Citizenship,reproduction and the state: international marriage and human rights

The relationship between citizenship, marriage and family has often been overlooked in the social and political theory of citizenship. Intimate domestic life is associated with the private sphere, partly because reproduction itself is thought to depend on the private choices of individuals. While feminist theory has challenged this division between private and public – ‘the personal is political’ – the absence of any systematic thinking about familial relations, reproduction and citizenship is puzzling. Citizenship is a juridical status that confers political rights such as the right to carry a passport or to vote in elections. However, from a sociological point of view, we need to understand the social foundations and consequences of citizenship – however narrowly defined in legal and political terms. This article starts by noting the obvious point that the majority of us inherit citizenship at birth and in a sense we do not choose to be ‘Vietnamese’ or ‘Malaysian’ or ‘Japanese’ citizens. Although naturalisation is an important aspect of international migration and settlement, the majority of us are, as it were, born into citizenship. Therefore, the family is an important but often implicit facet of political identity and membership. In sociological language, citizenship looks like an ascribed rather than achieved status, and as a result becomes confused and infused with ethnicity. This inheritance of citizenship is odd given the fact that, at least in the West, there is a presumption, following the pronouncements of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, to think of citizenship in universal terms that are ethnically ‘blind’, but it is in fact closely connected with familial or private status. These complex relations within the nation-state are further complicated by the contemporary growth of transnational marriages and this article considers the problems of marriage, reproduction and citizenship in the context of global patterns of migration.     

Reexamining the Relationship Between Fiscal Stress and Outsourcing

The determinants of outsourcing in local government are widely studied from a variety of frameworks. One concept consistently used to explain local government outsourcing is fiscal condition, with many noting that outsourcing is more likely when a local government’s fiscal condition declines into fiscal stress. Despite the ubiquity of this expectation in the outsourcing literature, several articles reviewed suggest that the findings for this relationship remain uncertain. As a result, the research presented in this article sought to examine and extend what is known about the relationship between fiscal stress and outsourcing in U.S. municipalities. The research includes previous measures of fiscal stress and adds new measures. In addition, it tries to overcome the limited theoretical testing of the relationship between fiscal stress and outsourcing by examining both direct and indirect effects of fiscal stress on outsourcing. It finds that municipalities in the United States that are experiencing fiscal stress are more likely to engage in outsourcing, particularly municipalities that are experiencing fiscal stress and have a positive evaluation of the external market to provide services.     

Minorities and Modernity: The Crisis of Liberal Secularism

The Enlightenment as the origin of modernity and as the foundation of moral universalism has been much invoked by social theory in recent years especially by writers influenced by Michel Foucault's essay on the subject. Postmodernism and cultural anthropology have made the question about Enlightenment universalism ever more pressing. At one level the issue is very simple. By its emphasis on universalism in knowledge and ethics, the Enlightenment made particularity a problem and it resulted in a stigmatization of those social groups that patently departed from its magisterial interpretation of rationality appear to be irrational, premodern and dangerous. Aamir Mufti claims uncontroversially that the Enlightenment idea of universalism set up a series of contrasts between the universalism of the bourgeois world of civility, civilization and citizenship on the one hand and local practices and customs on the other. The result was to construct a classification of social minorities who were deemed to be in need of education, moral reform, modernization and assimilation. Enlightenment in the Colony involves a comparison between “the Jewish Question” and the Partition of India. The particularity of Jews and Muslims is examined in the context of modern assumptions about universalism, especially the notion of universal citizenship.     

AMPFlSTR Identifiler STR allele frequencies in Tanzania, Africa

POPULATION:  Identifiler—Employees and students of Muhimibili University College of Health Sciences in Dar es Salaam representing 19 widely distributed administrative districts and 42 tribes within the country.     

Sources of Leader Support and Interstate Rivalry

Since segments of the selectorate differently experience costs and benefits from rivalry, the foreign policy choices of leaders reflect these domestic preferences. As a result, shifts in the composition of the domestic coalition of support backing the leader provide a fundamental determinant of rivalry termination. While previous research sought to explore the relationship between domestic political turnover and rivalry termination using regime transitions as a proxy for turnover of the state’s domestic ruling group, in practice this measure exhibits significant disconnection with the quantity of interest. Further, there are alternative pathways through which regime transitions may lead to rivalry termination. I test the relationship using new data from the CHISOLS project, finding that when rivals undergo a change in the source of support that maintains the leader in office, the probability of rivalry termination rises dramatically. I further find that regime transitions have an effect on the probability of rivalry termination that is independent of the effect of ruling coalition turnover. This study thus both asserts the relationship between domestic political turnover and rivalry termination and clarifies the mechanism by which the relationship operates.