Millions of Small Battles: The Peronist Resistance in Argentina

This article studies the working‐class clandestine political organisation known as the Peronist resistance. Created after Argentine President Juan Perón was overthrown in 1955, the resistance movement was much more than a reaction to the limitations imposed on the organisation of unions. It signalled the birth of a new paradigm of political and cultural resistance firmly anchored in the household and the neighbourhood. Looking into the cultural dimensions of violence, the study shows how violence functioned as a creative force, producing transformations in political agency and cultural practices that reached into the Peronist household and shaped mourning rituals and the politics of martyrdom.     

L'évolution de la justice traditionnelle dans l'Afrique francophone

L'histoire du football Rwanda commence avec la colonisation du pays. En une cinquantaine d'années, ce jeu sport d'origine anglaise, en intégrant une société agro-pastorale et guerrière, est devenu une pratique culturelle locale. Comprendre ce phénomène nécessite d'articuler l'ancrage colonial d'une activité cosmopolite aux [ré]inventions culturelles locales suscitées par son implantation. Ce texte vise à montrer comment un jeu de balle, en traversant une société en cours d'occidentalisation, a marqué l'édification d'une modernité guerrière reçue et façonnée par les joueurs de l'époque. En traversant les transpositions ludiques d'enjeux sociaux et politiques plus larges, on observe que cette pratique, tout en participant du procès de "civilisation" que s'administra l'institution coloniale, constitua l'un des fers de lance de la lutte pour l'émancipation.     

WHAT IS GOVERNANCE IN THE ‘PUBLIC INTEREST’? THE CASE OF THE 1995 PROPERTY FORUM IN POST‐CONFLICT NICARAGUA

‘Public interest' (synonymous here with ‘common good’ and ‘public good’) is a central concept in public administration. In an important, basic sense, we evaluate the effectiveness of governments in terms of whether their policies are detrimental to, or benefit, public interest. However there are problems operationalizing public interest: it seems a concept that is simultaneously indispensable yet vague. While difficulties operationalizing public interest are widely understood, a further problem is insufficiently acknowledged. This is that many features underpinning public interest (a tradition of citizenship, stable government, a rule of law, basic infrastructures) are taken for granted in established democracies. However, in other contexts we cannot assume these. Examining what public interest means in developing countries can be useful to identify these taken for granted assumptions, and to re‐examine this ubiquitous and enduring concept. We do this through a case study of land rights reform in post conflict Nicaragua.     

Factors Associated with Co-occurrence of Spousal and Parental Violence: Quebec Population Study

Although the occurrence of both spousal and parental violence within the same family has been documented, there are scarcely any data on this phenomenon for Quebec and Canada. In analyzing the data from the 2004 Quebec survey on family violence in the lives of children, conducted with a population sample of 3,148 mothers, this study pursued two goals: to determine what differences exist between three groups in which family violence occurs (spousal violence, parental violence and co-occurrence of the two) and to better document the factors related to the different types of family violence by developing an explanatory model. Ecological analyses revealed major differences between these three groups in every aspect examined. Our findings support the hypothesis that families in which spousal and parental violence co-occur are not qualitatively different from those families in which only spousal or only parental violence occurs, but that they differ in the severity of the cases reported.     

POLICY DESIGN FOR LEGITIMACY: EXPERT KNOWLEDGE,CITIZENS, TIME AND INCLUSION IN THE UNITED KINGDOM’S BIOTECHNOLOGY SECTOR

More than ever, policy designers need to take legitimacy deficits seriously. To do so, they increasingly involve citizens in policy design processes and draw from a wider range of expertise. Where should they stop in terms of inclusiveness to citizens and expertise and for how long should they allow citizens and experts to be persuasive? These are the questions addressed in this article. Policy design legitimacy, the article argues, can be related to variations in designers and politicians’ inclination to resort to output‐oriented (expertise‐based) versus input‐oriented (citizen‐centred) design processes. Input‐oriented processes have a higher potential in terms of legitimacy deficit reduction than output‐oriented processes, but they take longer, notably because they require the involvement of large numbers of people. In contrast, output‐oriented processes have a slightly lower legitimacy potential, but can produce it faster. These propositions are illustrated by two policy design narratives drawn from the United Kingdom’s biotechnology sector.     

PERSUASION AS GOVERNANCE: A STATE‐CENTRIC RELATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

Debates about governance and the relationship between governance and government have focused upon markets, hierarchies and networks as principal modes of governance. In this paper we argue that persuasion constitutes a further and distinctive mode of governance, albeit one which interpenetrates other modes of governance. In order to assess the nature, limitations and scope of persuasion and the complex relationships between markets, hierarchies, networks on the one hand and persuasion on the other, we interpret persuasion through the prism of two theoretical perspectives on governance. We argue that the society‐centred perspective usefully draws our attention to the role played by non‐state actors in the exercise of governance through persuasion but that a state‐centric relational account can help us to better understand important facets of persuasion as a mode of governance.