‘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 Hindered Self-Help: Housing Policies, Politics And Poverty In Kolkata, India

The housing dimension in Kolkata has been changing in recent years. Since 1991, the city has initiated housing reform that has taken many forms and manifestations characterized by the reduction in social allocation, cutbacks in public funding and promotion of a real estate culture in close partnership between the state and private actors. There has been increasing concern about the housing condition of the poor in the deserted slums and bustee settlements amidst the evident ‘poor blindness’ in housing and investment policies. Against this background the paper discusses self-help housing in Kolkata. It seeks to answer a simple question – why the concept of self-help has not been recognised as a viable policy option for a city with widespread slums and bustee settlements by visiting the complex urban context of Kolkata set within the city's politics, poverty and policies. The paper concludes that there is a need to recognise the existing structural duality in the city and support self-help housing as a parallel housing approach.

Cultural politics and the racial cartographics of human origins

Discussions about human origins, both scientific and pre-scientific, have frequently been freighted with the cultural politics of race relations and questions about human equality. In one way or another, maps have played a critical role in these enterprises by presenting in visual form narratives of human genesis and patterns of human ancestral lineages. In this paper I discuss how a sequence of cartographic representations of human beginnings have transacted racial power from the middle ages to the present day.

Restraing Regulatory Capture? Anglo America, Crisis Politics and Trajectories of Change in Global Financial Governance

A growing number of respected commentators now argue that regulatory capture of public agencies and public policy by leading banks was one of the main causal factors behind the financial crisis of 2007–2009, resulting in a permissive regulatory environment. This regulatory environment placed a faith in banks own internal risk models, contributed to pro-cyclical behaviour and turned a blind eye to excessive risk taking. The article argues that a form of ‘multi-level regulatory capture’ characterized the global financial architecture prior to the crisis. Simultaneously, regulatory capture fed off, but also nourished the financial boom, in a fashion that mirrored the life cycle of the boom itself. Minimizing future financial booms and crises will require continuous, conscious and explicit efforts to restrain financial regulatory capture now and into the future. The article assesses the extent to which this has been achieved in current global financial governance reform efforts and highlights some of the persistent difficulties that will continue to hamper efforts to restrain regulatory capture. The evidence concerning the extent to which regulatory capture is being effectively restrained is somewhat mixed, and where it is happening it is largely unintentional and accidental. Recent reforms have overlooked the political causes of the crisis and have failed to focus explicitly or systematically on regulatory capture.