The United States and Bahrain: Interpreting the Differentiated U.S. Responses to the Arab Spring

We examine how the United States' response to the situation in Bahrain can be differentiated from that in Libya and Egypt based on a comparative content analysis of the U.S. administration's press releases, remarks, and interviews during the first three months of the Arab Spring movement. Our findings indicate that although the level and duration of violence were comparable, the U.S. government response was strikingly different with the support given to the Bahraini government, in contrast to the critical stances adopted towards Libya and Egypt. We explain how the United States' lack of political incentive to act and concerted support by its allies were influential factors for the United States' differentiated policy during the Arab Spring.     

CITIES,TASKS, AND SKILLS

This research applies a task‐based approach to measure and interpret changes in the employment structure of the 168 largest U.S. cities in the period 1990–2009. As a result of technological change some tasks can be placed at distance, while others require proximity. We construct a measure of task connectivity to investigate which tasks are more likely to require proximity relative to others. Our results suggest that cities with higher shares of connected tasks experienced higher employment growth. This result is robust to a variety of other explanations including industry composition, routinization, and the complementarity between skills and cities.     

Theorising Nudist Equality: An Encounter Between Political Fantasy and Public Appearance

Abstract: This paper approaches in/equality theorising through the lens of social nudism. Its starting point is a left conception of inequality where systemic power and the politics of oppression displace liberal concerns with immutability, offence, and the removal of impediments. But if undoing inequality involves more than clearing away obstacles, what else is at stake? Refracted through nudist subordination, response takes two forms. The first addresses the criteria through which discrimination gets converted into illegitimate inequality. The second considers the manifold character of equality's ambition. Reading equality as an open‐ended fantasy, with material effects, that guides and is shaped by moments of political unsettling, the paper focuses on nudism's eruption in non‐nude publics. Through these non‐normative moments of public appearance, the paper addresses the relationship between equality, contact, and “lines of undoing” subordination, and asks whether the nudist/textile divide highlights the limits to group‐based understandings of inequality.     

At Last! The Voegelin Reader

ABSTRACT

The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, one of the great political scientists of the twentieth century, run to 34 volumes. The selection republished in this Reader will provide senior undergraduates and graduate students (and perhaps their teachers) with a wide-ranging introduction to Voegelin's modern but Aristotelean political science. The selection includes excerpts from his Autobiographical Reflections and from his best-known work, The New Science of Politics. There are several examples of his late an alytical essays. Readers unfamiliar with his relationship to Christianity, always a contentious issue, will find his discussions of the relationship of philosophical or noetic symbols and experiences to revelatory of pneumatic ones especially helpful. The editors and the University of Missouri Press have performed a major service to contemporary political science by making this se lection available.     

Negotiating Neoliberal Empowerment: Aboriginal People,Educational Restructuring,and Academic Labour in the North of British Columbia,Canada

Aboriginal peoples in Canada are gaining influence in post‐secondary education through Aboriginal‐directed programs and policies in non‐Aboriginal institutions. However, these gains have occurred alongside, and in some cases through, neoliberal reforms to higher education. This article explores the political consequences of the neoliberal institutionalization of First Nations empowerment for public sector unions and workers. We examine a case where the indigenization of a community college in British Columbia was embedded in neoliberal reforms that ran counter to the interests of academic instructors. Although many union members supported indigenization, many also possessed a deep ambivalence about the change. Neoliberal indigenization increased work intensity, decreased worker autonomy and promoted an educational philosophy that prioritized labour market needs over liberal arts. This example demonstrates how the integration of Aboriginal aspirations into neoliberal processes of reform works to rationalize public sector restructuring, constricting labour agency and the possibilities for alliances between labour and Aboriginal peoples.     

The Meeting-Places of Parliament in the Ancient Palace of Westminster

Abstract

The importation into England of church furnishings of most kinds has been going on since the early Middle Ages. The focus of this study is on wooden furnishings and the early 19th century, when a specific group of patrons scoured mainly France and the Low Countries for the furniture that had been prised from churches, as a direct and indirect result of the French Revolution. The taste for such material was fuelled by a Romantic enthusiasm, although ironically much of it was in the Baroque style. The historical setting for this nostalgic explosion in interest is briefly sketched, as well as an account of its development into the early 20th century.     

Wither women and work

Afshar, Haleh, ed. Women, Work, and Ideology in the Third World. New York: Tavistock Publications, 1985. xvii + 265 pp. including indices and chapter notes and references. $15.95 cloth.

Larwood, Laurie, Ann H. Stromberg, and Barbara A. Gutek, eds. Women and Work: An Annual Review, Vol. 1. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1985. 312 pp. including chapter references. $29.95 cloth.

Long, Norman, ed. Family and Work in Rural Societies: Perspectives on Non‐wage Labour. New York: Tavistock Publications, 1984. viii + 222 pp. including references and indices. $33.00 cloth; $13.95 paper.