From liberation movement to political party: ANC foreign policy in transition

With the dramatic changes in the international and domestic environment, the African National Congress (ANC) has been faced with reconciling the policies of liberation with those of a political party. In response, the ANC has taken up a series of positions representing a new foreign policy outlook, one which takes cognizance of both the changing international environment and the ANC's new role as an emergent political party on the verge of taking power. This paper will investigate this transformation of ANC foreign policy by first examining the broad outlines of policy during the period of the liberation struggle; secondly, looking at the nature and effect of the crisis induced by both the end of the Cold War and the implementation of the South African government's radical reform programme; and finally, examining the preliminary contours of a new foreign policy as the organization emerges out of the transitional period and into the role of governing power.     

Solving south Africa's Chinese puzzle: Democratic foreign policy making and the ‘two chinas’ question

When President Nelson Mandela abruptly announced on 27 November 1996 that South Africa would no longer recognise the Republic of China but would open official diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China in its stead, he caught the world by surprise. In what was a fittingly bizarre end to a situation that continued to defy all expectations, the post‐apartheid government made its first significant foreign policy decision. The remarkable level of public debate, the inter‐departmental conflicts, the role of interest groups and party politics which accompanied the decision to switch recognition gave the South African government and the public as a whole its first exposure to the vagaries of conducting foreign policy in a democracy.

This article will examine the decision to recognise the People's Republic of China by investigating the historical relationship between the South African state, non‐state actors and their Chinese counterparts, the debate itself and the role of interest groups ‐ both within and outside the formal policy making process ‐ in seeking to influence the decision and analysing the dynamics of the recognition decision. In so doing, it hopes to shed some light on the policy decision making process in the new democratic South Africa.     

Public Policy in the Party City: The Spectacle of Culture,Gender, and Locality

The article explores the bidding process for the European Capital of Culture (ECOC) award, an aspect of local regeneration policy reliant upon a specific conception of culture. The process is examined in terms of changes in urban layout, manifestations of cultural and community identity, media representations, and the spectacle of culture, gender, and locality. The process is viewed as an urban managerialist project, driven by private and public sector elites in pursuit of economic rather than cultural goals. A narrow and particular view of culture was employed in the bidding process to achieve essentially managerial goals, and cut adrift from significant issues of gender, identity, and class. “Culture,” as conceived within the ECOC process, is viewed as a policy product of local government, regeneration partnerships, government agencies, and business interests, in contrast to culture as a way of life or lived urban experience. As an elite process, the voices of local culture were largely excluded.     

Revelation and Rhetoric: A Critical Model of Forensic Discourse

Over the past thirty years or so, theoretical work in such fields as legal semiotics and law and literature has argued that the legal process is profoundly rhetorical. At the same time, a number of communication-based disciplines such as semiotics, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology have provided, particularly in interdisciplinary combination with law, a wealth of empirical evidence on, and insight into, the micro-contexts of language and communication in the legal process. However, while these invaluable nitty-gritty analyses provide empirical support for a rhetorical thesis, work in these areas has tended to ignore rhetoric as an explanatory principle. This article introduces an overarching rhetorical framework for the discursive construction and management of cases in contemporary Anglo-American legal processes. Taking ‘forensic’ as relating to the conduct of cases and ‘discourse’ as semiosis-in-practice, I argue that the practices within which forensic discourse is embedded are not, as the received legal view would have it, aimed at revealing an impartial truth but are deeply rhetorical practices aimed at persuading decision-makers to provide a remedy for a claimed wrong. By looking across forensic texts and contexts, I identify common elements of forensic discourse that can be found both in classical forensic orations and throughout the modern legal process and consider how these intersect with critical forces of agency and structure and the particularities of semiosis in situated context. An awareness of commonalities across forensic discourse can help sharpen our focus on the critical causes and consequences of individual and structural difference and point to consequential suggestions for reform.     

Children's testimony: Research findings and policy implications

Abstract

Traditionally the British legal system has taken a sceptical attitude toward the testimony of children, reflected in the competency requirement, the corroboration rule and the judicial caution. However, recent psychological research has suggested that children, properly interviewed, can provide invaluable testimony in securing convictions in cases of sexual or physical abuse. Research suggests that children's spontaneous accounts of events are generally accurate, and that suggestibility can be greatly reduced by appropriate questioning techniques. Partly as a result of such research, the legal hurdles surrounding children's evidence have been dismantled and procedural innovations, such as the use of the Videolink and videotaped interviews introduced. Empirical research demonstrates the success of the Videolink and a similar evaluation is planned for videotaped interviews. The latter has highlighted the need for a new research agenda which would include the impact of biased or repeated questioning, and requests to children from abusers to lie or keep secrets.     

Victim age,attractiveness and,abuse history as factors in the perception of a hypothetical child sexual abuse case

Abstract

This study examines the effect of victim age, victim attractiveness, the victim's abuse history and respondent gender have on attributions of blame and credibility towards a female victim in a hypothetical child sexual abuse case. A total of 397 respondents from a community sample read a hypothetical child sexual abuse (CSA) scenario in which victim age, victim attractiveness and the victim's abuse history were manipulated. Respondents then completed a 16-item blame attribution questionnaire. Several predictions were made. First, a 10-year-old victim would be deemed less blameworthy and more credible than a 15-year-old victim. Secondly, an attractive victim would be viewed more positively, and attributed less blame, than an unattractive victim. Thirdly, a victim with previous history of being sexual abused—either by the same or different perpetrators—would be deemed more culpable for their own CSA than a first time victims. Finally, female respondents were expected to take a more pro-victim and anti-perpetrator stance than males. Whilst comparatively few differences were found across victim attractiveness and abuse history. Overall findings were broadly in line with predictions. It was concluded that victim age and respondent gender play particularly important roles in the attribution of blame towards victims and perpetrators of child sexual abuse.     

Working on the Ground. A Collective Biography of Feminine Subjectivities: Mapping the Traces of Power and Knowledge

In this paper we map the traces of power and knowledge as we read them at play in our own memories and as we make sense of them from a Foucauldian perspective. Our question here is twofold: how might we use Foucault to read our embodied memories of power and knowledge; and how might we use the analysis of those stories to enable us better to see the implications of Foucault's writing for the analysis of subjects' enmeshment in power/knowledge relations? We use as the ground of our analysis our own embodied memories of achieving ourselves as appropriate(d) subjects (as girls and women, in relation to men--fathers, lovers, and husbands). Our trajectory in this paper is double. First, it has been towards uncovering the ways in which girls and women might be said to be powerful, even when they are complicit in their own subjection. Second, it has been to show that when Foucault defines all acts of power to involve the possibility of resistance and freedom, and he takes the opposite, a state of domination, to arise from 'economic, political, or military means', he has not fully acknowledged the extent to which the repeated, minute accretions of everyday practices can generate sedimentations of lines of force that may also be understood as a state of domination.     

Soft power,ideology and symbolic manipulation in Summer Olympic Games opening ceremonies: a semiotic analysis

This paper is a semiotic analysis of Summer Olympic Games Opening ceremonies as performative texts. Owing to massive media attention, these events have become eagerly awaited global spectacles. However, with such a wide audience, the challenge is to convey both an Olympic welcome and something truly unique about the host city and nation. This creates a communication challenge and some interesting questions in terms of symbolism. Research into the content of Olympic Games ceremonies reveals an exercise both in forging internal cohesion and in projecting soft power. Soft power is an increasingly valuable currency in a multipolar world and opening ceremonies are a prime soft power opportunity. The paper seeks to uncover the ways successive Olympics Games organising committees have sought to balance the competing communicational objectives of opening ceremonies through double coding. The author considers every ceremony from Moscow 1980 to London 2012 in this comparative semiotic analysis.     

Nano‐Industry Operationalizations of “Responsibility”: Charting Diversity in the Enactment of Responsibility

The Collingridge dilemma—the problem of reacting to emerging technology either “too early” or “too late”—is one that is readily recognized by developers and promoters of nanotechnologies. One response can be found in the rise of a discourse of “responsible development” in the science and innovation policy landscape. While a number of commentators have discussed the potential of such initiatives, it remains unclear how responsible development is actually being configured “on the ground,” in private sector nanotechnology. This paper addresses this question by analyzing empirical engagements in Europe and the United States in order to map industry operationalizations of “responsibility” in these contexts. We show that a number of different articulations of “responsibility” are present, including as a response to public lack of trust and perceived public pressure, and as the management of risk. We close by relating these findings to the theoretical literature on responsibility, other contemporary accounts of the ways in which responsible development can be operationalized, and the possibilities that these articulations of responsibility may open up.