‘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

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.

From the "pólis" to the modern state: an approach to the problem of politics in Heidegger

This paper starts off asking whether a strictly political approach may be deduced based on Martin Heidegger’ ontological analyses of modernity. His interpretation of the Greek phenomenon of the polis is discussed along with the distinction established therein between this form of community and the modern state, founded according to Heidegger on the metaphysical essence of modernity. To clarify this question regard is had to the proclamation of values observed by Heidegger in the different forms of state organization arising in the age of technical consummation of metaphysics. In this connection, his vision of nihilism is studied and a hypothesis is finally offered as to the form of state that would be consistent with a renunciation of the values required, in his view, by the manifestation of the entity in modernity as a wholly producible object.

Textualising British Politics: Deconstructing the subject of British foreign policy

British politics has been described as a sub-discipline crying out for methodological and ideational cross-fertilisation. Where other areas of political science have benefited from new ideas, British politics has remained largely atheoretical and underdeveloped. This has changed recently with the rise of interpretivism but the study of British politics would also benefit from more serious engagement with poststructuralism. With this in mind, I examine how the thought of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction could be useful for thinking through the foundations of British politics, re-examining what appears natural or given and revealing the problematic and contradictory status of these foundations. After suggesting the need to 'textualise' British politics', I illustrate how deconstruction operates in a specific context, that of British foreign policy since 1997. This exploration reveals how certain decisions (such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003) became possible in the first place, and how their basis in an idea of an 'us' and a 'them', a coherent, autonomous subject separate from its object, is deeply problematic. Such a critical reading of British politics is impossible within the dominant interpretivist framework, and opens up new possibilities for thought which form an important supplement to existing ways of studying the field.

Anti-Semitism in France: Past and present

This article discusses the so-called newness of today's antisemitism through the historical and social specificities of antisemitism in French society. It casts light on the continuities of antisemitic discourse in France, but also its transformation in relation to the French colonial heritage and the recent ‘communitarianisation’ of France's social life. This analysis of antisemitism is furthered by the presentation of two case-studies: the controversial discourses of comedian Dieudonné and Kémi Séba, leader of a black supremacist movement called Tribu KA which stirred controversies in the 2000s. These two examples emphasise the fact that antisemitic discourse is better understood as a narrative about downward social mobility and status, which hardly makes antisemitism new.

From Rights to Compassion: The D Case and Contemporary Abortion Politics

This chapter is concerned with exploring the dynamics of contemporary debate on women’s reproductive choices and rights in the somewhat transformed social, political and economic context of the Republic of Ireland. News coverage of the events of April and May 2007 provide the focus of attention, as the case of ‘D’, a 17 year old in the temporary care of the state, seeking to terminate her pregnancy after a diagnosis of severe foetal abnormality, became yet again a focus of public debate on abortion access within the state. The analysis explores how the issues this case raised were framed in the public domain, in order to consider the shifting moral grammar shaping the debate. The paper explores the ways in which this case illustrates the ongoing tensions between changing characterisations of Irishness, and the social dynamics of access to reproductive rights, particularly for national minors in the care of the state.