The Ties That Bind: Multiculturalism and Secularism Reconsidered

The article examines contemporary controversies over the rights of Muslim women to wear various forms of the veil, in both France and the United Kingdom and argues that despite their apparent differences as political ideologies, both multiculturalism and secularism are deployed as techniques to govern difference. It traces a common philosophical lineage of these two ideologies, and their shared genealogical relationship to the subject of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought. Drawing on Marx and Hegel, it argues that at the core of secularism and multiculturalism there lies the germ of a subject and law formed through a concept of culture that was to a great degree indivisible from religion. While secularism ostensibly decouples culture from religion to produce a common political culture, and multiculturalism purports to accommodate a diverse range of cultural and religious practices, both fail to accommodate difference that stretches the bounds of a citizen-subject defined according to Anglo-European norms of culture, which implicitly includes Christianity.     

Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen: Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility Among India’s Professional Elite

Feminist Legal Studies -     

Theft in Broad Daylight: Racism and Neoliberal Legality

Law and Critique - In this article the author examines Fitzpatrick’s foundational critique of liberal legality and racism, a theme which remained central to his decades-long excavation of...     

Democracy,dictators and the regulation of arms exports: The UK and Iraq

Chris Cowley, Guns, Lies and Spies: How We Armed Iraq (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1992). Pp.273. £7.99.

Paul Henderson, The Unlikely Spy (London, Bloomsbury, 1993). Pp.294. £16.99.

David Leigh, Betrayed: The Real Story of the Matrix Churchill Trial (London, Bloomsbury, 1993). Pp.271. £5.99.

John Sweeney, Trading With the Enemy: Britain's Arming of Iraq (London, Pan Books, 1993). Pp.197. £5.99.     

'And You Can't Find Me Nowhere': Relocating Identity and Structure within Equality Jurisprudence

This paper explores key tensions in conceptualizing equality. It begins by arguing for the equality of lives lived and then goes on to link this to equality based on power. Yet, although equality of power seems to offer a more radical model than approaches to equality based on resources, satisfaction, and recognition, it nevertheless is not entirely suitable, since it too centres equality's subject. After addressing some of the analytical problems a subject-centred framework raises, including how to deal with reactionary identities and practices, the paper considers instead a structural approach to equality. This focuses on targeting social organizing principles, while recognizing the complex relationship between inequalities of gender, race, sexuality, and class and inequalities associated with unpopular viewpoints or beliefs. Finally, using lesbian and gay sexuality as an example, the paper considers the ways in which normative-epistemological organizing principles — proper place and the public/private — naturalize, legitimize but also hold the possibility of undercutting asymmetries of power.     

Beyond patriotic discourse in financing the SDGs: investment-linked diaspora revenue bonds model for sub-Saharan Africa

Mobilising and sustaining investment flows are two interrelated challenges of development financing. Given the untapped potential of remittances and knowledge flows of sub-Saharan Africa diasporas, an investment-linked diaspora revenue bonds model is proposed to target three issues: generating diaspora investments, which will not be used to service sovereign debts; linking such investments to projects, programmes, and sectors with high economic returns; and developing hybridised institutional frameworks of local and diaspora actors to manage this investment. This model, a hybrid of sovereign and corporate bonds, draws lessons from the Sukuk market and other diaspora bonds to offer an alternative solution to the multi-dimensional nature of development financing challenges confronting SSA countries.