Studying small states in international security affairs: a quantitative analysis

Todays’ international security architecture composed of international security treaties and international security norms has been established and formalized by negotiations. Owing to the great importance of international security negotiations for international security practices, this paper sheds light on negotiation activities. A study of 100 different international security negotiations shows that states vary considerably with respect to their negotiation activity. Some countries voice positions very often, while others remain completely silent. This is puzzling, as active negotiation participation is an expression of state sovereignty and a means to influence the shape of the international security architecture. The article distinguishes between capacity and incentives as driving forces of state activity in international security negotiations. The analysis reveals that, next to political and financial capacities, states that place high priority on military matters are more active, while smaller and poorer states are more likely to shelter under the security umbrella of larger counterparts.     

Democracy Beyond Secrecy: Assessing the Promises and Pitfalls of Collective Voting

This paper assesses collective voting as a specific mode of democratic decision‐making and compares it to secret voting. Under collective voting, voters gather in one place and decide by the show of hands. We theorise two potential advantages and two disadvantages of collective voting so defined. We then draw on original survey data from one of the largest polities practising collective voting, the citizen assembly of the Swiss canton of Glarus. We find that both the promises and pitfalls of non‐secret voting are exaggerated. Non‐secret voting’s suspected pitfalls – social pressure and abstention – do not generally materialise in our sample, although for women they do appear to be relevant to some extent. However, the promises of collective voting – enabling cue‐taking and discursive bridging and bonding – are equally realised to a limited extent only.     

What do Australian Foundations Do – Who Knows and Who Cares?

This article explores governance and accountability demands on foundations in Australia and compares these with requirements in the US. The article begins by discussing the meaning of, and rise of concern with, governance and accountability, the nature and variety of foundations and their status as organisations in the public domain. The second and third sections compare the formal and informal requirements relating to governance and accountability of foundations in the US and Australia. It is suggested that US foundations are both more closely regulated and more concerned with issues of governance and accountability than Australian foundations. The fourth section identifies the drivers of demand for better governance and accountability of foundations in the US and their relevance in Australia. Finally, some possible explanations of the relative lack of concern with foundation governance in Australia are considered.     

politicizing biographies: the forming of transnational subjectivities as insiders outside

We take our own life stories as points of departure to look at some of the ways in which women were politicized in Argentina and West Germany (our respective countries of origin), focusing on similarities as well as differences in our politicization processes. We aim at putting present discussions about global political movements into a historical perspective. We want also to illuminate the centrality of political identities in the construction of specific (gendered) subjectivities. Our focus lies on theorizing the ways through which privileged (gendered) identities critically re-read their own position and transform their own understanding of themselves and the world through the field of the political. Methodologically, we want to contribute to ways of re-thinking Feminist methodologies by experimenting with a form of analysis in which we are alternately the subject and the object of our research process. The aim of this intervention is to transgress the binary oppositions between researcher/researched and challenge traditional understanding of social science where researchers provide analysis and informants have ‘experience’. One of our conclusions is that the 68 movement provided subject positions for living alternative normalities as an ‘insider-outside’, that is, for those who belonged to normalized groups in their respective societies, but for different reasons (of which we analyse some concerning our formation as ‘women’) could not identify with the dominant normalities offered to them. At the same time, the dominant male instrumentality of the movement estranged (some) women and allowed them (or forced them into) a kind of distanced engagement that, perhaps paradoxically, provided a basis for sustaining their political subjectivities through transformative experiences of defeat.     

Cognitive limitations and affirmative action: The effects of aggregate versus sequential data in the perception of discrimination

The present experiment examined whether or not relatively simple cognitive and information-processing limitations may prevent us from recognizing instances of organizational discrimination. It was hypothesized that the perception of discrimination would be more difficult when the relevant information had been presented in a case-by-case basis rather than in aggregate format. The obtained results provided strong support for the original hypothesis. Subjects who had been presented with company data in aggregate format provided significantly higher ratings of discrimination than those subjects for whom the information had been presented in sequential form. The implications of these findings to the policy of affirmative action are also discussed.     

Fragmented control: Governing contentious labor organizations in China

How does an authoritarian state govern contentious civil society and what are the effects on grassroots mobilization? This article theorizes the relationship between repression and mobilization by examining the case of informal labor organizations in South China that threaten social stability. Findings based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork inside these organizations suggest that the central state's mandate to maintain social stability is refracted through the interests and capabilities of local agencies. This results in “fragmented control”: divergent, even conflicting, forms of state governance over civil society. Local authorities work at cross‐purposes by simultaneously repressing, co‐opting, and neglecting underground organizing. Fragmented control generates political uncertainty on the part of activists and induces them to engage in “censored entrepreneurialism”—a set of tactical adaptations characterized by a mixture of self‐censorship and entrepreneurial experimentation.