‘Risk, Politics and the ‘Scientification’ of Political Judgement: Prisoner Release and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland’

Drawing on research in Northern Ireland into the process of release under the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, this article explores the identification and classification of risk in relation to prisoners released early under the Sentences (NI) Act. The main argument is that conflict, post-conflict and transitional conditions expose more starkly the political underpinnings of risk-management strategy and the article demonstrates the particular variant of Politicized Risk Assessment (PRA) recently used in the release of prisoners in Northern Ireland

The Open Method of Coordination on Health Care After the Lisbon Strategy II: Towards a Neoliberal Framing?

This paper undertakes a content analysis of the discourse on the Open Method of Coordination on Health Care (OMC/HC) in order to show how equity and solidarity are increasingly linked to optimisation and, as such, how neoliberalism increasingly frames health care. Some of the side-effects of this reframing for politics are highlighted: legitimating and extending EU governance, reducing the space for oppositional formations and limited citizenship. The analysis begins by interrogating the broader context of the Lisbon Strategy II, after which the techniques of the OMC/HC and its substantive outputs are analysed.

Journal article: Children and Religion under Article 14 UNCRC: A Critical Analysis

This article examines the text of Article 14 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 and the work of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. It considers the text of the article and its travaux préparatoires; it then provides an analysis of the issues considered by the Committee: the concept of the evolving capacities of the child, freedom of religious choice, freedom of manifestation, and education. It also highlights the problems that have emerged in the Committee’s work, in the light of a theoretical framework of the right of the child to religious freedom in international law. It concludes that the Committee fails children in relation to their religion and suggests some positive steps to be taken by the Committee.

Placing political economy: organising opposition to free trade before the abolition of the Corn Laws

The unfurling of global capitalism – and its attendant effects – has long been fertile intellectual terrain for geographers. But whilst studies of the processes and mechanisms of globalisation undoubtedly assume a talismanic importance in the discipline, geographers, with few exceptions, have left examinations of early economic liberalism to historians. One such critically important episode in the evolution of the liberal economic project was the repeal of the so-called 'Corn Laws' in 1846. Whilst the precise impact of the Manchester-based Anti-Corn Law League (ACLL) continues to be a matter of conjecture, Eric Sheppard has asserted that their particular take on political economy managed to assume a 'truth-like status' and worldwide universality. But the ACLL's campaign represents only one, albeit decisive, stage in the long intellectual and practical struggle between 'protectionists' and the disciples of free trade. Studies of the non-'Manchester' components have tended to focus squarely upon national politics. This paper examines a pivotal attempt in 1838 by Lord Melbourne's Government to experiment with the effective elimination of import duties on fresh fruit. Unlike most agricultural commodities, table fruit was produced in a tightly defined area, thus allowing the Government's experiment to play out, in theory, without national political fallout. Whilst the Government's clandestine actions left little time for a concerted opposition to develop, Kentish fruit growers soon organised. A formidable lobby was forged that drew wide local support yet also evolved beyond the original 'epistemic community'. Whilst the coalition failed in their efforts to reintroduce protective duties, their actions allow us to see how protectionist ideologies and policies were vivified through practices at many different spatial scales and to better understand the complex spatiality of protectionist takes on political economy. Their campaign also changed – at least in the short term – the course of British mercantile policy.

A framework for assessing the vulnerability of food systems to future shocks

Modem society depends on complex agro-ecological and trading systems to provide food for urban residents, yet there are few tools available to assess whether these systems are vulnerable to future disturbances. We propose a preliminary framework to assess the vulnerability of food systems to future shocks based on landscape ecology's 'Panarchy Framework'. According to Panarchy, ecosystem vulnerability is determined by three generic characteristics: (1) the wealth available in the system, (2) how connected the system is, and (3) how much diversity exists in the system. In this framework, wealthy, non-diverse, tightly connected systems are highly vulnerable. The wealth of food systems can be measured using the approach pioneered by development economists to assess how poverty affects food security. Diversity can be measured using the tools investors use to measure the diversity of investment portfolios to assess financial risk. The connectivity of a system can be evaluated with the tools chemists use to assess the pathways chemicals use to flow through the environment. This approach can lead to better tools for creating policy designed to reduce vulnerability, and can help urban or regional planners identify where food systems are vulnerable to shocks and disturbances that may occur in the future. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.