Legislative influences in Japanese budgetary politics

Following World War II (W.W.II), Japan adopted a democratic parliamentary system. Since its formation in 1955 the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had monopolized Japanese legislature (Diet) for over 35 years. However, it is said that at the center of the budgetary process was the Ministry of Finance (MOF). Elite bureaucrats rather than politicians are typically seen as the agenda-setter. The action of politicians, in particular members of the LDP, to influence the budgetary resource allocation has been largely unexamined. This paper empirically examines the influence of the LDP on the supplementary budget formation and on the revenue-sharing. We find that the LDP had a significant impact on the budget formation. Further, we find that the LDP manipulated transfers from the central government to local governments presumably to maintain its electoral positions.     

Unveiling White logic in criminological research: an intertextual analysis

Critical race scholars have called into question the objective neutrality upon which much positivist social science rests, arguing that it discursively masks how whiteness underpins the normative purview of research design and findings. As the scholarly securing of whiteness takes shape through explicit and discursive mechanisms, this article examines how it is manifest in criminological research through an intertextual analysis of contemporary peer-reviewed scholarship. Examining 558 articles in five recognized journals, this paper documents how blind spots towards race and racial stratification surface in criminological research, arguing that most of the articles analyzed do not simply ignore White privilege; they actively uphold it. Findings suggest that they do so through two means: first by whitewashing race, that is, disregarding how race and racism can differentially affect acts and trends of crime and deviance, and secondly, by narrowly representing race as merely explanatory variable without querying the broader power relations it marks. After discussing how these patterns reveal and uphold whiteness as a normative value, we conclude with a discussion of preliminary steps aimed at exposing and unpacking how White logic informs the field.     

The International Finance Corporation and the emerging market funds industry

Linking the world’s core equity markets with semi-peripheral and peripheral equity markets has been a fundamentally different process from linking core markets with each other. International financial institutions have played a larger role in core‐periphery equity market integration, and issues of corporate governance assume greater importance in the core‐periphery cases. Illustrating these differences, this article considers the creation of the Korea fund, one of the early country funds in an emerging market promoted by the International Finance Corporation (IFC). The case shows that increasingly sophisticated financial instruments, like country funds, alter the structure of the international financial system in such a way as to reposition governments in developing market economies with respect to their domestic financial systems; allow for some international capital inflows without loss of corporate control; and make diversification possible for a transnational class of investors. Moreover, the article proposes that international financial institutions like the IFC can alter the structural context of a particular market within which various financial actors later strike deals. In the light of the process of coalition building elaborated here, the article reserves a role for considerations of both multilateralism and a state’s position in the world system in a body of literature heavily concentrated on state-level political activity.     

The Responsible Migrant,Reading the Global Compact on Migration

Law and Critique - In 2016, the international community, in reaction to the growing number of ‘tragedies’ occurring as people attempted to move across borders, met to discuss large...     

Portraying history and heroism in Rebecca West's The sentinel

Rebecca West's early interest in the suffragette movement gives us a strong sense of her development as a writer and feminist thinker, as her feminist perspective shifts from impassioned and enthusiastic supporter of the suffragettes in her incomplete novel, The Sentinel, to the more measured assessments in her early journalism. This article discusses some of the ways in which the imagery, iconography and militant discourse of suffragette writing and public speaking shaped the imagination of the young Rebecca West. It also shows how her celebration of female heroism in The Sentinel, often conveyed through detailed depictions of the women she admired, creates a vivid and informed version of feminist history.     

Global feminisms,c. 1870–1930: vocabularies and concepts—a comparative approach

This ‘Viewpoint’ assesses some recent approaches to the study of feminisms across the globe during the c. 1870–1930 period. At a moment when historians are working towards the commemoration of women's partial enfranchisement in Britain in 1918, we consider the intellectual frameworks that most effectively celebrate this achievement whilst also situating the Act within its complex, global context. Reflecting on discussions held at a recent workshop at the University of Oxford, we advocate the effectiveness of a global and comparative methodological approach to question what ‘feminism’ meant to contemporary campaigners. The scrutiny of localised and national issues within comparative and global contexts illuminates the plurality of definitions, vocabularies, and categories relating to feminism that were being used (and rejected) during this era and raises broader questions for the study and practice of feminist history.