Die unmittelbare Anwendung der Protokolle der Alpenkonvention in ?sterreich

Die Alpenkonvention und ihre Protokolle sind ein umfassendes multilaterales Vertragswerk, das auf den Schutz der ?kologisch sensiblen Alpenregionen vor den Belastungen durch Tourismus, Verkehr und sonstigen Nutzungen zielt. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht die Praxis der Anwendung der Protokolle der Alpenkonvention in ?sterreich, wo sich zu verschiedenen Einzelf?llen bereits eine Judikatur des Verwaltungsgerichtshofes entwickelt hat. Dabei gibt es wenige, aber doch spektakul?re “leading cases”.     

Security, Equality, and the Clash of Ideas: Sweden's Evolving Anti-Trafficking Policy

Seeking to explain the emergence of anti-trafficking initiatives, scholars have explored two sets of ideas??national security and gender equality??thought to shape policy. In this study, we examine whether such ideational influence accounts for Sweden's evolving anti-trafficking policy over the past decade. As powerful domestic ideas about gender inequality informed the adoption of an abolitionist prostitution policy in the 1990s, one would expect similar ideas to influence domestic responses to the related issue of cross-border trafficking. However, our case study shows that the policy area of trafficking has largely followed a different ideational path. Gendered ideas, periodically nested in a human rights discourse, have been salient in the public debate on trafficking in human beings, especially during the campaign to boycott the 2006 FIFA World Cup. However, they have exerted substantially less influence on Swedish legislative initiatives to combat trafficking, with security concerns still holding sway.     

Fairness in Non-human Primates?

Humans have a sense of fairness, i.e. an interest in the ideal of equity. This sense allows them to compare their own efforts and subsequent outcomes with those of others, and thus to evaluate and react to inequity. The question is whether our closest living relatives, the non-human primates, show the behavioural characteristics that might qualify as necessary components to a sense of fairness, such as inequity aversion. In this article, we review the five different experimental approaches to studying behaviours related to fairness in non-human primates, including their underlying logic and main findings that represent the current state of research in this field. In the critical condition of all these studies, a subject and a conspecific partner have either to invest different efforts or receive different outcomes while observing each other. The main question is whether??and how??subjects react to unequal situations that humans would perceive as ??unfair??. Taken together, the results from all five approaches provide only weak evidence for a sense of fairness in non-human primates. Although apes and monkeys are attentive to what the partner is getting, they do not seem to be able or motivated to compare their own efforts and outcomes with those of others at a human level. Even though the debate is still on-going, we believe that a full sense of fairness is not essential for cooperation. Obviously, apes and monkeys are capable of solving problems cooperatively, without a strong, humanlike sense of fairness. They are mainly interested in maximizing their own benefit, regardless of what others may receive. It is thus possible that a sense of fairness only exists rudimentarily in non-human primates.     

La Naissance de l’Auteur: Origines Politique et Juridique d’un Concept Littéraire

Si le concept d’auteur est une notion centrale de la littérature et de la théorie littéraire, il s’agit d’abord d’une notion juridique qui a été mobilisée par les philosophes modernes, en particulier Hobbes et Spinoza, dans le but politique et scientifique de lutter contre le régime traditionnel des autorités et de défendre la liberté de pensée contre les interprétations normatives des docteurs de la loi et de la religion. L’article remonte aux origines politiques et juridiques de l’auteur-législateur moderne et retrace sa marche vers la Souveraineté.     

The Physiology of Political Participation

Political involvement varies markedly across people. Traditional explanations for this variation tend to rely on demographic variables and self-reported, overtly political concepts. In this article, we expand the range of possible explanatory variables by hypothesizing that a correlation exists between political involvement and physiological predispositions. We measure physiology by computing the degree to which electrodermal activity changes on average when a participant sequentially views a full range of differentially valenced stimuli. Our findings indicate that individuals with higher electrodermal responsiveness are also more likely to participate actively in politics. This relationship holds even after the effects of traditional demographic variables are taken into account, suggesting that physiological responsiveness independently contributes to a fuller understanding of the underlying sources of variation in political involvement.     

Early Pubertal Timing and Girls’ Problem Behavior: Integrating Two Hypotheses

Girls’ early pubertal timing has been linked in many studies to behavioral problems such as delinquency and substance use. The theoretical explanations for these links have often involved the girls’ peer relationships, but contexts have also been considered important in some explanations. By integrating two theoretical models, the peer-socialization and the contextual-amplification hypotheses, we propose a contextual framework for explaining the link between early pubertal timing and external problem behavior in girls. We hypothesize that early developing girls engage in unhealthy, dangerous, and risky behavior under contextual conditions that promote access to older friends and opposite-sex relationships. Under other conditions it is less likely. We tested this integrated hypothesis in two studies conducted in Sweden. The first was a cross-sectional study with information about school and free-time friends in a community sample (N = 284). Early pubertal timing was linked to having older, more normbreaking friends outside of school, but not in school, thus suggesting that the school context interferes early-developing girls’ selection of older peers. The second study involved both a longitudinal (N = 434) and a cross-sectional sample of girls (N = 634), where we examined a leisure setting that is known to attract delinquent youth. Results showed that early pubertal timing was most strongly linked to delinquency for girls who spent time in this context and were heavily involved with boys and peers. In sum, results from both studies supported our predictions that certain contexts would amplify the peer-socialization effect. Overall, we conclude that the integrated peer-socialization/contextual-amplification model satisfactorily explains the link between pubertal timing and external problem behavior.     

Problematic Proximities: Or Why Critiques of Gay Imperialism Matter

This article examines the issues of censorship, language and racism through a critical reflection on Peter Tatchell’s response to the critique of gay imperialism offered by Jin Haritaworn, Tamsila Tauqir and Esra Erdem. In ‘Academics smear Peter Tatchell’, we are invited to find evidence of ‘Islamophobia, racism or support for imperialist wars’ in the writings that can be downloaded from Tatchell’s website. The article shows how islamophobia and racism operate in Tatchell’s writings not necessary in the content of specific arguments but through the very form of proximities (for example in the proximity between the words ‘Islam’, ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘terror’). The article thus reflects on how racism operates in language through the repetition of associations that get ‘stuck’.