Post‐national citizenship,social exclusion and migrants rights: Mexican seasonal workers in Canada

In the past few decades, migrants residing in many European and North American countries have benefited from nation‐states' extension of legal rights to non‐citizens. This development has prompted many scholars to reflect on the shift from a state‐based to a more individual‐based universal conception of rights and to suggest that national citizenship has been replaced by post‐national citizenship. However, in practice migrants are often deprived of some rights. The article suggests that the ability to claim rights denied to some groups of people depends on their knowledge of the legal framework, communications skills, and support from others. Some groups of migrants are deprived of the knowledge, skills, and support required to negotiate their rights effectively because of their social exclusion from local communities of citizens. The article draws attention to the contradiction in two citizenship principles—one linked to legal rights prescribed by international conventions and inscribed through international agreements and national laws and policies, and the other to membership in a community. Commitment to the second set of principles may negate any achievements made with respect to the first. The article uses Mexican migrants working in Canada as an illustration, arguing that even though certain legal rights have been granted to them, until recently they had been unable to claim them because they were denied social membership in local and national communities. Recent initiatives among local residents and union and human rights activists to include Mexican workers in their communities of citizens in Leamington, Ontario, Canada, are likely to enhance the Mexican workers' ability to claim their rights.     

As unconscious and gay as a trout in a stream?: turning the trope of the Australian Girl

The instability of colonial representational economies, identities and tropes is the subject of analysis in this paper. I take as my starting point the anxieties that were generated during the late 19th century in relation to what I nominate the fictitiousness of settler subjects in colonial Australia. In order to examine these historical concerns and their explicitly gendered representations, I consider in detail one text, Rosa Campbell Praed's Fugitive Anne: A Romance of the Unexplored Bush (1902). This text was published in 1902 and was one of a number of romance novels this author produced for readerships in both colonial Australia and England. This adventure romance features the trope of the Australian Girl and also engages in varying degrees with discourses of colonial ethnography that, to my knowledge, have not been examined in relation to the ideological production and effects of this figure.     

Reviews

Thomas Remington (ed.), Parliaments in Transition. The New Legislative Politics in the Former USSR and Eastern Europe. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994, vii + 246pp.

Carlos Taibo, La disolución de la URSS. Barcelona: Ronsel, 1994, xii + 376 pp., 1900 pesetas.

Miroslav Shkandrij, Modernists, Marxists and the Nation. The Ukrainian Literary Discussion of the 1920s. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, University of Alberta, 1992, xii + 265 pp.

Don C. Rawson, Russian Rightists and the Revolution of 1905. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, xvi + 286 pp., £40.00 h/b, £19.95 p/b.

Mary Schaeffer Conroy, In Health and in Sickness: Pharmacy, Pharmacists and the Pharmaceutical Industry in Late Imperial, Early Soviet Russia. New York: East European Monographs, Boulder, distributed by Columbia University Press, 1994, viii + 703 pp., h/b, No price.

William Millinship, Frontline: Women of the New Russia. London: Methuen, 1993, xxi + 297 pp., £9.99 p/b.

Sebastian Siebel‐Achenbach, Lower Silesia from Nazi Germany to Communist Poland, 1942–1949. London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1994, vii + 381 pp., £47.50.

John Erickson & David Dilks (eds), Barbarossa. The Axis and the Allies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994, xii + 287 pp., £25.00

Yuri Pavlov, Soviet‐Cuban Alliance; 1959–1991. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1994, iv + 272 pp., $18.95.

Joshua Fogel, The Cultural Dimension of Sino‐Japanese Relations: Essays on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995, 216 pp., £40.00 h/b, £16.00 p/b     

Reviews

John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, xi + 360 pp., £24.95, $29.95.

W. Lutz, S. Scherbov & A. Volkov (eds), Demographic Trends and Patterns in the Soviet Union Before 1991. London: Routledge, 1994, xl + 496 pp., £85.00.

Deborah Adelman, The ‘Children of Perestroika’ Come Of Age. Young People Of Moscow Talk About Life in the New Russia. Armonk, NY & London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994, xxii +193 pp.

Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, viii + 319 pp.     

Reviews

Janos Kornai, Highways and Byways. Studies on Reform and Post‐Communist Transition. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1995, xv + 241 pp., £26.95

Ha‐Joon Chang & Peter Nolan (eds), The Transformation of the Communist Economies: Against the Mainstream. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1995, xii, + 438 pp., £47.50.

Paul Cook & Frederick Nixson (eds), The Move to the Market?: Trade and Industry Policy Reform in Transitional Economies. London: Macmillan, 1995, xvi + 280 pp., £45.00.

Tom Gallagher, Romania after Ceausescu. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995, viii + 267 pp., £16.95.

Carol Barner‐Barry & Cynthia A. Hody, The Politics of Change. The Transformation of the Former Soviet Union. New York: St Martin's Press, 1995, xi + 371 pp., £14.99.

Daniel Orlovsky (ed.), Beyond Soviet Studies. Washington: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1995, xi + 349 pp., £20.50.

Aleksandr Gurov, Krasnaya Mafiya, Moscow: Samotsvet, 1995, 328 pp., no price.

Beatrice F. Manz (ed.), Central Asia in Historical Perspective. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 1994, x + 245 pp., £40.95.

H. B. Paksoy (ed.), Central Asia Reader—The Rediscovery of History. Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994, ix + 206 pp., $60.00 h/b $21.95 p/b.

Peter Ferdinand (ed.), The New States of Central Asia and Their Neighbours. New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, for The Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1994, 120 pp., $14.95.

Michael Mandelbaum (ed.), Central Asia and the World—Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan. New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1994, 251 pp., $16.95

Stephen Kotkin & David Wolff (eds), Rediscovering Russia in Asia: Siberia and the Russian Far East. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995, xxiii + 356 pp., $65.00 h/b, $24.95 p/b.

Suzanne Goldenberg, Pride of Small Nations: The Caucasus and Post‐Soviet Disorder. London: Zed Books, 1994., xvi + 233 pp., £14.95.

Levon Chorbajian, Patrick Donabedian & Claude Mutafian, The Caucasian Knot: The History and Geo‐politics of Nagorno‐Karabagh. London: Zed Books, 1994, xxi + 198 pp., £14.95.

Shireen T. Hunter, The Transcaucasus in Transition. Nation‐building and Conflict. Washington, DC: The Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1994, xiii + 223 pp., $19.95.

Edward Allworth (ed.), Muslim Communities Reemerge. Historical Perspective on Nationality, Politics and Opposition in the Former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, trans. Caroline Sawyer. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1994, xii + 365 pp., £57.00 h/b, £23.50 p/b.

S. Frederick Starr (ed.), The Legacy of History in Russia and the New States of Eurasia. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994, xiii + 313 pp., $22.95.

Vladimir Shlapentokh, Munir Sendich & Emil Payin (eds), The New Russian Diaspora: Russian Minorities in the Former Soviet Republics. London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994, xxv + 221 pp., £48.00 h/b, £19.00 p/b.

Michael Rywkin, Moscow's Lost Empire. New York & London: Armonk, M. E. Sharpe, 1994, xiii + 214 pp., £40.00 h/b, £16.00 p/b.

Tobias R. Philibin III, The Lure of Neptune. German‐Soviet Naval Collaboration and Ambitions, 1919–1941. University of South Carolina, 1994, xxi + 192 pp., $34.95.

Yu. L. Dyakov & T. S. Bushueva, The Red Army and the Wehrmacht. How the Soviets Militarised Germany, 1922–1933, and Paved the Way for Fascism. New York: Prometheus Books 1995, 348 pp., £21.00.

Iosif Stalin v ob"yatiyakh sem'i: iz lichnogo arkhiva (Sbornik dokumentov), compiled by Yu. G. Murin, edited by V. N. Denisov. Moscow: Rodina, 1993, 222 pp., no price.

Donald Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia. A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, xvi + 360 pp., £35.00.

Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, xiii + 354 pp., £40.00.

Arto Luukkanen, The Party of Unbelief: The Religious Policy of the Bolshevik Party 1917–1929. Helsinki; Studia Historica 48, 1994, 274 pp., no price.

John Fennell, A History of the Russian Church to 1448. London: Longman, 266 pp., £12.99.     

“Give me some space”: exploring youth to parent aggression and violence

A small scale qualitative project, undertaken by an interdisciplinary domestic violence research group involving academic researchers and research assistants, with colleagues from Independent Domestic Abuse Services (IDAS), investigated youth aggression and violence against parents. Following the literature review, data was generated through several research conversations with young people (n = 2), through semi-structured interviews with mothers (n = 3) and practitioners (n = 5), and through a practitioner focus group (n = 8). Thematic analysis and triangulation of the data from parents, practitioners and young people, elicited interconnected and complex overarching themes. Young people could be both victim and perpetrator. The witnessing or experiencing of domestic aggression and violence raised the concept of ‘bystander children’. The impact of young people experiencing familial violence was underestimated by parents. For practitioners, the effects of working with domestic violence was shown to be significant - both positively and negatively.     

Letters to the President: participation beyond the public sphere in Argentina, 1989–1999

President Carlos Menem received thousands of letters from citizens during his two consecutive administrations (1989–1999). Most often Peronist and working class, they wrote to him to seek financial or material aid, praise, criticize, advise, communicate political opinions and invite correspondence. They injected their letters with intimate details of everyday life, their understandings of democracy, and their sense of the successes and failures of the state at meeting those criteria and forging a democratic identity for the Republic. This article provides contextualized readings of a sample of those letters in an effort to elucidate why their writers looked beyond the public sphere to express themselves, and chose the letter to the president as method. It argues that discursive participation in the public sphere remained elite-dominated, and mass mobilization did not provide the individualized results or political bonds that the letter writers sought. Furthermore, as an activity that Juan Perón had actively encouraged, writing to the president appeared an object lesson in good Peronist citizenship. The “mythical basis of the legitimacy” of Perón and his version of Justicialism had been his “direct contact with the people” (Plotkin). The letters reveal how citizens in the 1990s sought to reconstitute this imagined proximity with a Peronist president in a newly democratic context.     

The “Servants” of Dehradun: A Changing Relationship between Municipal Councillors and Voters in India

The “typical” municipal councillor in India is usually portrayed in the literature as a political entrepreneur in a clientelistic relationship with voters, providing privileged access to the state in return for electoral support. This article arose out of a lack of familiarity with this portrait and the municipal councillors (known locally as Parshads) of Dehradun. Ethnographic research and the co-construction of in-depth profiles with women Parshads revealed key differences in the ways that they get things done, the types of work they do and the ways that voters make demands. The term naukrani, meaning servant, is proposed to capture these dimensions of their everyday work, and to draw attention to the way Parshads are positioned in relation to an increasingly assertive electorate. It is argued that this positioning of naukrani is revelatory of a particular democratic logic in Dehradun and emergent political subjectivities, particularly among the middle class. By examining naukrani as an imposed positioning, rather than a strategic political identity, the limitations of politicians’ self-authorship are suggested. A focus on women Parshads hints at the gendered nature of this positioning and the implicit masculine bias in conventional understandings of political actors’ role in urban governance.     

An ecological path model of use of violence among African American adolescents

This cross-sectional study used an ecological framework to understand the risk and protective factors associated with use of violence among African American adolescents ages 12–17 years (N = 2,328). Using data from the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the authors study identified different direct paths in predicting use of violence among African American adolescents. The authors then computed a multigroup analysis to determine whether significant gender differences exist in use of violence. Path analysis results suggest micro, meso, and macro factors significantly predicted violence use. The strongest predictor of use of violence among African American youth was parental conflicts. The multigroup analysis suggests that the pathways to use of violence significantly differ between African American boys and girls. Among African American boys, the strongest predictor of increased use of violence was parental conflicts; among African American girls, it was negative peer influence. Findings suggest that all 3 ecological domains and gender differences should be accounted for when developing prevention or intervention services that target use of violence among young African Americans.     

COVID-19 and the policy sciences: initial reactions and perspectives

Policy Sciences - The world is in the grip of a crisis that stands unprecedented in living memory. The COVID-19 pandemic is urgent, global in scale, and massive in impacts. Following Harold D....