Testing a social ecological model for relations between political violence and child adjustment in Northern Ireland

Relations between political violence and child adjustment are matters of international concern. Past research demonstrates the significance of community, family, and child psychological processes in child adjustment, supporting study of interrelations between multiple social ecological factors and child adjustment in contexts of political violence. Testing a social ecological model, 300 mothers and their children (M = 12.28 years, SD = 1.77) from Catholic and Protestant working class neighborhoods in Belfast, Northern Ireland, completed measures or community discord, family relations, and children's regulatory processes (i.e., emotional security) and outcomes. Historical political violence in neighborhoods based on objective records (i.e., politically motivated deaths) were related to family members' reports of current sectarian antisocial behavior and nonsectarian antisocial behavior. Interparental conflict and parental monitoring and children's emotional security about both the community and family contributed to explanatory pathways for relations between sectarian antisocial behavior in communities and children's adjustment problems. The discussion evaluates support for social ecological models for relations between political violence and child adjustment and its implications for understanding relations in other parts of the world.

ARTICLE: Anarchy and International Law: The Approaches of Hedley Bull and Noam Chomsky

Are anarchy and the law antithetical? Not so, as for more than 350 years international law has governed a legal order based on anarchy; wherein no central authority exists and law functions not on the basis of coercion but on cooperation whereby States must agree to each specific laws before it is bound by its obligations. This article contemplates two manners in which an anarchist might consider international law interesting: first, as a legal system which governs an anarchical society as described by Hedley Bull in line with the English School of International Relations; and second, as a manifestation of a State system which, though illegitimate can be utilized, as Noam Chomsky does, for tactical reasons to demonstrate its inconsistencies and thus weakening the system with the ultimate aim being its implosion

Global Systemic Risk and International Regulatory Coordination: Squaring Sovereignty and Financial Stability

In recent years much attention has been given to systemic risk and maintaining financial stability. Much of the focus, rightly, has been on market failures and the role of regulation in addressing them. This article looks at the role of domestic policies and government actions as sources of global instability. The global financial system is built upon global markets controlled by national financial and macroeconomic policies. In this context, regulatory asymmetries, diverging policy preferences, and government failures add a further dimension to global systemic risk not present at the national level.<br/>Systemic risk is a result of the interplay between two independent variables: an underlying trigger event, in this analysis a domestic policy measure, and a transmission channel. The solution to systemic risk requires tackling one of these variables. In a domestic setting, the centralization of regulatory power into one single authority makes it easier to balance the delicate equilibrium between enhancing efficiency and reducing instability. However, in a global financial system in which national financial policies serve to maximize economic welfare, regulators will be confronted with difficult policy and legal tradeoffs. <br/>We investigate the role that financial regulation plays in addressing domestic policy failures and in controlling the danger of global financial interdependence. To do so we analyse global financial interconnectedness, and explain its role in transmitting instability; we investigate the political economy dynamics at the origin of regulatory asymmetries and government failures; and we discuss the limits of regulation.<br/>

Pierre Bourdieu as a Sociologist of the Economy and Critic of 'Globalisation'

This article examines Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of the economy and his more recent politically engaged interventions on 'globalisation'. Many scholars regard these as not being in the same academic league as his classic studies on taste, academia, and state elites, etc., and, instead, dismiss them as a private matter or even, as the spleen of Pierre Bourdieu, the individual. This paper questions this disjunction of the 'academic' and 'politically engaged' sides of Pierre Bourdieu's work. First, it argues that his most recent interventions against a neo-liberal globalisation were the logical result of a particular definition of intellectual practice that had been outlined before in his sociology of the intellectual field. It then demonstrates that Bourdieu's economic sociology and critique of contemporary capitalism not only does not contradict his earlier research, but that it provides valuable and original insights into the current transformation of the political economy of the advanced capitalist countries. The paper concludes with a suggestion of how to strengthen the theoretical foundation of Bourdieu's analysis of contemporary capitalism by relating it to and making it compatible with alternative approaches in the tradition of critical political economy.

Informalilty in the Social and Culture Life in the City Centre of Nairobi

We live in a world of advanced technology, stiff global competition and rapid transformation of all facets of life and as a result architecture has not been spared. These transformations affect the social relations, cultural consumption and political economy that have influenced the manner in which people perform in and out of space in the city centres. The residents have adopted strategies for negotiating through the spaces sanitized by authorities and other agents. The public spaces provide the background materials for informal urban practices that are sometimes deemed illegal yet are necessary for animating the city spaces. Cities market themselves ecstatically beyond the baroque with a more visible presence of the contending parties through trademarks, public relations invasively advertised in streets, monuments (signature buildings or projects), and language. This paper comes out of a research carried out in Nairobi in February and March 2007. It examined how the notions of globalisation are reflected in the life in the city centre; the impacts on the quality of life of users of the city centre and how informal urbanism has developed as copying strategy to deal with the transformations due to liberalization and globalization.

Green Political Theory

Ecologism or green political theory is the most recent of schools of political thinking. On the one hand, it focuses on issues that are extremely old in politics and philosophical inquiry – such as the relationship between the human and nonhuman worlds, the moral status of animals, what is the ‘good life’, and the ethical and political regulation of technological innovation. Yet on the other, it is also characterised as dealing with some specifically contemporary issues such as the economic and political implications of climate change, peak oil, overconsumption, resource competition and conflicts, and rising levels of global and national inequalities. It is also an extremely broad school of political thought covering a wide variety of concerns, contains a number of distinct sub-schools of green thought (here sharing a similarity with other political ideologies) and combines normative and empirical scientific elements in a unique manner making it distinctive from other political ideologies.

Macroprudential Ideas and Contested Social Purpose: A Response to Terrence Casey

In response to Terrence Casey's argument that the emergence of macroprudential regulation since the financial crash can and should save neoliberalism we raise five objections. 1). The Debt-Driven Growth Hypothesis (DDG) and the Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH), as Casey terms them, are just as likely to be complementary as they are oppositional and they are by no means incompatible. 2) Casey's empirics are too thin and static, drawn from the 1980s and 1990s, while Anglo Liberal Financialised Capitalism (ALFC) is a complex adaptive system that has continued to evolve throughout the 2000s. 3) Casey overlooks the dynamic relationship between potentially excessive financialisation and the performance of the wider economy, which is becoming a growing concern for many policy makers using the macroprudential frame. 4) Macroprudential as a series of ideas about the economy are often incompatible with neoliberal premises and their ontological foundations. 5) Many of the policy makers who have acted as the biggest champions of macroprudential regulation have also been highly critical of ALFC and view the macroprudential turn as making a contribution to a much needed deeper financial reformation that would over time transform some of the constituent economic and social relations of the existing political economy. We conclude that what we call the social purpose of macroprudential regulation (the question of whether it is intended to patch up or transform the existing system) is contested, and that macroprudential regulation has much potential beyond saving ‘neoliberalism’.

Poverty, ethnicity and international migrants to Northern Ireland: New opportunities or new vulnerabilities?

This briefing provides a brief overview of recent patterns and processes of migration to Northern Ireland and to identify the major challenges arising for society. It is based on primary research conducted by the author during 2013 that consisted mainly of focus groups and interviews with individual migrants. This briefing paper proceeds as follows: it identifies the key features of recent migration to Northern Ireland before presenting evidence from the research to show the experiences of migrants in the labour market. The key policy questions to be considered will be the role of the state and civil society for building positive inter-group relations and the opportunities that exist for migrants to achieve economic and social mobility.

And We’d Like to Thank…::Romania’s Integration into the European Union, 1989-2007

Conditionality is formally a key determinant of many non-member states’ relations with the EU. It is particularly so for states intent on membership. As the case of Romania shows, the EU’s use of conditionality is far from consistent. Relations can develop and accession take place without the requisite conditions being met. This follows from the use the EU makes of the flexibility evident in its evolving and generally vague definitions of the conditions that need to be met. Hence it was often extraneous factors over which Romania had either limited or no influence that were responsible for key developments in relations. These factors include the geopolitical and strategic interests of the EU and its member states, the actions of the Commission and the agenda-setting and constraining effects of rhetorical commitments and timetables, and the dynamics of the EU’s evolving approach to eastern enlargement.

Guns don’t kill people, cyborgs do::a Latourian provocation for transformatory arms control and disarmament

This article seeks to provoke a deeper engagement of Critical Security Studies with security's relations to technology and weapons. It explores existing assumptions about these relations in mainstream arms control and disarmament theory, and the way such assumptions are deployed and distributed in the current settlement of arms control and disarmament practice. It then draws on recent social and philosophical discussions of materiality, particularly on the thought of Bruno Latour, to propose a different set of concepts for exploring the aims and limits of arms control and disarmament. These concepts emphasise the mediating roles of material things in social relations and they may offer a richer view of the object of arms control (weapons and violence) and of the practices of arms limitation and reduction; one that may ultimately gesture towards a different understanding of arms politics, and that may be used to explore the transformatory potentials of arms control and disarmament.