Addressing Information Needs in Employment Services Provision in Italy: The Role of Codesign Networks

This article examines how coproduction can contribute to information quality in support of labor-market decision-making. Data was gathered on different types of Labor Market Intelligence (LMI) as decision-support systems for stakeholders, and subsequently by analyzing a specific program, with a focus on the role of information within its coproduction process. Results confirm the importance of information systems to support employment services design, but highlight the limitations of existing channels, and outline the types of information needed for policy effectiveness: those that are gathered through continuous relations with employers and jobseekers, and that often derive from participation in policy networks.     

Managing governance complexity and knowledge networks in transparency initiatives: the case of police open data

Public organisations are often described as being subject to types of complexity that result from the interorganisational structure of governance networks. Transparency programmes add another level of complexity due to increased information openness. However, neither the nature of this complexity nor the network management approaches needed for transparency programmes has been conceptually developed. To address this gap, this article brings together governance complexity theory and knowledge management theory. An empirical model is tested using the case of police open data with regression analysis and 22 expert interviews. The results show that institutional and environmental complexity such as budget pressures, legal-normative constraints, and task complexity exert a negative influence on police information openness. However, network knowledge management practices including developing mission focus on people and communication and overcoming organisational boundaries through interorganisational collaboration can counteract these problems of complexity.     

Authority in rebel groups: identity,recognition and the struggle over legitimacy

This article asks how rebel leaders capture and lose legitimacy within their own movement. Analysing these complex and often uneasy relations between elites and grassroots of insurgency is important for understanding the success or failure of peace processes. This is because internal contestation over authority between rival rebel leaders can drive a movement’s external strategy. Based on ethnographic research on the Karen and Kachin rebellions in Myanmar and insights from Political Sociology, the article suggests that leadership authority is linked to social identification and the claim to recognition among insurgent grassroots. If rebel leaders manage to satisfy their grassroots’ claim to recognition, their insurgent orders are stable. Failing this, their authority erodes and is likely to be challenged. These findings contribute to understanding insurgency and peace negotiations in Myanmar and civil wars more generally by showing how struggles over legitimacy within rebel groups drive wider dynamics of war and peace.     

‘Whichever way you turn,there is the face of God’ diaspora,memory, and historiography from the margin in The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami

In The Moor’s Account, Laila Lalami dares to dust off the archive of official history that passed over the testimonies of a Moroccan slave during the Discovery Age. This paper explores the way the slave capitalizes on historiography to reconstruct the Western monolithic history. In so doing, the re-constructor’s memory performs a number of roles. It registers the history of the European conquest of La Florida using micro narrative frameworks that highlight salient differences from the official record. Besides, the diasporic memory that the present novel advocates has the intention to mark a difference of the silenced subjectivity from the supremacist histories through a transnational matching of homeland with diaspora. This transnationalism is coupled with a look forward to circumvent the essentialism implied in the monologic narratives. In shuttling between the past, present, and future, memory espouses cosmopolitanism as an alternative to the fundamentalism which threatens people’s cultural diversity.     

Trumponomics and China-US Economic and Trade Relations

Since he took office,the new US president,Donald Trump,has unveiled his broad economic policy-now called Trumponomics.It emphasizes neoliberalism at home,less government regulations,more growth and weakening the welfare state.Internationally,Trumponomics embraces protectionism and nativism with a focus on US economic interests.Trumponomics caters to the lower-middle classes,a reflection of the country's current economic and diplomatic challenges.Trumponomics will bring uncertainty to China-US economic and trade relations.China should carefully study the policies of the Trump administration and prepare contingency plans.     

The demise of the intervention paradigm—resilience thinking in the Merida Initiative

Post-Cold War interventions have gone through a series of distinct paradigms—each allowing for its own oppositional discourse. This possibility seems to be diminishing with the rise of resilience thinking. In the early 1990s, liberal internationalist framings drove intervention by prioritising individual human rights over state rights to non-interference. Here, it was possible to oppose intervention as illegal boundary violation and unaccountable foreign rule. Neo-liberal approaches circumvented the legal problematic by conflating sovereignty with the capacity for good governance. However, they depended on a strong sociocultural dichotomy, giving rise to accusations of neo-colonialism. In contrast, the resilience discourse emphasises the positive, transformative aspects of local agency, rather than seeing it as deficient and needing paternal guidance. This paper argues that by claiming to merely plus up already existing social practices, international policy engagement in the Global South becomes difficult to conceive as boundary transgression or hierarchical imposition. These insights are drawn out with reference to the Merida Initiative, a US-Mexican security agreement signed in 2007.     

Prevention,knowledge, justice: Robert Nozick and counterterrorism

ABSTRACT

This article explores questions of justice and moral permissibility of state action in counterterrorism through Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Using the case of the Berlin attack in December of 2016 and the ensuing political debate over whether potential terrorists could be put into preventive custody as an illustrative example, it engages Nozick’s argument on prevention, knowledge and justice. In Nozick’s fierce defence of individual rights, the state comes into being as an aggregate of individuals and their inviolable rights, and thus possesses no moral legitimacy of its own. Individual rights must therefore not be violated for the sake of common goods. In conjunction with his emphasis on free will and the ensuing unpredictability of human decision-making, the article highlights the Nozickian position as a powerful account against the justification of preventive custody, thereby providing a moral “fail-safe” in counterterrorism discourses that build on just war theory and utilitarianism.     

Light,dark and the powers that be: a hydroelectric project in Butembo

Despite its major importance in international trade, the city of Butembo in the North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of Congo is deprived of such basic urban infrastructure as electricity. Private and public actors have attempted to bring power to the city, but their efforts have remained fruitless. Analysis of these failed projects to electrify the city offers a glimpse of local power relations. Why, rather than cooperating, do various local power holders counteract each other? Will gaining credit for bringing electric power to the city in turn yield political power over its future? With a special focus on a hydroelectric dam that was built but never functioned, this article sheds light on the way in which the citizens of Butembo relate to different bodies of authority. I argue that the hydroelectric dam gradually became a tool in a larger political strategy.     

软实力视阈下的日本动漫外交

近年来,日本在经济持续低迷与少子老龄化的背景下,努力寻求通过文化"软实力"来提高国家影响力的新途径。受美国学者约瑟夫·奈的启发,日本政府认识到"动漫"是日本的软实力资源之一,并实施了一系列动漫外交。日本政府的动漫外交促进了日本文化产业的发展,对构建国家形象和提升国家软实力发挥了重要作用。     

Adolescent Co-occurring Disorders Treatment: Clinicians' Attitudes,Values, and Knowledge

This study examined community-based clinicians’ (N = 294) attitudes, background/experiences, values, and knowledge relating to issues of co-occurring disorders, which occur at a high rate among adolescents involved in the juvenile justice system. Study results reveal that clinicians self-rate their clinical values and attitudes at or above the expected level of competency, but they concede that their skill and knowledge levels are not adequate. Comparison measures reveal that employment setting conditions, geographic region, hours worked per week, and strongly held convictions about the importance of integrated mental health and substance use disorders service delivery distinguish clinicians’ co-occurring disorders knowledge levels. Implications are offered.