Now wash your hands: uncommissioned art and gender

Examining the urban arts in the UK, in their paint and fibre-based alternatives, this article aims to account for the differences in contemporary dealings with graffiti and yarn-bombing (kniffiti). The intersectional complications of gender, race, age and class, as they have come to bear on the visual arts, as well as the historical power structures that have determined the classification of crime, and of art, are offered as possible rationales for present-day handling of ‘deviance’ in the form of urban art. It seems that urban knitting has blind-sighted both social conventions and legal principles in a way that exposes the arbitrary nature of both.     

Post-war Kosovo landscapes in Pristina: discrepancies between language policy and urban reality

This paper focuses on the complex nature of post-war multilingual landscapes in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, as shaped by the country’s political shift after independence in 2008. We aim to contribute to this sociolinguistically underexplored territory through an examination of the relative predominance and visibility of the capital’s most dominant languages: Albanian, Serbian, and English. Our central aim is to empirically problematize the shared co-officialdom of the Albanian and Serb languages, as put forward in the “Ahtisaari Plan” in 2007 and subsequently adopted in the State Constitution in 2008 and Language Laws in 2006 and 2008. We posit that the multilingual language policies which paint an inclusive, multi-ethnic picture of Pristina do not coincide with its monolingual Albanian reality. In addition to these empirical findings, our second aim is to contribute to the theorization of authorship in the public sphere. With reference to the Pristina context, we problematize the analytical categorization conventionally made between top-down and bottom-up agency and distinguish a third category of semi-official authorship. This third category enables us to examine the dynamic nature of the discrepancy between Kosovo’s language policy and Pristina’s urban linguistic reality in more detail.     

Turkey and Russia in a shifting global order: cooperation,conflict and asymmetric interdependence in a turbulent region

The current global political economy is characterised by the intensifying economic interaction of BRICS and ‘near BRICS’ economies, with emerging powers increasing their influence in neighbouring regions. The growing partnership between Turkey and Russia constitutes a useful case study for examining this transformation, in which Western supremacy and US hegemony are under increasing challenge. Turkish–Russian relations shed light on broader themes in global political economy. First, significant economic interdependence may be generated among states with different political outlooks, in the form of loose regional integration schemes driven by bilateral relations between key states and supporting private actors or interests. Second, growing economic interdependence may coexist with continued political conflict and geopolitical rivalry, as indicated by the Syrian and Ukrainian crises. An important strategy that emerges is the tendency to compartmentalise economic issues and geopolitical rivalries in order to avoid negative spill-over effects. This facilitates the coexistence of extensive competition with deepening cooperation, as reflected in relations in the field of energy.     

China’s ‘New Silk Roads’: sub-national regions and networks of global political economy

This paper argues that the Chinese government’s ‘belt and road’ initiative – the Silk Roads vision of land and maritime logistics and communications networks connecting Asia, Europe and Africa – has its roots in sub-national ideas and practices, and that it reflects their elevation to the national level more than the creation of substantially new policy content. Further, the spatial paradigms inherent in the Silk Roads vision reveal the reproduction of capitalist developmental ideas expressed particularly in the form of networks, which themselves have become a feature of contemporary global political economy. In other words, the Silk Roads vision is more of a ‘spatial fix’ than a geopolitical manoeuvre.     

Foreign Terrorist Fighters: managing a twenty-first century threat

In the aftermath of the Arab uprisings Foreign Terrorist Fighters (FTFs) have emerged as a significant security challenge. Since the 1980s and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan the notion of a ‘foreign fighter’ has been closely linked, if not synonymous, with those ideologically or religiously motivated individuals who have travelled to join conflicts in Islamic lands. This article will explore the contemporary FTF movement, offering a comparison of Afghanistan in the 1980s and Syria in the contemporary period. It will explore the international community’s expansive responses to the challenge of FTFs, with special focus on the role of the United Nations.     

Under construction and highly contested: Islam in the post-Soviet Caucasus

While scholarship on Islam in the Caucasus has focused on the late Soviet religious revival – the rise of Salafi jihadism and religious radicalisation in the northern part of these strategic crossroads – no study to date has addressed the discursive struggle over the social functions of regional Islam. This article deconstructs these discourses in order to examine the very varying, and often conflicting, representations of Islam advocated by various actors across the region and within particular republics. The article highlights the contested functions of regional Islam against the background of a religious revival that is still a work in progress.     

Unfulfilled promises of the consultation approach: the limits to effective indigenous participation in Bolivia’s and Peru’s extractive industries

Indigenous peoples’ right to prior consultation and to informed consent represents the basis of the new global model shaping state–indigenous relations. Consultation processes promise to enable indigenous people to determine their own development and are especially promoted when extraction projects with significant socio-environmental impacts are planned on indigenous lands. In this article we draw on debates on participatory development in order to analyse the first state-led consultations in Bolivia’s and Peru’s hydrocarbon sectors (2007–14). The analysis shows that effective participation has been limited by (1) an absence of indigenous ownership of the processes; (2) indigenous groups’ difficulties defending or even articulating their own visions and demands; and (3) limited or very general outcomes. The study identifies real-life challenges, such as power asymmetries, a ‘communication hurdle’ and appropriate timing – as well as simplistic assumptions underlying the consultation approach – that account for the unfulfilled promises of this new model.     

Financialization,distance and global food politics

This paper provides a new perspective on the political implications of intensified financialization in the global food system. There has been a growing recognition of the role of finance in the global food system, in particular the way in which financial markets have become a mode of accumulation for large transnational agribusiness players within the current food regime. This paper highlights a further political implication of agrifood system financialization, namely how it fosters ‘distancing’ in the food system and how that distance shapes the broader context of global food politics. Specifically, the paper advances two interrelated arguments. First, a new kind of distancing has emerged within the global food system as a result of financialization that has (a) increased the number of the number and type of actors involved in global agrifood commodity chains and (b) abstracted food from its physical form into highly complex agricultural commodity derivatives. Second, this distancing has obscured the links between financial actors and food system outcomes in ways that make the political context for opposition to financialization especially challenging.     

关于制造业工会工作的调研与思考

朝阳区制造业工会2013年成立后,为夯实工作基础,全面了解基层企业工会组织工作现状,探索促进制造业工会工作健康发展的新路子,对行业所辖44家基层企业工会进行逐一实地走访,围绕企业状况、工会组织建设、民主管理、职工权益维护和技术创新、文体活动及职工需求等工会重点工作内容进行了专题调研,获得了大量一手信息与数据,发现了制造企业工会存在的普遍问题,并对破解问题进行了思考.     

悖信援引时效抗辩权的法律规制

义务人实施一定言行导致权利人合理信赖诉讼时效不会成为其行使权利的障碍,其后义务人援引时效抗辩权的,构成悖信援引行为。我国现行法框架下对于悖信援引行为的法律规制,难以通过起算、中断等规则予以解决,而应当适用诚实信用原则或禁止权利滥用原则限制此类援引行为。司法实务中适用诚实信用原则或禁止权利滥用原则处理时效援引争议的典型案例包括:义务人恶意躲避权利人、双方存在长期合作关系使权利人产生合理信赖、时效期间届满后双方进行某种形式的磋商等。对于司法实务中某些误用此二原则的裁判意见,应当尽量予以纠正和避免。