China’s Response to the Ebola Virus Disease in West Africa

This article examines the Chinese response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, first surveying Chinese interests in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Many Chinese workers have been evacuated and projects postponed. For the first time, China has extended humanitarian aid to countries facing a public health emergency. China is under pressure to ‘do something’ but faces its own developmental challenges as well as problems of logistics. Chinese knowledge of Africa is still relatively weak and uninformed. Although China’s assistance dwarves that from the other BRICS, the Ebola crisis has revealed problems in Sino-African relations, not least the gap between rhetoric and reality.     

Company level localization and public affairs officers' educational background in Switzerland

As corporate public affairs officers have only rarely been researched in Switzerland, this study contributes a situation analysis of Swiss public affairs officers, their work processes, and biographical background to further fill this empirical gap. First, the existing public affairs research regarding Switzerland is reviewed, and research questions are derived. The research was conducted by sending out a survey to the members of the Swiss Association for Public Affairs, followed by personal in‐depth interviews with 11 public affairs officers. The findings show that respondents work in organizations that employ 1 to 82,100 people are all Swiss nationals, and their departments are mostly called ‘public affairs’. The responsibility of public affairs is predominantly for senior or top management level, and the majority of public affairs officers report to the director of their department. The respondents are highly educated. Moreover, the paper asks whether public affairs is conducted in a strategic way by taking Fleisher's 10 elements as a conceptual basis. Results show that strategic involvement of their activities is rather low. Recommendations are discussed in order to increase the strategic involvement and advance professionalization of public affairs in Switzerland with specific regard for the political system. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Law enforcement and civil society in Russia

Many Russian civil society organisations are directly engaging with state law enforcement agencies, particularly the police, in joint efforts to improve the performance and change the norms and values of state officials involved in administering justice. These activities are based upon a model of state–society relations that stresses the possibility of a positive relationship of mutual assistance and partnership between the state and civil society. Such assistance is often described by these organisations as helping low-level bureaucrats better perform their core organisational tasks. This model is contrasted with two alternative models of the role of civil society, which depict civil society either as teaching citizens the norms and values associated with liberal democracy, or as a potential counter-weight to an over-reaching state. Three cases studies of cooperation between NGOs and law enforcement agencies demonstrate the utility of such an approach. Although these projects suffer from some common pathologies of civil society work in Russia, they remain important, not least because of the presence of ‘uncivil society’ extremist groups who also are trying to influence the norms and beliefs of state law enforcement officials. The civil society activities profiled here suggest that direct, cooperative engagement with the state is one important component of long-term efforts to transform the Russian state in a more liberal, ‘civil’ direction.     

The Politics of Food Regulation and Reform in Ireland

Amid a period of increasing political anxiety generated by the BSE crisis, the Irish Government sought to replace a confusing medley of food regulations with a single agency responsible for regulating food from the 'farm to the fork'. Presented as a radical departure from a regime previously discredited, its remit would be to redefine the relationship between risk assessment, management and communication. In this context, the paper puts forward three principal arguments. First, that while the Minister for Health and Children was keen to extol both the scientific credentials of the agency, and the importance of shifting regulatory responsibility from the Department of Agriculture and Food (DAF) to the Department of Health and Children (DOHC), what remains novel is the manner in which reform has managed to retain political access for influential agri-business interests. Second, that any reform undertaken should be fully cognisant of the international agreements between the European Union and the World Trade Organisation which extended further a free market in food trade. The agency's institutional architecture therefore was framed with the intention of restoring market confidence without threatening the habitat of those multi-national companies that occupy this arena. Finally, that the role of science (and risk) in food regulation has altered. Rather than perform the task of sustaining order through responsible government, science now participates in (re)constituting order through the market.     

State and local law enforcement response to transnational crime

This report, using the results of the survey and new research, identifies some next steps to providing State and local law enforcement with tools to identify and respond to transnational crime.... The second section [excerpted here] is a literature review of the current state of the field in identifying and responding to transnational crime at the State and local level. This section provides a context for the interpretation of the results of this study....