Postnational Relations to the Past: A “European Ethics of Memory”?

In nation-building processes, the construction of a common past and references to a shared founding moment have played a well-documented role in fostering notions of a collective political actor. While notions of unreflective national collective memories no longer hold in an age of a postheroic “politics of regret”, the preferred subject of collective memories nevertheless often remains the nation, both in academic literature and in public debates. In this paper, my aim is to establish the role of collective memory in self-proclaimed “postnational” approaches—specifically in the context of European integration—and to assess in how far these approaches can claim to go beyond notions of memory handed down to us from earlier accounts of nation-building processes. I start by laying out two different approaches to a postnational collective memory as they emerge from the literature. The first approach aims at overcoming national subjectivities by focusing on a specific content: a shared, albeit negative, legacy for all Europeans. The Holocaust plays a particularly prominent role in this discourse. The second approach sees and seeks commonalities not so much on the level of memory content but rather on the level of specific memory practices (a “European ethics of memory”). While it is not aimed at dismantling the nation as a political subject per se, it also creates a European self-understanding that makes the symbolic borders of Europe look more porous: potentially everyone can employ these memory practices. However, as I will show, this approach knows its own attempts to define a postnational “essence”, most notably by tying the ethics of memory to a specifically European cultural repertoire.     

Recalling Extra Data: A Replication Study of Finding Missing Markets

We re-examine some of the strongest evidence supporting agricultural commercialisation, a highly touted yet under-researched development intervention. Our replication study re-examines Ashraf, Giné, and Karlan’s ‘Finding Missing Markets’ paper. Using the previous paper’s raw data, our research generally reproduces the original findings. We explore the evaluation’s theory of change, focusing on the result that first time export crop adopters benefit more from agricultural commercialisation than previous adopters. We also examine recall bias questions and provide sample size guidance for future researchers. Similar to the original paper, we find that the intervention mostly benefits households just entering the agricultural production value-chain.     

Old Love for New Snoops: How Exemption 3 of the Freedom of Information Act Enables an Irrebuttable Presumption of Surveillance Secrecy

Exemption 3 of the Freedom of Information Act states that a federal agency can withhold a document that has already been deemed non-disclosable by a different statute. That exemption is often used by agencies that are involved in traditional national security practices and the controversial modern techniques of pervasive electronic surveillance, as justification for keeping information on those practices secret. This article argues that Exemption 3 has inadvertently made the security and surveillance establishment more secretive, creating a nearly irrebuttable presumption that documents must not be disclosed to citizens or journalists. Exemption 3 jurisprudence has allowed precedents on the secrecy of old-school surveillance techniques to be applied to the far more pervasive techniques exercised by security agencies in the modern era.     

How much does it cost to be a scientist?

We examine the academe–industry wage gap. Once self-selection and different personal characteristics of academic and industrial scientists have been taken into account the wage gap narrows from 28 to 13 %. The counterfactual wage faced by an academic scientist increases with time spent on development and decreases with time spent on research. This finding challenges the idea of a solely negative relationship between science and wages. We further find that preferences for science augment the relationship between research orientation and wages. Overall, the results have implications for policy makers that aim to increase development oriented research activities at universities, individual scientists thinking about whether to pursue a career in industry or academe, and managers trying to hire academic scientists.