What Role for Human Rights in Business?

The Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) were endorsed by the United Nations Human Rights Council in June 2011, following the six‐year mandate of the Special Representative to the Secretary General (SRSG) on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises. The SRSG developed a framework comprised of three pillars: (1) States have a duty to protect against human rights abuses committed by third parties, including business enterprises; (2) business enterprises have a responsibility to respect human rights; and (3) victims of business‐related human rights abuses need access to effective remedies. In particular, guiding principle (GP) 11 provides that business enterprises should respect human rights, that is, they should avoid infringing on the human rights of others and address adverse human rights impacts with which they are involved. This article considers the implications of the Guiding Principles' framework for business; the continuing role of conventional accountability mechanisms in providing access to remedy for victims under the third pillar of the framework; and developments in ‘hard law', with a particular focus on the approach by the UK, since the introduction of the UNGPs, before turning, briefly, to the future for business and human rights.     

Indian spies inside Pakistan: South Asian human intelligence across borders

This article examines India’s historical efforts to spy inside Pakistan from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s. It draws from memoirs of notable Indian spies who were jailed for espionage in Pakistan and spy ‘fiction’ written by former Indian intelligence and military officers who allege their writing is based on actual cases. The article highlights commonalities among Indian spies using the words of Indian officers to better understand human intelligence efforts inside Pakistan. It finds that Indian spies in these books have initially been Hindus or from multi-religious families, from the Indian-Pakistan border and have been poorly treated by the Indian government and its intelligence services.     

Alternative South–South development collaboration? The role of China in the Coega Special Economic Zone in South Africa

Aid, in the form of financial aid and investment, has become increasingly prevalent in both bilateral and multilateral partnerships in the BRICS. In Africa, the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation provides the official framings for forms of development assistance to the continent, with financial forms of aid available through the New Development Bank and the China–Africa Development Bank (CADFund). This article explores how Chinese international development assistance has influenced South Africa's economic growth and development strategies and is reshaping South Africa as “gateway” to Africa and continental leader. Special economic zones (SEZs) have become a prioritised form of BRICS development collaboration particularly in terms of Chinese trade and investment expansionism into Africa through South Africa. Chinese international development assistance and foreign direct investment in South Africa in particular are very notable and have been strengthened during the Chinese official state visit prior to the Johannesburg BRICS Summit in 2018. The article critically analyses the development policy discourse on BRICS spearheading an alternative model of South–South international cooperation by examining the Coega SEZ in South Africa, hailed as the most SEZ in Africa. The article critically examines the development alternative potential of the Coega SEZ.     

京津冀协同发展背景下的政策协同评估研究——基于省级“十三五”专项规划文本的分析

从国家层面提出的京津冀协同发展战略,对于推动京津冀一体化,打造以创新为特征的世界级城市群具有重要指导意义。在此背景下,实现区域协同目标,需要率先发挥政策的先导作用。为了保障政策制定的绩效水平,对京津冀三地的政策协同状况进行评估具有重要意义。根据政策协同理论的相关内容,借鉴日趋成熟的政策分析模型,融合文本分析的量化研究方法,构建了基于纵向维度和横向维度的政策协同分析框架,同时运用政策协同量化标准对北京、天津、河北三地的省级"十三五"专项规划进行了指标评分和数据分析,得出了有关京津冀地区政策协同状况的研究发现。     

Bridging the Gap: The Relationship between INGO Activism and Human Rights Indicators

This article explores the tension between the production of “naming and shaming” reports as tools of activism by international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) and the usage of these reports as cross-national indicators of human rights violations. Because INGOs are strategic actors, their reports are not a reflection of the “true” levels of abuse. Although existing scholarship has raised this issue in relation to bias in cross-national indicators, it has yet to explain the process by which NGOs produce reports. This article exploits subnational variation across domestic and international NGOs within India, showing how the divergence in their reports can be explained by these groups’ organizational structures, probability of success in their chosen issue areas, and target audiences. By explaining how human rights NGOs produce reports, this article concludes with suggestions to ensure that the biases prevalent in a single source of data do not drive the results of future scholarship.     

Does intellectual property lead to economic growth? Insights from a novel IP dataset

While policymakers often make bold claims as to the positive impact of intellectual property (IP) rights on both developed and developing country economies, the empirical literature is more ambiguous. IP rights have both incentive and inhibitory effects that are difficult to isolate in the abstract and are dependent on economic context. To unravel these contradictory effects, this article introduces an index that evaluates the strength of IP protection in 124 developing countries for the years 1995 to 2011. We illustrate the value of this index to economics study and show evidence that is consistent with IP leading to increased growth. Our results are further consistent with two causal pathways highlighted in the literature: that IP leads to greater levels of technology transfer and increased domestic inventive activity. Yet other aspects of our study fit uneasily with this simple story. For example, we find evidence suggesting that increased levels of growth lead to greater levels of IP protection, contradictory evidence in the literature linking IP with growth, a lack of evidence that increased levels of IP protection lead to actual use of the IP system, and problems with what IP indexes measure. Because of this, we suggest another – and so far undertheorized – explanation of the links between IP and growth: that IP may have few direct effects on growth and that any causality is a result of belief rather than actual deployment of IP.     

Between regulatory field structuring and organizational roles: Intermediation in the field of sustainable urban development

Recent contributions in the domains of governance and regulation elucidate the importance of rule‐intermediation (RI), the role that organizations adopt to bridge actors with regulatory or “rulemaking” roles and those with target or “rule‐taking” roles. Intermediation not only enables the diffusion and translation of regulatory norms, but also allows for the representation of different actors in policymaking arenas. While prior studies have explored the roles that such RIs adopt to facilitate their intermediation functions, we have yet to consider how field‐level structuring processes influence (and are influenced by) the various and changing roles adopted by RI. In this study we focus on the mutually constitutive relations between field‐level change processes and the evolving roles of RIs by studying the rise of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI)/Local Governments for Sustainability, an RI serving as a bridge for sustainable urban development policies between the United Nations and local authorities. Using ICLEI as an illustrative case, we theorize four different processes of regulatory field structuration: problematization, role specialization, marketization, and orchestrated decentralization. We discuss their implications for RI roles in the field and further theorize the changing dynamics of trickle‐up intermediation processes as an RI gains power and influence.     

人类社会发展机制研究

社会发展是社会有机体各构成要素、各组成部分之间所发生的不以人的主观意志为转移的相互联系、相互制约、相互作用的矛盾运动。推动社会发展的主体和享有社会发展成果的主体是人民群众。人类社会发展的最佳状态是和谐发展,人人共享社会发展成果与人的全面发展是社会和谐的前提。     

科学权威的哲学解读

科学权威是科学共同体中拥有最高承认程度的阶层,是整个共同体评价系统的中坚和核心。科学权威作为一种历史现象,一方面对科学发展有积极的促进作用,另一方面由于时代的局限及个人修养等原因,也存在一些消极影响。因此,客观公正地分析科学权威的积极作用及其消极影响并寻求应对之策,无疑对科学的研究和发展具有重要的理论意义与实践意义。     

权利社会理论与社会“弱势化”心态矫正

社会＂弱势化＂心态是当前社会转型期值得警惕的社会问题,其本质问题是社会权利贫困问题。权利贫困决定了社会利益分配的不平衡,加剧社会分化和社会结构失衡,从而引发不同社会群体之间的对立和冲突,妨碍经济发展和社会稳定。为此,必须适时着手赋权社会的改革,使社会弱势群体获得更多的生存、发展、医疗、教育和文化等社会权利,获得和分享更多的改革开放的成果,以权利同质和机会均等实现包容发展。