explore the ways in which these mechanisms negotiate the much older regulatory function of time. The findings suggest that these mechanisms contribute to forms of time compression across professional activities, time compression in turn having consequences for professional judgement. The study explores the mechanisms via which this occurs, while also examining the implications of the research for debates about democracy, political regulation, and public sector management.     

Reading Katrina: Race,Space and an Unnatural Disaster1

Beneath the fleeting commotion of natural disaster, the events of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 revealed deep-rooted dynamics of racial and class inequalities. National media frenzy in the wake of the storm on the Gulf Coast reported on the plight of black poor populations, especially in New Orleans, as those worst impacted and also most neglected. The first part of this article elaborates on the contested concepts of “race” and “racism” in a contemporary context, in which popular visual and narrative representations inform contemporary racial discourses and the perpetuation, in turn, of a dominant neoconservative hegemony. A discursive reading, in part two, of emergent political and media narratives around Katrina reveals the processes and tropes operating to (re)construct “race” in dominant American culture. In this deconstructive analysis, the devastated urban space of New Orleans emerges as a physical as well as highly symbolic regime of knowledge in relation to which dehistoricized racial constructions are propagated and naturalized. Finally, hegemony is reconceptualized as an inherently contingent contemporary power. Discursive processes of racial domination reinforced by popular representations of Hurricane Katrina have been effectively subverted by activist movements in New Orleans which mobilize alternative, experiential and spatial narratives; signifying a grassroots politicization to counter the naturalized racial tropes of neoconservative discourse and intervene with more democratic processes in the ongoing reconstruction of the devastated city.     

A practical analysis of shared‐appreciation mortgages

Abstract

When the development of large‐scale public housing projects was discontinued in the 1970s in both Canada and the United States, the policy response was very different. This article reviews the nature of the dissimilar low‐income housing policy paths, documenting the role of federal housing policy in the evolution of a significant nonprofit “third sector” in Canada's housing system; the decision of the U.S. federal government to rely on the private sector for subsidized rental supply; and, with very little help from the federal government, the ‘bottom‐up” attempt to develop a nonprofit housing sector in communities throughout the United States. In Canada, a permanent stock of good‐quality, nonprofit social housing was created along with a growing and increasingly competent community‐based housing development sector.

The Canadian experience demonstrates that it takes time to build the capacity of the nonprofit sector. The U.S. experience demonstrates that there is a great deal of community‐based talent ready and willing to provide nonprofit housing if reliable and adequate funding is available. Canada has made outstanding progress relative to the United States in the area of affordable housing supply, creating yet another small but significant difference in the quality of life for lower income households. The general Canadian approach to consistent national support of nonprofit and cooperative housing can be applied in the United States. Canada's relative success is not based on unique structural or systemic differences—that is, it is a matter of political choice and political will. The United States should look to Canada's 20‐year experience to determine whether some of the mechanisms used to support Canada's nonprofit sector might be transferable to the United States.     

Judicial politics in Britain: Patrolling the boundaries

This study considers judicial policy‐making in Great Britain by noting the peculiarly British institutional restraints on judicial action of parliamentary sovereignty, the resulting subordination of all courts to the legislative branch and the absence of a codified charter of rights or constitution. Though there is no judicial power to annul legislative or executive actions, British courts and judges still play a small, but significant, role in policy‐making through the common law and, in particular, through judicial review of adminstrative actions. A written bill of rights would likely draw courts further into the the political arena and politicise the appointment of judges.