Search results for "Political Science and International Relation"

Rethinking Samir Amin’s legacy and the case for a political organization of the global justice movement

2019

Juego argues that the new Internationale’s “primary organizational function should be the global coordination of actions of progressive grassroots movements from country to country.” He calls for a ‘learning organization,’ where the new Internationale supports “a continuous dialogue between bottom-up and top-down approaches to decision-making.” He sees it as “[a]kin to a global coordinating council” meaning that it works to integrate and synthesize the “varying initiatives, campaigns, and mass actions at all geographical levels of membership” while remaining mindful of the “dialectics between reform and revolution.” The new Internationale must, moreover, be “grounded on a pragmatic understa…

Not Another Set of Nuts and Bolts

2011

Vulnerability to Forced Labour and Trafficking: The case of Romanian women in the agricultural sector in Sicily

2015

This paper focuses on labour and sexual exploitation faced by Romanian female workers employed in the agricultural sector in Ragusa, Sicily, Italy. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2013 and 2014 with Romanian female farm workers in Ragusa, the paper identifies factors that contribute towards their vulnerability to exploitation. By paying specific attention to the experiences of women who are mothers with dependent children, we look at structural factors that increase their vulnerability and consider how this vulnerability ‘forces’ women into situations whereby they effectively accept and/or submit to abuse. We also highlight how European Union (EU) citizenship does not automatically protec…

Responsibility in uncertain times: an institutional perspective on precaution

2008

Precaution is a key issue in environmental governance. Variously defined, intensively debated and introduced in many regulations, its meaning, scope and application remain problematic. This article argues that the controversy on precaution is a matter of culturally patterned expectations concerning the production and use of knowledge and the related social positions and responsibilities. The way uncertainty and its role in the policy process are understood is crucial. For some precaution is a flawed concept, to be accommodated to the current expert-based cooperative scheme. For others it is a major innovation requiring a rearrangement of the latter. Precautionary policies may evolve in dif…

Which regions produce the most innovation policy research?

2022

[EN] This article uses the data indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus databases up to and including the year 2020 to map leading regions and trending topics in academic innovation policy research. The country analysis highlights four leading regions in this research field: Western Europe (led by the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain), North America (led by the USA), Scandinavia (led by Sweden and Denmark), and Asia-Pacific (led by China and Australia). The most common keywords are used to develop a conceptual framework. Applying the Tree of Science approach, we classify the most influential studies into three categories: foundational studies (the roots), structural …

The Croatian view of the Katyn crime

2021

The murder of Polish prisoners of war in Katyn and other places of massacre was covered by a conspiracy of silence for decades.1 1 In 1990, the suspicions that Polish prisoners of war from the camp...

(Un)Natural and contractual international society: A conceptual inquiry

2011

This article offers a critical perspective on one of the central concepts of IR and the English School of IR in particular, namely the concept of international society. It argues that the moral agency of international society and its ‘naturalness’ were affirmed simultaneously with the marginalization of the concept of societas designating contractual political relations. The article traces the concept of contracted societas back to the work of Hugo Grotius, an acclaimed founder of the ‘international society’ tradition. By placing Grotius’ use of the concept in the context of ancient and early modern discussion of political alliances and partnerships, it demonstrates that politically contra…

The limits of subtractive politics: Agamben and Rousseau’s inheritance

2020

The article critically engages with Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Rousseau in order to explore the affinities between the two authors’ subtractive approach to political subjectivation. In The Kingdom and the Glory. Agamben argues that Rousseau’s Social Contract reproduces, in a secularized manner, the providential paradigm of government, whose origins Agamben finds in early Christianity. This paradigm establishes a fictitious articulation between transcendent sovereignty and immanent government, presenting particular acts of government as emanating from general divine laws. We shall demonstrate that Rousseau was neither unaware of the problematic character of this paradigm nor did he venture…

Zwischen Kultur und Kalkül? Vertrauen und Sozialkapital im Kontext der neoinstitutionalistischen Wende

2004

Trust and social capital work in social networks as informal institutions, favouring cooperation between the participants of such social interaction. However, the increasing use of both terms has been accompanied by vanishing conceptual and theoretical precision. In order to counterbalance this development this article tries to clarify some of the major puzzles connected with both terms. First, we embed trust and social capital within the institutionalist turn in political science. Second however, we demonstrate that trust and social capital have been modelled from at least two perspectives: sociological institutionalism and economic institutionalism. Furthermore, attempts of combining thos…

Macro-regional Strategies, Cohesion Policy and Regional Cooperation in the European Union: Towards a Research Agenda

2018

Since 2009, the European Union has developed strategies for the Baltic Sea, Danube, Adriatic-Ionian and Alpine macro-regions. These macro-regional strategies represent a new tool of European Union governance that seeks to combine the community’s territorial cooperation and cohesion policy repertoire with intergovernmental ‘regional cooperation’ involving European Union member and partner countries. By establishing comprehensive governance architectures for cross-sectoral and trans-boundary policy coordination in areas such as transport infrastructure and environmental protection, macro-regional strategies seek to mobilise European Union member and non-member states alike in promoting and h…