Moroccan City Festivals,Cultural Diplomacy and Urban Political Agency

Over the last two decades, cultural festivals have been established and consolidated in cities across Morocco. Their proliferation has coincided with the reign of Mohammed VI, well known as an enthusiastic and extremely wealthy patron of the arts, and the concomitant state-controlled democratization of Moroccan politics and society. Drawing on two examples—the Marrakech International Film Festival and the Mawazine music festival in Rabat—this article interrogates the ways in which festivals and the urban scale combine to function as vehicles for cultural diplomacy. Contra the common tendency in recent policy debates that perceive the city (with or without its administration) as an active agent in translocal cultural relations, I argue for a more nuanced perspective that understands the urban festival as a diplomatic platform through which the cultural politics of the state are rescaled and where a range of actors contest ideas about the local, national and global trajectories of society and cultural life.

     

Law and Speed: Asylum Appeals and the Techniques and Consequences of Legal Quickening

This article examines how a politics of speed is manifest in a legal context via a detailed ethnography of the French National Court of Asylum (CNDA). It identifies the temporal, spatial, and organizational ordering techniques that characterize asylum appeals in France and discusses the consequences of these techniques for the way in which the appeal process is experienced by legal decision makers and subjects. It reveals adverse impacts of legal quickening on legal quality, in particular through identifying: ‘cracks’ in the performance of legal roles like lawyer and judge that begin to appear when law is executed rapidly and repetitively; dwindling opportunities to demonstrate and experience respect between parties; and the ‘thinning-out’ of legal process, as heuristics rather than deliberation come to dominate legal reasoning. The article contributes to a burgeoning body of socio-legal literature on law and time by establishing the negative impact of excessive legal quickening on role performance, respect, and legal quality.     

Theorising media as practice

This article explores the possibility of a new paradigm of media research that understands media, not as texts or structures of production, but as practice. Drawing on recent moves towards a theory of practice in sociology, this paradigm aims to move beyond old debates about media effects and the relative importance of political economy and audience interpretation, at the same time as moving beyond a narrow concentration on audience practices, to study the whole range of practices that are oriented towards media and the role of media in ordering other practices in the social world. After setting this new paradigm in the context of the history of media research, the article reviews the key advantages of this paradigm in mapping the complexity of media‐saturated cultures where the discreteness of audience practices can no longer be assumed.     

Do Citizens Really Shop between Decentralised Jurisdictions? Tiebout and Internal Migration Revisited

Tiebout predicted that differences in service provision and tax rates across regions would lead citizens to migrate to their preferred jurisdiction. This central tenet of the fiscal federalism literature has rarely been explored outside the North American context. This paper delves into this gap in the literature by examining the factors that undermine Tiebout's prediction. It undertakes an international comparative analysis drawing upon recent innovations in the measurement of internal migration that facilitate country comparisons. While some of Tiebout's ideas find limited support, the overall weight of evidence suggests a weak link between internal migration and decentralisation     

Civil wars,party politics and the consolidation of regimes in twentieth century Europe

The present article explores how winners' and losers' strategies for competition influence the possibility of democratization after civil war. Civil wars have been pivotal events in many states, but there has been little analysis of how they affect democratization. Since most have been won by the political right in twentieth century Europe one expects a correlation between civil war and the imposition of authoritarian solution to political conflicts. However, an analysis of five civil wars shows a wide variety in the patterns of political dominance achieved by the winners, ranging from total clampdown in Spain to the winners relinquishing power, as in Ireland. In between, Finland, Greece and Hungary combined various degrees of open competition with restrictions on the losers. In effect democratization can be as likely an outcome of civil war as regression to authoritarianism. Explaining the variation in outcomes of the five cases is the objective of this article.     

The endorsement of cognitive distortions: comparing child pornography offenders and contact sex offenders

This study examined the endorsement of cognitive distortions in child pornography offenders (CPOs), using an established assessment tool, the Abel and Becker Cognition Scale. The scale was expanded to include cognitions specific to child pornography offending, extracted from Howitt and Sheldon's Children and Sexual Activities Inventory (C&SA). Three samples of CPOs, child sex offenders and offenders with both offence types responded to the cognition items. An exploratory Principal Component Analysis suggested six main components of the scale. CPOs were significantly less likely to endorse these statements in general, and this was more pronounced on items that project blame onto the child or other people, describe a need for power and consider children as sexually active. The statements extracted from C&SA did not differentiate between the groups. These findings are discussed under consideration of the relationship between cognitive distortions and contact sex offending, and in reference to the general criticism concerning the definition and appropriate measurement of cognitive distortions.     

The wild mammals (protection) bill: A parliamentary white elephant?

Examining one unsuccessful private members’ bill (PMB) ‐ Kevin McNamara's Wild Mammals (Protection) Bill which would have prohibited hunting ‐ this case study examines many of the non‐legislative functions of the British Parliament. Even unsuccessful PMBs ‐ and this was a PMB whose failure was preordained ‐ have many consequences for both parliament and the wider political system of which it is an integral part. PMBs can perform an important ‘exit’ function, taking the decision away from a reluctant executive. They can help to set the agenda of political debate, generating publicity for parliament (as a body), the issue itself and the member promoting the bill. They generate correspondence between represented and representatives, helping to inform and educate. They can be used as a party‐political weapon and may have electoral consequences. They may also affect the legitimacy of the political system. PMBs are far from parliamentary white elephants.     

From Tuscany to Victoria: Some Determinants of Sustainability Reporting by Local Councils

This paper seeks to respond to recent calls by the academic community for studies investigating sustainability reporting by the public sector, as well as for more engagement-based studies of this issue by examining the views of managers within local councils (LC). The objective of this project is to provide insights as to the possible reasons and explanations for the types of sustainability disclosures among a group of local councils operating in Italy and Australia. In particular, an international comparison is undertaken to ascertain the effect of culture on the adoption of sustainability reporting (SR). Evidence is collected from semi-structured interviews with managers and accountants from ten local councils consisting of five from Italy (Tuscany) and five from Australia (Victoria). The findings suggest that although there are available some general policy documents relating to sustainability reporting, councils are left to their own discretion as to what they consider fit under the definition of sustainability and therefore, determine to a large extent, what to report to stakeholders. Moreover, there was a range of legitimacy type behaviours displayed by a number of councils while others were influenced by notions of public sector accountability and transparency. Adopting Hofstede's cultural framework, the research also highlights the relevance of the Italian and Australian cultural settings in shaping the SR practices used by LCs. The findings suggest that differences regarding cultural dimensions, such as ‘power distance’ and ‘uncertainty avoidance’, influence key aspects of SR.     

Working class power and state formation in Mao Zedong's thought, 1931–1934

One facet of contemporary debates surrounding international development and humane governance is the growing attention being focused on participatory governance as a method of reducing poverty and increasing social rights. The article evaluates the evolutionary forms of participatory governance in the Philippines since the mid-1990s. Various administrations have attempted to introduce participatory programs concerned with poverty reduction and agrarian reform in the Philippines. Various institutional obstacles and the failure of many non-government organisations to engage with these processes at an adequately strategic level, however, have hampered these attempts. The rhetoric of participation has often been contradicted by a commitment to forms of neo-liberal governance that facilitate the exclusion of public scrutiny and debate over issues of development strategy and security. The article concludes by arguing that real progress on establishing participatory forms of governance requires taking measures that challenge embedded power relations. Non-government organisations are better served by maintaining more oppositional political stance.