External networks and institutional idiosyncrasies: the Common Security and Defence Policy and UNSCR 1325 on women,peace and security

In 2008, the Council of the European Union (EU) adopted a ‘Comprehensive Approach’ that outlines a strategy for securing gender mainstreaming; two years later, the Council introduced a set of indicators to assess its implementation. The EU was responding to the United Nations Security Council’s call for regional institutions to assist in implementing Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325, adopted on 31 October 2000, concerning ‘women, peace and security’. This resolution sought to meet the ‘urgent need to mainstream a gender perspective into peacekeeping operations’. Considering that prior exposure to gender issues, resources and well-established relations with civil society and gender advocates are lacking, the adoption of both the Comprehensive Approach and the indicators, as well as the structures and procedures established since then as part of the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy, requires some explanation. This article draws on feminist institutionalist approaches to argue that the impetus for change came from individuals and groups within the EU who were involved in external networks, both above and below the supranational level, who seized on institutional idiosyncrasies that also shaped the implementation of UNSCR 1325 in important ways.     

Mind the Gap: Civilian Protection and the Politics of Peace Operation Design

Protecting civilians from conflict and atrocities has become a major focus of governments, the UN, and activists. Yet peace operations—the main policy instrument for directly shielding civilians from violence—vary widely in how well they are designed to do so. One much-maligned problem is a gap between a force's ambitions to protect civilians and its physical resources for doing so. Missions plagued by these ambitions–resources gaps gesture toward protecting civilians but are not designed to do so effectively. They can also worsen civilian suffering. This article explores the politics behind these gaps, focusing on the role of powerful states—especially major Western democracies—in creating and facilitating them. It argues that ambitions–resources gaps represent a form of organized hypocrisy that helps political leaders balance competing normative and material pressures to protect civilians while limiting costs and risks. Case studies of France's Operation Turquoise in Rwanda and US support for the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) in Darfur support the argument.     

Energy policy under austerity localism: what role for local authorities?

In the UK, local authorities (LAs) have been placed at the forefront of domestic energy-reduction strategies as the responsible actors for coordinating policy in this sector. Yet, there has been little research regarding the role of LAs in this policy agenda, and their abilities to bring together stakeholders in the successful design and implementation of strategies to reduce energy demands. The paper aims to fill this gap by highlighting the relevance and importance of the energy policy sphere to local government studies, building on the idea of resilient LAs within the context of tensions between the localism agenda and the actual implementation of energy efficiency polices. This is achieved through multiple rounds of semi-structured interviews with LA officers. Our findings reveal that LAs, operating under a localism agenda, lack the freedoms and resources from central government to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders, resorting to short-term policies.     

Study in blue: trauma,affect, event

As contemporary student activists in the United States embrace a vocabulary of trauma and microaggressions, some critics on the left consider this a depoliticizing move symptomatic of the university’s growing thralldom to neoliberalism. The author argues that such criticism neglects how talk of trauma and microaggressions attempts to affectively manage structural violence’s failure to manifest in the form of discrete, identifiable, and extraordinary events. To illustrate this, she turns to the poetry of Claudia Rankine and the performance art of Emma Sulkowicz as aesthetic treatments of racial microaggression and sexual trauma, respectively. Rankine’s and Sulkowicz’s works belong to an emergent genre the author calls the coincidence report, in which subjects with no proof of structural violence except for their own feelings must cope with what happens when an event doesn’t. Ultimately, both artists sideline attempts to reconstruct the event in favor of redistributing specific affects throughout their respective publics. In both cases, these affects are blue – that is, depressive (Rankine) and obscene (Sulkowicz). Subjects in the blue find themselves ambivalently attached to living politically in the shadow of an event even as they detach from the fantasy that political life is less disappointing, depressing, or deflating than it actually is.     

Ontario Healthcare Coverage Eligibility Among New Permanent Residents: A Scoping Review

New permanent residents to Ontario can experience difficulties accessing health services due to the 3-month residency requirement for provincial healthcare coverage. This scoping literature review, which included peer-reviewed articles and gray literature from 1993–2013, examined the effects of the 3-month waiting period on the health of new permanent residents to Ontario, public health, and the health-care system. At the individual level, issues of affordability, pre-existing conditions, and quality of care were prominent throughout the literature. At a systems level, the policy was found to constrain various health-care settings, pose a risk to public health, and compound health-care system costs.     

Constitutional analysis: The power index approach

Abstract. A power index approach to the EU institutions gives a new perspective upon the EU institutions and their future reform. Using a standard power measure, the Banzhaf index, we show that in a group of states as the EU council, the voting power of a member state is equal to twice the individual power to block multiplied by the group's collective power to change. Political power of the member states is calculated under alternative constitutional rules for the EU, where cooperative game theory allows the derivation of power equivalences. We suggest that simple majority should be used more often in the EU council.     

The Great Rabbit Massacre – A “Comedy of the Commons”? Custom, Community and Rights of Public Access to the Links of St Andrews

In the US courts and legal scholars have rediscovered the English doctrine of custom. In her essay ``The Comedy of the Commons: Custom, Commerce, and Inherently Public Property', Professor Carol Rose argues that customary uses of recreation lands should be upheld by courts because the highest value of such land is achieved by keeping them open to the public. Rose relies in her argument on the English doctrine of custom, but the doctrine of custom legitimates local not public use. British legal history, however, provides an example of such a ``public' common in the Links of St Andrews. In the case Dempster v. Cleghorn, the golfing public sought to vindicate their customary right to the maintenance of golfing ground as it had been ``in all times past'. This article examines the case of Dempster, and the consequent riot, and asks whether it was a ``comedy of the commons'. It concludes that despite ten years of litigation and the extirpation of the Dempsters' warrened rabbits, the case nevertheless is a ``comedy of the commons' that provides a model of the meditation of public use by local custom and community. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Leader Effects and Voting for the Populist Radical Right in Western Europe

Charismatic leaders are often assumed to drive the electoral success of populist radical right parties. Yet, little attention is given to how voter evaluations of leaders influence individual voting behavior. To our knowledge, no systematic and comparative tests of this empirical question exist. In this paper, we test to what extent voters’ support for populist radical right parties is fueled by leaders' appreciation. In order to examine leader effects on the populist radical right vote, we rely on an original dataset pooling 29 National Election Studies from ten established West European parliamentary democracies (1985‐2018). Our analysis finds that: (1) voters’ evaluation of party leaders is significantly associated with voting for populist radical right parties; (2) leader evaluations are more important than left‐right self‐placement when it comes to voting for the populist radical right, and (3) leader effects are more important for populist radical right voters than for other voters.