Between the Dock and a Hard Place: Hazards and Opportunities of Legal Pluralism for Indigenous Women in Ecuador

This article examines the challenges and opportunities of indigenous justice for women in Ecuador. The legal recognition of indigenous justice is a major component of democratization in the region. Yet it also raises the risk of institutionalizing detrimental gender biases within indigenous forms of law. Taking the Remache case as a point of departure, this article identifies some of the fault lines in legal pluralism and women's conflicted relationship with it. Rather than rejecting customary law, however, women advocate for their rights within it—lobbying for gender parity within indigenous justice in the 2008 Constitutional Assembly. As women's support for indigenous justice relocates legal authority, it also challenges conventional practices of state sovereignty. To understand the attractiveness of legal pluralism for women and its impact on the state, this study explores the confines of feminist alliances, the accessibility of indigenous justice, and its implications for state sovereignty.     

International financial governance in hard times: tracing the transformations

This article reviews the tenets of the intellectual consensus on how to organize the international financial system that came to crystallize at the end of the 1990s and the contestation of such a consensus in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007–09. Illustrating the path of ideational transformation from the early 1990s until the present time, the article builds on recent constructivist works in international political economy that take economic ideas held by agents as the principal unit of analysis. In doing so, it brings to the surface both the substantive changes that had taken place in the principles underlying the governance of the international financial system and the dynamics of ideational change. Specifically, the article suggests a shift away from a governance project based on the dispersion of supervisory authority and finds that new policy ideas of regulation and political centralization have all been conceived with negative reference to the past.     

Central banks’ communication as reputation management: How the Fed talks under uncertainty

This article advances a reputation‐based account to explain the relative salience that different issues assume in central banks’ communication. Based on an innovative dataset consisting of a corpus of speeches by the members of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System of the United States (also known as the Fed) delivered from 2006 to 2016, the analysis shows that the most salient issues in the Fed's communication are shaped by reputational concerns about policy reversals. Specifically, when these concerns are higher, the Fed is more likely to focus on issues related to areas where its reputation is weak or not yet established—that is, issues related to credit easing and systemic financial regulation. In contrast, issues related to activities where the Fed's reputation is established are likely to become less salient—that is, issues related to economic activity and inflation. A similar pattern of issue attention is observed when the Fed addresses political audiences compared to other audiences.     

Understanding varieties of populism in times of crises

Abstract

This introduction presents the conceptual and analytical framework which constitutes the background for the special issue entitled ‘Varieties of Populism in Europe in Times of Crises’. More specifically, this contribution investigates how different populist parties in the European Union have been affected by the recent economic crisis and the more long-lasting political and cultural crises. Analytically, the article disentangles the role of the Great Recession vis-à-vis other factors (such as political and party system factors, but also structural social changes or cultural opportunities) in the growing strength of populist parties in various European countries. It argues that although the economic crisis has without any doubt provided a specific ‘window of opportunity’ for the emergence of new political actors, which have capitalised on citizens’ discontent, long-lasting political factors – such as the increasing distrust toward political institutions and parties – and the more recent cultural crisis connected with migration issues have offered further fertile ground for the consolidation of populist parties in several European countries. Furthermore, as confirmed by the articles presented in the special issue, the various crises have offered differential opportunities for different types of populism – both inclusionary and exclusionary.     

Multivariate Classification of Original and Fake Perfumes by Ion Analysis and Ethanol Content

The increased marketing of fake perfumes has encouraged us to investigate how to identify such products by their chemical characteristics and multivariate analysis. The aim of this study was to present an alternative approach to distinguish original from fake perfumes by means of the investigation of sodium, potassium, chloride ions, and ethanol contents by chemometric tools. For this, 50 perfumes were used (25 original and 25 counterfeit) for the analysis of ions (ion chromatography) and ethanol (gas chromatography). The results demonstrated that the fake perfume had low levels of ethanol and high levels of chloride compared to the original product. The data were treated by chemometric tools such as principal component analysis and linear discriminant analysis. This study proved that the analysis of ethanol is an effective method of distinguishing original from the fake products, and it may potentially be used to assist legal authorities in such cases.     

Mussolini's Secret War in the Mediterranean and the Middle East: Italian Intelligence and the British Response

Little is known of the history, structure and operations of the Italian intelligence services in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The challenge brought by Fascist Italy to the security of the British and French imperial systems is at the heart of this article, which sets out to assess not only the imperial dimension of Fascist intelligence but also the response provided by Britain's and France's colonial authorities to Mussolini's ambitions in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. An examination of British and French intelligence archival material sheds new light upon perceptions of power and threat afforded by British and French policy-makers keen to maintain political control over their colonial and client states. The paper suggests that despite comprising a multitude of competing agencies, the Fascist services could rely on the work of motivated individuals and on the support of Italian diplomatic representatives overseas. Their ability to establish relations – although short-lived – with Arab nationalist leaders and their intense activities in British colonies, protectorates and mandates generated concern within the British Foreign and Colonial Offices. Meanwhile, poor intelligence coordination and assessment coupled with misguided assumptions about the nature of Arab nationalism hindered Britain's response to the challenge mounted by Mussolini's regime.     

Palestine,Israel and Egypt: New scholarship on the Middle Eastern conflicts

A. Ilan, The Origins of the Arab‐Israeli Arms Race (London: Macmillan 1996). Pp.287. ISBN £36. 0–333–63240–0.

Efraim Inbar and Shmuel Sandier (eds.), Middle Eastern Security: Prospects for an Arms Control Regime, a BESA study in Mideast Security (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass 1995). Pp.199. £25/$19.50 (cloth); £16/$19.50 (paper). ISBN 0–7146–4644‐X and 4168–5.

Saul Zadka, Blood in Zion. How the Jewish Guerillas drove the British out of Palestine (London: Brassey's 1995). Pp.227, biblio., index. £19.95. ISBN 1–85753–136–1.

Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang. Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940–1949 (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass 1995). Pp.358. £37.50/$47.50 (cloth); £18/$25 (paper). ISBN 0–7146–4106–5.

W. Scott Lucas, Britain and Suez. The Lion's Last Roar (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1996). Pp.139, biblio., index. £35. ISBN 0–7190–4579–7.

Ram Ginat, The Soviet Union and Egypt 1945–1955 (London: Frank Cass 1993). Pp.269. £35/$45. ISBN 0–7146–3486–7.     

Regulating finance after the crisis: Unveiling the different dynamics of the regulatory process

It is now widely recognized that regulatory failures contributed to the onset of the global financial crisis. Redressing such failures has, thus, been a key policy priority in the post‐crisis reform agenda at both the domestic and international levels. This special issue investigates the process of post‐crisis financial regulatory reform in a number of crucial issue areas, including the rules and arrangements that govern financial supervision, offshore financial centers and shadow banking, the financial industry's involvement in global regulatory processes, and macroeconomic modeling. In so doing, the main purpose of this special issue is to shed light on an often understudied aspect in regulation literature: the variation in the dynamics of regulatory change. Contributors examine the different dynamics of regulatory change observed post‐crisis and explain variations by accounting for the interaction between institutional factors, on the one hand, and the activity of change agents and veto players involved in the regulatory reform process, on the other.