Corporate accountability in South Africa: the role of community mobilizing in environmental governance

Contrasting perspectives of international companies and civil society groups have divided recent debates about corporate responsibility in developing countries. The Corporate Social Responsibility discourse has been promoted by business lobbies, emphasizing the role of international companies in voluntarily contributing towards the solution of pressing social and environmental problems through partnerships with other stakeholders. The notion of corporate accountability has become the rallying point for sustainable development, demanding stricter regulation of corporate behaviour by national governments and the enactment of an international corporate accountability convention. This article assesses the promises and pitfalls of these two competing approaches to industries in South Africa. The article argues that a multi-level approach is necessary to the impact of CSR and corporate accountability initiatives. It concludes that CSR may improve environmental management systems and reduce corporate pollution levels whereas corporate accountability approaches may provide important incentives for companies to improve their environmental performance, assist in the development of national environmental governance frameworks guiding company-community interaction, and facilitate the enforcement of national legislation pertaining to corporate responsibility. However, both approaches fail to address the underlying, globallevel structural causes of conflicts between companies and stakeholders affected by their operations. These conflicts can only be reversed by fundamental changes in the global economy.     

Race,Gender, Science and Citizenship

This paper argues that the history of embodiment of human racial and gendered differences must be seen as part of the history of liberal citizenship and its limits. The author suggests that a science of similarity and difference can never be a reliable guide to questions of rights. The consequences of this conclusion for our understanding of science and the gendered body are addressed in the second half of the paper, in an effort to clear the way for a more adequate and inclusionary model of citizenship and rights.     

Gender,Citizenship and Subjectivity: Some Historical and Theoretical Considerations

Because the French Revolution failed to produce a widely acceptable definition of citizenship, the limits of manhood suffrage in the early nineteenth century were uncertain. Social practices, in particular scientific activity, served as claims to the status of citizen. By engaging in scientific pastimes, bourgeois Frenchmen asserted that they possessed the rationality and autonomy that liberal theorists associated both with manliness and with civic capacity. However, bourgeois science was never a stable signifier of masculinity or of competence. As professional science emerged, the bourgeois amateur increasingly became the feminised object of satire rather than the sober andmeritorious citizen‐scientist.     

Gendering normative power Europe: lessons of the Women,Peace and Security agenda

The European Union is seen to operate at the international level by promoting ideas and values, rather than by exerting military or economic power. As a gender actor, the EU has played a key role in the development of formal equality, which is presented as a foundational principle of European integration. It therefore follows that normative power Europe should seek to promote these values in external affairs. This article interrogates the role of the EU as a normative gender actor in relation to its implementation of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, set out in UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and related resolutions. Documentary analysis will be supplemented by a detailed assessment of speeches and public statements about the role of the EU as a gender actor in external affairs. This data will be used to assess whether there is a disjuncture between the dominant narrative about gender equality as a fundamental value of the EU and the actions of the organization. It will also allow us to assess whether gender mainstreaming is a tool for public diplomacy or has made a significant change to the way the external relations agenda is formulated and implemented. Additionally, the article will draw attention to the institutional obstacles to the EU performing a role as a gender actor in external affairs. It identifies a critical tension between framing the WPS resolutions as an extension of the EU's equality on the one hand, and understanding that gender mainstreaming is a mere policy tool in international affairs. In doing so, it highlights how competing institutional demands can ultimately undermine core values (e.g. equality) when they are used instrumentally.     

Blood,Justice, and American Citizenship: An Interpretation of Gangs of New York

An ironic exploration of Aristophanes' anticipation of many of the doctrines of postmodernism including the notions that social conventions can be deconstructed, that speech constructs reality, and that poets, or writers, are the creators of human horizons. Despite his seeming agreement with postmodernists, Aristophanes comes to quite different conclusions about how readily the "truth" of postmodern ideas should be disseminated. Aristophanes' Clouds is examined as a postmodern text.     

Gender,Colonialism and Citizenship in the Modern Middle East

Books reviewed in this article: Selma Botman, Engendering Citizenship in Egypt Margaret L. Meriwether and Judith E. Tucker (eds), A Social History of Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon     

Property,Authority and Citizenship: Land Claims,Politics and the Dynamics of Social Division in West Africa

In the contemporary African context of rising competition and anxiety over access to land, neoliberal policy interventions designed to clarify property rights, broaden political participation and increase official accountability have frequently provoked rather than alleviated social and political conflict. Comparing case histories of local struggles over land and authority in selected rural areas in Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire and Bénin, this paper argues that in situations where access to land has been linked historically to claims on authority and social belonging, pressures to privatize or clarify ownership have intensified debates over citizenship and governance as well as over land claims per se. Ensuing struggles over land and entitlement have intersected with national as well as local economic and political dynamics, reinforcing ‘traditional’ hierarchies, contributing to the proliferation of formal and informal governing agents and institutions, and frequently disrupting or subverting open governance and sustainable resource use, rather than helping to create conditions for sustainable development and democratization.