Migrants into Members: Social Rights,Civic Requirements,and Citizenship in Western Europe

How do the states in Western Europe turn outsiders into insiders? This article examines that question by introducing a new qualitative framework that we term national membership conditionality structures (MCS). This framework includes not only status acquisition rules, such as those governing naturalisation and settlement, but also, crucially, civic integration requirements and social benefit eligibility standards. The article illustrates how linkages across these policy sectors shape different membership-making processes for third-country nationals by examining the MCS variation in Great Britain and Germany, two countries that both experienced significant migration inflows beginning in the first post-war decades. As a contrast to these two ‘mature’ MCS cases, a study of Spain is also included as a ‘nascent’ case, whose recent experience with large-scale immigration provides an opportunity to consider an MCS under active construction. The article concludes that while EU-level policies and institutions have extended their reach to cover ever more sectors, the components of national MCS remain largely outside supranational purview. As such, membership remains a core imperative of the contemporary nation-state.     

Genes and Antisocial Behavior: Perceived versus Real Threats to Jurisprudence

Separating wheat from chaff in regard to the hyperbole surrounding media coverage about genes for violence, born killers, et cetera provides a launch pad for two experienced behavioral geneticists who have conducted research on aggression and crime with twins, families, and adoptees to provide an essay on the facts and limitations of current knowledge; they conclude that any current threats to jurisprudence lie in perception rather than in empirical facts.     

The Economics of Science and Technology

This paper provides a non-technical, accessible introduction to various topics in the burgeoning literature on the economics of science and technology. This is an interdisciplinary literature, drawing on the work of scholars in the fields of economics, public policy, sociology and management. The aim of this paper is to foster a deeper appreciation of the economic importance of science and technology issues. We also hope to stimulate additional research on these topics.     

Organised diaspora networks and homeland peacebuilding: the Bosnian world diaspora network as a potential development actor

International donors and development INGOs are increasingly recognising the potential contributions that Diasporas can make to developing countries. However, traditional peacebuilding literature has largely ignored the potential of Diasporas to contribute to post conflict reconstruction in the homeland. This article, therefore, assesses this potential through an examination of the Bosnian World Diaspora Network, created after the recent dispersal of refugees due to the conflict in Bosnia. It concludes that the relationship between, on the one hand, diaspora activities and, on the other, armed conflict and war recovery is considerably less straightforward than has been supposed. However, it does suggest a number of ways in which donors/host lands could assist the coordination of development agencies and diaspora networks.     

Preaching politics: Islam and Christianity on the Kenya coast

Focusing on the Kenya coast, this article analyses the developing contrast between the place of Islam and Christianity in public politics. It argues that Islam’s association with criticism of the political order contrasts with Christianity, but that this is not the result of inherent difference between the religions. Both have previously provided a language, and space, for political commentary and activism in Kenya. The contrast is rather the contingent result of particular circumstances in Kenya. Christianity has become increasingly associated with affirming clientelism and the accumulation of wealth in a way which is avowedly non-political but in practice legitimates the current political order. Meanwhile, although individual Muslims are more likely to enjoy high political office than was previously the case, Muslims are also more likely to locate their experience as symptomatic of a wider pattern of exclusion in Kenya and link this sense of local injustice to global inequalities.     

World History in 60 Seconds: How Bank Imperial Re-Edited Russian Binary Logic

Contemporary Russian culture's biggest problem is not westernisation, popification or rampant social impoverishment, but the stubborn aversion to counting past three. There is some sort of sick fascination with binary oppositions. Ever since the destruction of pagan worship 1000 years ago, the Holy dialectical triad has damned Russian culture. All attempts at modernisation are stifled by grandiose plans based on binary models of cultural dynamism that, after an initial expulsion of energy, eventually stagnate and spoil more than they transform. Moreover, there is little opportunity for multiple modes of analysis since most studies privilege the same destructive dialectics that they seek to examine. Everything is locked into a violent oppositional mentality that suffocates change, and only leads to new and improved methods of oppression and social degradation. All of Russia's other problems stem from this mathematical myopia. Within the relatively new field of Kulturology (Russian Cultural Studies) and the relatively forgotten field of Russian Philosophy (not philosophy in Russia) there have been few attempts to explore moments of interconnection. Subsequently, Kulturology is presented as a natural progression of a dialectical continuum that is necessarily oppositional. There is a common assumption that scholars study texts by using specific critical strategies within disciplinary limits and not the other way round. That is, they do not explore or question their discipline through the study of tactical texts. The intention of this paper is not to contrast Kulturology to Russian Philosophy and Cultural Studies so as to come up with a more refined product, but to examine the relationship between their central epistemological concerns. Rather than applying them either singularly or coextensively in order to analyse a particular text, I will attempt to consider Kulturology and Russian Philosophy through the text of a contemporary Russian-made advertising campaign. Curiously, the commercial text and the critical disciplines share key discursive concerns that point to a shared contemporary cognitive logic. Their arithmetical articulation of the cognitive logic of the dynamics of Russian culture, structures of interpretation and the construction of cultural history are the excessive focus of this paper.