Immigration and social justice: towards a progressive European immigration policy?

"Stepping back from current debates over immigration in the new 'Fortress Europe', this paper examines moral and philosophical arguments for an alternative and more 'progressive' immigration policy. Despite recent interest within geography in principles of social justice, the extent to which such principles reach beyond particular societies or nations has rarely been considered explicitly. The notion of social justice may be extended to the question of immigration, without taking the position that migration should itself be seen as a 'human right'. Even within relatively conservative contractarian and communitarian conceptions of social justice, a number of suggestions can be made for 'progressive' policy options, in particular by focusing on the communal rights and duties of societies rather than the human rights of individual migrants."     

Is There Life After Policy Streams,Advocacy Coalitions,and Punctuations: Using Evolutionary Theory to Explain Policy Change?

This article reviews the current state of public policy theory to find out if researchers are ready to readdress the research agenda set by the classic works of Baumgartner and Jones (1993 ), Kingdon (1984 ) and Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1993 ). After reviewing the influences of institutional, rational choice, network, socio-economic and ideational approaches, the article pays tribute to the policy streams, punctuated equilibrium and policy advocacy coalition frameworks whilst also suggesting that future theory and research could identify more precisely the causal mechanisms driving policy change. The article argues that evolutionary theory may usefully uncover the micro-level processes at work, particularly as some the three frameworks refer to dymamic models and methods. After reviewing some evolutionary game theory and the study of memes, the article suggests that the benefits of evolutionary theory in extending policy theories need to be balanced by its limitations.     

Flothilde's visions and Flodoard's histories: a tenth‐century mutation?

Although Flodoard of Reims is best known for his comprehensive historical writings, he also recorded separately the visions of a young girl named Flothilde. Re‐examining Flodoard's varied historical works in light of these visions reveals that he was unusually interested in visions generally, and particularly those of women. The question is why. In proposing answers, it will be suggested that both Flodoard's histories and Flothilde's visions represent a crucial moment in the transformation of ninth‐century Carolingian understandings of history, visions, and reform into the quite different patterns of the early eleventh century.     

Is There a National Policy For Children and Youth With Serious Emotional Disturbance?

This article examines the status of a national mental health policy for children in need of mental health services. The need for systems planning and services integration involving multiple agencies is presented. The different programs of the major governmental agencies involved in the delivery of services to children are reviewed, as are the range of services provided. This article demonstrates the fragmentation and duplication that is endemic in all aspects of mental health, and that consequently makes policy implementation exceedingly difficult.     

Is there a Sovietology of South‐East Asian studies?

This article provides an indictment of the study of South-East Asian international relations by confronting head-on the problems that have arisen within this field, in particular the way in which Western academics ended up colluding with deeply illiberal regimes in the area, which excluded dissenting opinions, often by deliberately denouncing these opinions as 'polemical'. This study uses the discipline of Sovietology to explore the reasons why South-East Asian studies developed into a closed community of scholarship, often hostile to dissenting viewpoints. The disciplines bear comparison because they both manifestly failed to predict the cataclysms that befell their respective areas of study. The analysis identifies similarities in the way in which the two disciplines seemed to ignore sceptical voices and evolved a shared belief in 'system stability'. As a result, both Soviet studies and the study of South-East Asian international relations developed serious methodological flaws. However, this study argues that South-East Asian studies suffered even more severe disciplinary shortcomings than its Sovietological counterpart because the academic space was further de-intellectualized by the pervasive influence of the authoritarian South-East Asian developmental state which blurred the distinction between scholarship and bureaucracy and which succeeded in co-opting Western academics. The result was to create a field of study that promulgated the tyranny of the single truth, which erroneously perceived South-East Asia as a region of domestic tranquillity and regional order. What, in fact, emerged was an intellectual culture of self-censorship that kept South-East Asian studies within tacit, self-regulated boundaries.     

Is “Threat” in the Eye of the Researcher? Theory and Measurement in the Study of State‐Level Immigration Policymaking

This study initiates a methodological critique of the state‐level immigration policy literature through the lens of the racial threat and group power perspectives. First, I highlight the conceptual problems related to the application of such theories to legislature‐level data analysis. Next, I demonstrate the methodological and analytical problems that raise concerns about ad hoc theorizing in this field. Using counts of hostile and welcoming immigration legislation (2005–2011), I demonstrate that outgroup size measures correlate positively with both dependent variables while measures of population growth rate yield null results unless used on their own. These results suggest that the use of legislature‐level models with demographic indicators does not allow us to gain a clear understanding of whether and how population dynamics influence immigration policymaking. Based on these findings, I recommend that when using demographic indicators as key explanatory variables, researchers provide evidence of result consistency across multiple model specifications and also test the models with both hostile and inclusive policy variables. Such protocols would help avoid ad hoc theorizing.     

An Exceptional Response? Security,Development and Civil Society in Spanish Policy after 11‐M

This article considers the ways in which Spanish state institutions responded to the Madrid bombings of 11 March 2004 in the context of the global ‘War on Terror’. It examines three inter‐related arenas of Spanish policy after 9/11 in which security and civil society are invoked in ways that impact upon the country's development agenda toward its southern Mediterranean partners. The first relates to Spain's external relations with its North African neighbours, and in particular the place of migration in shaping these relations over the last decade. The second concerns Spain's political relations with the representative organizations of its own Muslim populations. A third area of analysis pertains to the juridical‐institutional reactions of the state to the 11 March attacks: how have public authorities and civil society been affected and refashioned in the face of jihadist terrorism on the peninsula? The author argues that in each of these domains, the post‐9/11 context generally, and the 11 March attacks in particular, have elicited a securitization of civil society, which has in turn been associated with the country's international relations and domestic politics. Such securitization, however, has only been partially successful, thus vindicating the continuation of ‘politics as usual’ among Spain's state officials and its civil society.     

Human Rights and Multinationals: Is there a Problem?

In recent years interested individuals and pressure groups have expressed considerable concern over the alleged complicity of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in violations of human rights. While such allegations are not historically unprecedented, the context in which they arise has changed. In particular, the increased integration of the global economy has created a perception that MNEs should take more responsibility for the social dimension of their actions, a perception that enterprises themselves have in part accepted through inter alia the issuing codes of corporate conduct. Furthermore, the rise of identity and lifestyle politics has made MNEs, as purveyors of products and services that help to define consumer lifestyles, a target of concern. These changes have significant implications for the evolution of human rights theory. In particular, they require a shift in the traditional view that corporations can only be victims of violations of human rights committed by states, towards one that extends responsibility for the commission, prevention and avoidance of such violations to MNEs themselves. On the other hand, there exist strong arguments against such an extension of human rights responsibilities. In particular, it is said that MNEs should only be responsible for the conduct of their business and should not be forced to involve themselves in such wider social issues. They are also private law entities and so should not possess the same responsibilities as states. This articles posits that such arguments in favour of extension, though strong and likely to remain influential, cannot answer the need for an extension of responsibility for human rights violations to MNEs where appropriate, on the basis that any attack on human dignity, whatever that legal nature and functions of its originator, must be liable to legal sanction. The technical legal means by which this might be done are considered. None the less, the article ends with a caution that any extension of human rights responsibilities to MNEs must not be allowed to deflect attention from the primary responsibility of states, as the most likely perpetrators of human rights violations, to avoid human rights violations on their own part and to establish a legal order in which the risk of such violations committed by private entities can be minimized, whether through effective national regulatory laws or international agreements on standards of corporate conduct.     

Is Cross‐Section Shape a Distinct Feature in Plant Fibre Identification?

Correct identification of textile fibres is an important issue in archaeology because the use of different materials can yield crucial information about the society that produced the textiles. Textiles made of plant and animal fibres can normally be easily distinguished, but to distinguish between different types of plant fibres, in particular different types of bast fibres, is difficult. Some years back it was shown that the features fibre diameter, lumen diameter, dislocation (nodes), and cross markings cannot be used on their own to distinguish between the typical bast fibres used for textiles in ancient Europe: flax, hemp, and nettle. Particularly not when only a few fibres are available for an examination so that statistical analysis is not possible, as is often the case in archaeology. The last two characterization features typically used to distinguish between bast fibres are cross‐section shape and lumen shape. In this paper, we present a study of retted and unretted fibres (in the stem) of flax, nettle, and hemp, and show that also cross‐section shape and lumen shape cannot be used as distinguishing features on their own.