What are the Future Prospects for the European Social Model?An Analysis of EU Equal Opportunities and Employment Policy

The aim of our article is to examine the future prospects of the European Social Model (ESM). First, the article defines the ESM as a mixture of hard law, soft law and underlying norms and values. Second, the article analyses the ESM on a more detailed level in the case of the law of equal opportunities and employment through a historical account and the legal dynamics of integration. The results of the analysis indicate a growing integration capacity of the ESM. Yet, this runs counter to the current neoliberal preferences of the Barroso Commission which has moved from a strategy of combining economic growth and social cohesion, to one in which economic growth creates social cohesion.     

Capacity builders for governance: community-driven reconstruction in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

Community-driven reconstruction (CDR) has become a new paradigm in post-conflict development. It combines infrastructure restoration with introducing good governance at the local level. Recent evaluations show that governance objectives are not easily met and significant change cannot be demonstrated. This paper adds to this argument on the basis of ethnographic research on a CDR programme in eastern DRC. It seeks to find explanations for the lack of demonstrable governance impact in the content and implementation of training. It identifies room for improvement by better adjusting capacity building to locally prevailing accountability mechanisms and by coordinating capacity building with other development programmes.     

The moving frontiers of genetically modified soy production: shifts in land control in the Argentinian Chaco

This article attempts to understand how control over land (power in practice) is built, achieved and contested in the context of land transfers involving pressures over possession rights in Santiago del Estero in northern Argentina. Here new forms of land control – due to expansion of the speculative, soy and cattle frontiers – are changing and involve new relationships while using novel mechanisms to gain and maintain control. The article adopts the notion of shifting ‘frontiers of land control’ as an analytical lens, following Lund and Peluso (2011). We can say that the process of soy and cattle expansion into the new frontiers happens through a group of different mechanisms which range from voluntary purchase to violent evictions. As shifts in land control in the frontier involve pressures on possession rights, we observe different mechanisms of control, mainly in the direction of dispossession and enclosure. The paper adds to the debate on ‘land grabbing’ by (a) showing how domestic investors operate to advance industrial agriculture and (b) showing how this frontier advances in a context of (rather unsecured) possession rights where rights are being shifted through transfers (sales, leases, evictions) and compensation mechanisms as well as conflict and judicial procedures.     

Industrial Restructuring in Romania from a Bilateral Trade Perspective: Manufacturing Exports to the EU from 1995 to 2006

The article presents an analysis of changes in the volume, structure and quality of Romanian manufacturing exports to the EU since 1995 in order to determine the nature and extent of industrial restructuring in Romania. We argue that the observed five-fold increase in the volume of manufactured exports from Romania to the EU over more than a decade-long period, although it is a positive development, still hides a persistent reliance upon labour-intensive and low value-added products. Only towards the end of the examined period have Romania's export patterns begun to resemble those of the more advanced Central and East European countries, reflecting the more important role played by intra-industry exports of differentiated products, the gradual transition from labour intensive, low valued-added exports to more technology-intensive ones and the improvement in product quality.     

‘If This Was a Normal Situation’: Challenges and Potentials for Deliberative Democratic Peacebuilding in Kosovo's Emerging Governance Networks

The link between public administration and conflict resolution is traditionally understood through the ‘democratic peace’ thesis, which holds that war is less likely in democracies than in non‐democracies. Limited success with post‐conflict democratisation missions has opened space for renewed research on three strands of ‘deeper democracy’: decentralisation, participation and deliberation. This article reports on the study of deliberative democratic practices in emerging governance networks in Prishtina. Through an investigation of three contentious issues in Prishtina's public spaces, research combines documentary sources with field interviews with governance actors to identify factors that enable and constrain the scope for deliberative decision‐making in governance networks. Case studies point to six main influences: ‘securitisation’, trust building, ‘mandate parallelism’, structural patterns of inclusion and exclusion, network structures and the properties of governed public spaces. In addition, two frames are found to be particularly resistant to deliberative engagement: Kosovo's status and ethnic identities. We formulate a tentative conclusion to be further investigated: in contexts where distrust is high, deliberative governance requires a rigid adherence to an overarching reference framework that can create discursive space within which relative deliberation can take place. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Computer Power and Legal Reasoning: A Case Study of Judicial Decision Prediction in Zoning Amendment Cases

While social scientists have long advocated the use of statistical methodology in legal analysis, its practical application has not been tested. Statistical models based on social science theories have been used to predict judicial decisions and explain court behavior, but the legal profession has failed to develop statistical models based on traditional legal theories and using data familiar to the lawyer. This article seeks to demonstrate by practical application of statistical methodologies, coupled with traditional legal research methods, that such research can produce important insight into a court's decision making and provide a useful model for predicting the probability of a favorable decision. The zoning amendment decisions of the Connecticut Supreme Court are the data base of this study, which also provides a comprehensive explanation of zoning amendment law in Connecticut as a backdrop against which to evaluate the insights gained by statistical analysis.