Insurgent Building: Spatial Practices of Resistance in the Bedouin-State Conflict in Southern Israel

In the con?ict between Bedouin representatives and government authorities in the southern Israeli Negev, the term ‘insurgent building’ refers to the construction of buildings erected in the full expectation that they will be demolished by the Israeli police shortly thereafter. This article analyses how insurgent building is employed as a spatial practice by emerging political actors to claim contested Bedouin landownership. Importantly, insurgent building relies on the ability of media and advocacy organizations to mobilize behind the issue. Most of the relevant scholarship takes the interpretative categories advanced by these actors at face value. Following anthropological debates regarding objecti?cation and categorization, I examine the context of a speci?c case of insurgent building. Emerging political actors who employ insurgent building often rely on prede?ned ethnic categories and clear-cut people–state polarities. This case demonstrates the need for a more differentiated understanding of multilayered local dynamics than the one offered by mainstream linear interpretations. At a more abstract level, political actors contribute to the reproduction of the very categories against which they mobilize.

Avoidance Techniques: State Related Defences in International Antitrust Cases

Despite its economic significance, competition law still remains fragmented, lacking an international framework allowing for dispute settlement. This, together with the growing importance of non-free-market economies in world trade require us to re-consider and re-evaluate the possibilities of bringing an antitrust suit against a foreign state. If the level playing field on the global marketplace is to be achieved, the possibility of hiding behind the bulwark of state sovereignty should be minimised. States should not be free to act in an anti-competitive way, but at present the legal framework seems ill-equipped to handle such challenges.

This paper deals with the defences available in litigation concerning transnational anti-competitive agreements involving or implicating foreign states. Four important legal doctrines are analysed: non-justiciability (political question doctrine), state immunity, act of state doctrine and foreign state compulsion. The paper addresses also the general problem of applicability of competition laws to a foreign state as such. This is a tale about repetitive unsuccessful efforts to sue OPEC and recent attempts in the US to deal with export cartels of Chinese state-owned enterprises

Energy: lessons from devolution

Geraint Ellis and Richard Cowell explain the findings of the ‘Delivering renewable energy under devolution’ project, including some reasons for Scotland’s lead.

The UK has seen massive increases in renewable energy since 1998, with installed capacity growing from 2,600 MW to 12,300 MW in 2011. This has coincided with devolution and it is within Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales that the greatest increases have been seen.

As devolved administrations now host half of the UK’s renewable energy capacity, their policies are critical to achieving the broader UK targets. This also provides a fascinating insight into what sort of approach works best, and why. This has been the focus of a two-year study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, involving universities from across the UK, which indicates that Scotland is leading the way on renewable energy.

All devolved governments have offered significant support to renewable energy but have different degrees of powers in relation to energy. Scotland’s success seems to be based on the centrality of energy issues to current political aspirations, particularly the SNP, but also has cross-party support. The research suggests that the consensus on the importance of renewable energy amongst élite interests in Scotland helps to explain why Scottish governments have been empowered and enabled to make robust use of the powers available.

As it has achieved successful growth in the sector, this too helps cultivate credibility among key business interests and gives increased leverage to its position in policy discussions with the UK Government. Scotland has been more consistent over time in presenting the expansion of renewable energy as a national economic agenda, rather than just an environmental or rural development agenda. The availability of larger, windy, but relatively less contested sites for onshore wind in Scotland has meant that more projects went through central consenting procedures rather than local planning authorities. Its enhanced support for wave and tidal power technologies is also notable. These political conditions have been harder to find in the rest of the UK, making progress a little more uncertain.

Northern Ireland has used its powers (which are more extensive than Scotland’s) to facilitate small-scale renewables and bio-fuel processes, with its liberalised planning regime offering an initial boost to expanding capacity.

This has contrasted with the position in Wales, which has least control over energy but the Welsh Government has adopted a more innovative approach to strategic spatial zoning; this appears to have pulled in a larger volume of onshore wind development interest than could be expected in a comparable region of England. A downside of the Welsh approach appears to be the fact that the concentration of these wind projects in these zones has triggered public opposition and political conflict.

It therefore appears that the powers available to the devolved governments do not seem to determine which country has been able to make greatest headway, with broader political commitments being more significant. Despite this, the research does not conclude that the actions and activities undertaken by the devolved governments are necessarily the most important factors in shaping the development of renewable energy in the UK. This is because devolution is still a relatively new dimension of energy governance in the UK and decisions affecting key drivers for renewable energy investment are still made mainly in Westminster, with the Treasury exercising close budgetary control. In all areas of the UK, grid capacity expansion remains slow to achieve. The major growth in offshore wind to date has been driven mainly by Westminster and cross-UK bodies with the most significant capacity growth being in English territorial waters.

An automatic COLREGs-compliant obstacle avoidance system for an unmanned surface vehicle

Unmanned surface vehicles are becoming increasingly vital tools in a variety of maritime applications. Unfortunately, their usability is severely constrained by the lack of a reliable obstacle detection and avoidance system. In this article, one such experimental platform is proposed, which performs obstacle detection, risk assessment and path planning (avoidance) tasks autonomously in an integrated manner. The detection system is based on a vision-LIDAR (light detection and ranging) system, whereas a heuristic path planner is utilised. A unique property of the path planner is its compliance with the marine collision regulations. It is demonstrated through hardware-in-the-loop simulations that the proposed system can be useful for both uninhabited and manned vessels.

The impact of union presence and strategic human resource management on employee voice in multinational enterprises in Australia

In this article, we examine the use and character of employee voice mechanisms of foreign-owned multinational enterprises operating in Australia, as well as the influence of a strategic human resource management approach and union presence. Findings indicate that foreign-owned multinational enterprises are high-level users of the full range of employee voice mechanisms, with the exceptions of use of employee suggestion schemes, trade union recognition and the use of joint consultation committees across all sites. Using logistic regression analysis, findings show that trade union presence, a strategic human resource management approach, greenfield site and country of origin impact the employee voice approach adopted. High trade union presence is associated with an indirect employee voice approach. A low trade union presence is associated with a direct or a minimalist approach to employee voice. Moreover, a strategic human resource management approach is associated with both direct and dualistic approaches to employee voice. Implications are drawn for theory and practice. © Australian Labour and Employment Relations Association (ALERA) SAGE Publications Ltd, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC.

Three narratives in search of a city: Researching Belfast's 'post-conflict' transitions

This paper highlights the role of narratives in expressing, shaping and ordering urban life, and as tools for analysing urban conflicts. The paper distinguishes analytically between two prominent epistemological meta-narratives in contemporary urban studies and multiple ontological narratives in a given city-in this case Belfast. The first meta-narrative represents cities as sites of deepening coercion, violence and inequality and the second sees them as engines of new forms of transnational capitalism. Both are marked by the strategy of specifying 'exemplar' or 'paradigm' cities. The core of the paper addresses how these two meta-narratives map onto and interact with, three contemporary ontological narratives of urban regeneration in Belfast. We conceive of narratives-epistemological and ontological-as analytical tools and objects of analysis but also as tools for social action for competing political and economic interests and coalitions. While in the urban studies literature Belfast is typically studied as an exemplar 'conflict city', it is now being promoted as a 'new capitalist city'. In the context of post-Agreement Belfast, we explore not only the 'pull' of exemplar narratives but also resistances to them that are linked to multiple and hybrid senses of place in the city. We conclude that any significant move beyond the exigencies of rampant commodification or recurring inter-communal antagonism must firstly, encourage new forms of grassroots place-making and, secondly, reform of Belfast's (and Northern Ireland's) fragmented governance structures. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.