Equitable representation in councils: theory and an application to the United Nations Security Council

We analyze democratic equity in council voting games (CVGs). In a CVG, a voting body containing all members delegates decision-making to a (time-varying) subset of its members, as describes, e.g., the relationship between the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). We develop a theoretical framework for analyzing democratic equitability in CVGs at both the country and region levels, and for different assumptions regarding preference correlation. We apply the framework to evaluate the equitability of the UNSC, and the claims of those who seek to reform it. We find that the individual permanent members are overrepresented by between 21.3 times (United Kingdom) and 3.8 times (China) from a country-level perspective, while from a region perspective Eastern Europe is the most heavily overrepresented region with more than twice its equitable representation, and Africa the most heavily underrepresented. Our equity measures do not preclude some UNSC members from exercising veto rights, however.

Champs de bataille: experiences et imaginaires

This contribution takes as its starting point the original conception of the overall research project which sought to examine the ‘battle’ as an event and a cultural act. It examines the representation of violence by non-combatants – who are in any case implicated in the act of war – as well as by combatants themselves. It does, however, also slightly subvert the original proposition of the war narrative as a historical source, towards the idea of the war narrative as a source of artistic representation, as well as towards the notion of ‘narrative’ understood in its broadest sense, towards visual as well as written narratives. The primary focus is however, a specific site of the violence perpetrated and endured by soldiers, the battlefield. One of the fundamental questions posed by the analysis here concerns the issue of the representation and of the reality of the battlefield, and of the reception of the expression of violence. Is representation in fact the only authentic way to seize and to try to understand violence? These questions, and some of the examples used in the first section dealing with the ‘experience’ of the battlefield, have their origins in work conducted for two decades within the international and interdisciplinary research group, the ‘Group for War and Culture Studies’, and therefore concern the bases of a cultural approach to the study of war. In the second section, the analysis moves from the notion of experience to the work of the imagination with a reading of various battlefields created by the contemporary artist Cozette de Charmoy; these are imaginary battlefields certainly, but ones which viscerally engage the body of the soldier and which seem to enable the reader/spectator to access a collective experience. Finally, the question is raised of whether representation actually becomes performative, if it becomes the experience itself, and a way not to ‘see’ that experience, but to ‘know’ it.

Site parade

Recent surveys showing LGBT professionals’ heightened experience of homophobia on building site visits can be considered in the context of a growing body of literature on the gender and sexual identity in construction work. This analysis offers a theoretical perspective on the practical issues, examining the embodied nature of professionalism and the performative nature of the construction site visit: an instance where an intertwined personal/professional identity is on parade, confronting the dominant identities of the site, and thus itself challenged. The work draws on Goffman’s theories of social interaction and the works of Bourdieu on the nature of practice.