Conduit or contributor? The role of media in policy change theory

The policy change literature is contradictory about the role the media plays in policy change: a conduit for policy participants, with media accounts transmitting multiple policy beliefs of those involved in policy debates or a contributor in the policy process, with media accounts supplying consistent policy beliefs with congruent narrative framing strategies to construct a policy story. The purpose of this study is to empirically test whether the role of the media is that of a conduit or contributor in the policy change process. This study tests whether there are differences in policy beliefs and narrative framing strategies between local and national print media coverage of two contentious policy issues in the Greater Yellowstone Area between 1986 and 2006, that of snowmobile access and wolf reintroduction. In the Greater Yellowstone Area policy arena, local media accounts are believed to be aligned with the Old West Advocacy Coalition, whereas the national media accounts are thought to be part of the New West Advocacy Coalition. With a methodology informed by narrative policy analysis, one hundred seventy five local and national print newspaper accounts were content analyzed to determine whether these media accounts were policy narratives, with embedded policy beliefs and narrative framing strategies. The results indicate that there are statistical differences between local and national media coverage for five of the seven hypotheses. Media accounts are generally policy stories, suggesting that the media’s role is more of a contributor than a conduit in the policy change process.

Exploring the Effective Authority of International Administrations from the League of Nations to the United Nations

This article analyses the concept of international administration by a multilateral organization through the lens of the effective authority of example missions, arguing that the United Nations Interim Administration of Kosovo (UNMIK) and the United Nations Transitional Administration of East Timor (UNTAET) are very specific and distinct attempts at statebuilding. The article’s main argument is that the two most-cited cases in the interwar years – the Saar Territory and the Free City of Danzig, as well as the international administration of West New Guinea by the United Nation (UN) – while presenting interesting parallels with and providing useful insights into the challenges faced by the contemporary international administrations of Kosovo and Timor-Leste, are in fact drastically different endeavours in terms of the effective authority exerted on the ground. The article builds on this special section’s contribution on authority building, analysing the five international administrations through the prism of claimed, recognized, and exercised authority.     

Sir Charles Lucas and The Empire at War

Abstract

This article gives an overview of the British Empire’s participation in the First World War. The roles of Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and South Africa are well documented but there was also a significant contribution from and impact on the smaller and more peripheral territories. These are well covered in Sir Charles Lucas’s multi-volume series The Empire at War. Although very much of its time, written for and by an imperial elite and now neglected, it remains an invaluable record.     

Tubali's trip: Rethinking informality in the study of West African labour migrations

This article focuses on the work and travels of Tubali, a Hausa-speaking migrant from the region of Tahoua in the Republic of Niger. In a journey that lasted four years and took him across Niger, Nigeria, Cameroun, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and the Republic of the Congo, Tubali operated in contexts usually characterised as “informal”: he travelled without documents or work permits, and was supported by institutions that elude state control and yet grant access to financial resources, travel support and employment opportunities to travellers unable or unwilling to follow official avenues. These migrants rely on the operation of relationships that, in Tubali's case, are mostly impromptu, formed on the basis of shared ethnicity, religion and region of origin. This article interprets Tubali's trip in relation to the meanings attributed to this way of working and travelling in Tahoua's society. It investigates the conceptual and political consequences of characterising these migrants' practices as “informal” and discusses analytical alternatives.     

Russia's quest for respect in the international conflict management in Kosovo

This article examines the emotion-based status-seeking logic in Russia's foreign policy vis-à-vis the West, presenting the example of Russia's reactions to NATO's military campaign against Serbia in 1999. It is argued that Russian assertiveness in combination with expressive rhetoric must be understood as a result of the ruling elite's need to have Russia's identity and self-defined social status as an equal great power in world politics respected by its Western interaction partners. Russia's reactions to NATO's intervention, which was not authorized by the UN Security Council, must be read as a strategy coping with the emotion anger about the perceived humiliation and provocation of status denial and ignorance by the West. We find various elements of such a coping strategy, among them the verbalization of the feeling of anger among Russian political circles and the media; uttering retaliation threats, but no ‘real’ aggressive, retaliatory action; minor and temporary activities aimed at restoring Russia's image and status as an influential an equal power. On the surface, the Kosovo episode did not result in any visible break or rift in the Russian–Western relationship. However, emotionally it has lead to a significant loss of trust in the respective partner on both sides.     

Choctaw Tales: An Interview with LeAnne Howe

LeAnne Howe, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and the Eidson Distinguished Professor of American Literature in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia, writes poetry, fiction, screenplays, plays, creative non-fiction and critical essays. Her work is primarily concerned with the experiences and the perspectives of American Indian people and communities. Howe’s latest book, Choctalking on Other Realities (2013), which she describes as ‘three parts memoir, one part tragedy, one part absurdist fiction, and one part “marvellous realism”’, received the inaugural Modern Language Association Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures and Languages in 2014. Along with being the recipient of a United States Artists Ford Fellowship and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, Howe also received the 2015 Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award. Howe’s writing could easily be described as enlivening, eclectic and often hectic, and, more often than not, she brings together a plethora of stories concerning the historical and contemporary experiences of the Choctaw Nation. Various geographical, spiritual, familial and narratological spaces are revealed or plotted during the course of Howe’s narratives, and, as a consequence, images that relate to the act of mapping, the basis of storytelling, and the subject of community and place become recurring motifs throughout her writing. Concerned with the ways in which Choctaw lifeways have been mapped out across time, Howe appears to be especially interested in the representation of travel, exchange, contact and consumption not only in the pre-contact and post-contact United States, but also within the global village.     

(Dis)Empowering New Immigrants and Refugees Through Their Participation in Introduction Programs in Sweden,Denmark, and Norway

This article sets out to critically examine whether and how different ideas of (radical and liberal) empowerment are embedded in policy documents and texts pertaining to the introduction programs in Scandinavia. All three countries have several elements in the program that have the potential of being empowering, viewed from both a radical and liberal empowerment ideology. However, the liberal empowerment ideology is more present in the programs, to various degrees, compared to the radical empowerment ideology, which is more difficult, if not impossible, to live up to within the framework of all three programs.     

The Political Context in Everyday Social Work Practice

Social work is political-normative work (De Boer & Duyvendak, 2004). Hence, the political and policy context in which social work practices take place is crucial in understanding social work as a profession and its social task as a product of the welfare state. The political comes to the fore very explicitly when studying social work interventions with clients of immigrant backgrounds, especially due to the prioritization of the “integration” of migrants on various European political agendas. This article studies how frames on “good citizenship” determine the everyday practices of social workers using data on the Netherlands.     

中西方传统法律文化观念的比较

关于中西方传统法律文化观念产生差异的根源,长期以来缺乏研究的深度和广度。在借鉴和移植西方的法律文化时,有必要研究清楚"法自然"与"自然法"、"权利"与"义务"、"正义"与"秩序"、"司法与立法、行政合一"与"司法独立"中西方不同的法理观念被借鉴和移植的法律文化的特点。     

The politics of history in West Papua - Indonesia conflict

This study examines how history is used as a source of legitimacy and a political instrument in the sectarian conflict between the Indonesian government and the West Papua nationalists. This paper explores the debate surrounding two historical aspects relevant to West Papua’s demand for independence: first, West New Guinea’s past as part of the Dutch colony and its relations with Indonesia and second, the 1969 referendum, the so-called Act of Free Choice, to decide West Papua’s fate. The Indonesian democratization in 1998 provided momentum to revise the narration of West Papua’s history. Democracy has empowered the Papuans as the victims of a power struggle to challenge the previous Indonesia’s monolithic narration of history. The Papuans’ alternative narration of history also serves as a medium of liberation from oppression by the Indonesian government. The Papuan story counters the theory that the narration of history is a privilege of the ruler and the winner.