Saving more than the children: the role of child-focused NGOs in the creation of southern security norms

The past decade has seen the emergence of ‘new critical discourses’ on security that argue for a widening of the term. This article hopes to add to such discussions by specifically examining the position of children and of the ngos that champion their rights in relation to the evolving security discourse in Southern societies. With this in mind, the first section of the article outlines the role of ngos in the contemporary practice of security. This will serve as an introduction to section two, where the activity of ngos vis-à-vis children will be considered. Such activity raises a number of questions with regard to the usefulness of incorporating children into the security discourse specifically, and to the social construction of ‘children’ generally. These will be outlined in section three. Section four argues for children to be considered as inherent to the creation of Southern security norms, while the final section concludes.     

It Takes a Coalition: The Community Impacts of Collaboration

Members of Congress frequently collaborate on policy initiatives, reaching out to colleagues in both parties to find common ground on solutions for the problems faced by their constituents. Using a novel dataset of over 30,000 “Dear Colleague” letters sent by members of the 111th Congress, I use the collaborative relationships that exist in the earliest stages of the policy process to measure the social influence of legislators. I demonstrate that districts represented by members of Congress who are better connected to their colleagues receive a greater share of federal grant money. I argue that this is because collaborative legislators are well‐positioned to be influential allies to strategic bureaucrats who want to maintain a broad base of support for their programs in Congress. Thus, devoting resources to building relationships with their colleagues is one way members of Congress can more effectively support the communities they represent.     

Women in the firing line: the home guard and the defence of gender boundaries in Britain in the second world war

This article focuses on the formation and application of the principles of Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936). Despite her lifelong and innovative commitment to social and housing reform, she has received only perfunctory recognition in women's history. The aims here are twofold. First, this oversight will be redressed by foregrounding the subtle, shrewd and imaginative means of persuasion Barnett used in the pursuit of her ideals. Second, her principles and practices will be included in a wider debate concerning the means by which middle-class women subverted dominant discourses without apparently transgressing boundaries of decency. Throughout, the intention is to problematise the widely held assumptions of her intransigence and insensitivity, which appear to have confined her to the footnotes of history.