Theorising European Integration: Revisiting Neo-Functionalism and Testing its Suitability for Explaining the Development of EC Competition Policy?

This paper was published in the highly respected, peer reviewed and ISI ranked journal - 'European Integration on-line paper series

Fronteras y oportunidades de integración: los recursos subterráneos de agua dulce en el Mercosur

El presente estudio de caso tiene como objetivo analizar la influencia del Sistema Acuífero Guaraní (SAG), en la agenda de integración del MERCOSUR. Se argumenta que el SAG al considerarse un espacio estratégico trasfronterizo, cuenta con un potencial desestabilizador, pero a la vez se configura como un potencial armonizador de la agenda de integración de MERCOSUR, analizando que esta característica promueve el fortalecimiento de los lazos de cooperación y el establecimiento de una dimensión ambiental al interior de la agenda. Para comprobarlo, se revisará el concepto de agenda y se utilizaran los conceptos de integración y desbordamiento del neofuncionalismo en el contexto de la interdependencia compleja. Finalmente, se avanza hacia el resultado de la investigación que permite entender como el carácter estratégico del agua permea la agenda del MERCOSUR.

The Ascent of EU Environmental Policy: A Case for Unintended Consequences. EDAP 1/2015

This paper aims to explore the issue of unintended consequences as the key underlying theme that explains the incremental integration of policies in the EU, with a particular focus on the issue of environmental protection. The theoretical background of the present research is provided by two of the main schools of thought that, in different historical contexts, have theorized unintended consequences as a relevant interpretative/analytical tool for European integration, namely neo-functionalism and neo-institutionalism. The paper focuses on three distinctive moments of the EU environmental policy: the first steps in the 1970s, the change of regulatory paradigm during the 1990s, and the EU leadership role in global environmental policy. The main argument is that while neo-functionalism can give a convincing account of the initial phases of EU environmental policy, neo-institutionalism offers a persuasive framework to understand the consolidation phases of the policy.

El rol de la Unión Africana (UA) en el Cuerno de África a partir del caso de Somalia - AMISOM (2007-2013)

El propósito de esta monografía es comprender cuál ha sido el rol de la Unión Africana (UA), dentro de la misión de paz AMISOM en el periodo de 2007- 2013. Por ello, el trabajo abarca aspectos geopolíticos e históricos, que han influido en la configuración del conflicto armado de Somalía y que han llevado progresivamente a la creación, evolución e implementación de mecanismos como las misiones de paz. Además, se abarcan los planteamientos del neo-funcionalismo y el neo-regionalismo para comprender las estructuras y las dinámicas propias de la UA y así, comprender la naturaleza tanto de sus acciones, como de sus propósitos; propósitos que aclaman el fomento del panafricanismo. Desde aquí se puede entender como su rol ha contribuido con el crecimiento del mercado de la industria militar en la región, a costa de la responsabilidad de proteger. Por último, se concluye que dichas dinámicas han llevado a la creación de comunidades de inseguridad.

Neo-Dandy

Neo-Dandy was a practice-led research project that explored histories of a quintessential men’s and womenswear garment from across the ages — the formal white dress shirt. The aim was to generate a body of radically new mens’ shirts that, whilst incorporating characteristics normally associated with womenswear, would remain acceptable to male wearers. A detailed study identified a broad spectrum of historical design approaches, ranging from the orthodox man’s shirt to the many variations of the women’s blouse. Within this spectrum a threshold was discovered where the men’s shirt morphed into the woman’s blouse — a ‘design moment’ that appeared to typify the dandy figure (a fashion character who subversively confronts dress norms of their day). The research analysed thousands of archive catwalk images from leading contemporary menswear designers, and of these, only a small number tampered appreciably with the men’s white dress shirt — suggesting a new realm of possibility for fashion design innovation. This led to the creation of a new body of work labelled ‘Neo-Dandy’. Sixty ‘concept shirts’ were produced, with differing styles and varying degrees of detailing, that fitted the brief of being acceptable to male wearers, eminently ‘wearable’ and on a threshold position between menswear and womenswear. These designs were each tested, documented, and assessed in their capacity to evolve the Neo-Dandy aesthetic. Based on these outcomes, a list of key design principles for achieving this aesthetic was identified to assist designers in further evolving this style. The creative work achieved substantial public acclaim with the ‘Neo Dandy Collection’ winning a prestigious Design Institute of Australia Award (Lifestyle category) and being one of four finalists in the prestigious overall field for design excellence. It was subsequently curated into three major Brisbane exhibitions — the ARC Biennial, at Artisan Gallery and the industry leader, the Mercedes Benz Fashion Festival. The collection was also exhibited at the Queensland Art Gallery.

Neo-Dandy

Neo-Dandy was a practice-led research project that explored histories of a quintessential men’s and womenswear garment from across the ages — the formal white dress shirt. The aim was to generate a body of radically new mens’ shirts that incorporated characteristics normally associated with womenswear, whist remaining acceptable to male wearers. A detailed study identified a broad spectrum of historical design approaches, ranging from the orthodox man’s shirt to the many variations of the women’s blouse. Within this spectrum a threshold was discovered where the men’s shirt morphed into the woman’s blouse — a ‘design moment’ that appeared to typify the dandy figure (a fashion character who subversively confronts dress norms of their day). The research analysed thousands of archive catwalk images from leading contemporary menswear designers, and of these, only a small number tampered appreciably with the men’s white dress shirt — suggesting a new realm of possibility for fashion design innovation. This led to the creation of a new body of work labelled ‘Neo-Dandy’. Sixty ‘concept shirts’ were produced, with differing styles and varying degrees of detailing, that fitted the brief of being acceptable to male wearers, eminently ‘wearable’ and on a threshold position between menswear and womenswear. These designs were each tested, documented, and assessed in their capacity to evolve the Neo-Dandy aesthetic. Based on these outcomes, a list of key design principles for achieving this aesthetic was identified to assist designers in further evolving this style. The creative work achieved substantial public acclaim with the ‘Neo Dandy Collection’ winning a prestigious Design Institute of Australia Award (Lifestyle category) and being one of four finalists in the prestigious overall field for design excellence. It was subsequently curated into three major Brisbane exhibitions — the ARC Biennial, at Artisan Gallery and the industry leader, the Mercedes Benz Fashion Festival. The collection was also exhibited at the Queensland Art Gallery.

Globalist Fallacies, Fictions and Facts: The MAI and Neo-classic Ideology

There is little evidence, historical or otherwise, to suggest that the needs of people and societies change greatly over time. Whilst acknowledging the benefits of the many recent technological innovations that are part of the contemporary milieu, I am reluctant to see such advances as sufficient rationale for the dismantling of the social contract between a government and its citizenry. The Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) highlights the move amongst developed countries to replace a national policy focus with a multilateral approach to global policy formulation that transcends the sovereignty of nation states. The purpose of this paper is to refute the assumptions underpinning multilateralist assertions that government has a diminishing role to play in the global society, and that national sovereignty, due to the increasingly important role of multilateral agreements and the global economy, is ‘a thing of the past’ (Arthur Asher, background briefing interview, Radio National, February 1, 1998). The basic premises that underpin the globalist argument1 for the diminishing role of government are that: • Economic growth increases jobs, prosperity, and freedom. • Free trade is an imperative for successful globalisation because financial sector performance - which depends on deregulation - is integral to global economic growth. • Information technology is revolutionising global trade and making globalisation inevitable. • Globalisation through deregulation, makes national boundaries meaningless, and therefore, national regulatory policies anachronistic. This paper compares the aforementioned axiomatic premises of globalisation to actual outcomes, events, and trends in the real world.

Letting go of Neo-Liberalism (with some help from Michel Foucault)

Neo-liberalism has become one of the boom concepts of our time. From its original reference point as a descriptor of the economics of the “Chicago School” such as Milton Friedman, or authors such as Friedrich von Hayek, neo-liberalism has become an all-purpose descriptor and explanatory device for phenomena as diverse as Bollywood weddings, standardized testing in schools, violence in Australian cinema, and the digitization of content in public libraries. Moreover, it has become an entirely pejorative term: no-one refers to their own views as “neo-liberal”, but it rather refers to the erroneous views held by others, whether they acknowledge this or not. Neo-liberalism as it has come to be used, then, bears many of the hallmarks of a dominant ideology theory in the classical Marxist sense, even if it is often not explored in these terms. This presentation will take the opportunity provided by the English language publication of Michel Foucault’s 1978-79 lectures, under the title of The Birth of Biopolitics, to consider how he used the term neo-liberalism, and how this equates with its current uses in critical social and cultural theory. It will be argued that Foucault did not understand neo-liberalism as a dominant ideology in these lectures, but rather as marking a point of inflection in the historical evolution of liberal political philosophies of government. It will also be argued that his interpretation of neo-liberalism was more nuanced and more comparative than the more recent uses of Foucault in the literature on neo-liberalism. It will also look at how Foucault develops comparative historical models of liberal capitalism in The Birth of Biopolitics, arguing that this dimension of his work has been lost in more recent interpretations, which tend to retro-fit Foucault to contemporary critiques of either U.S. neo-conservatism or the “Third Way” of Tony Blair’s New Labour in the UK.

Michel Foucault's 'the birth of biopolitics' and contemporary neo-liberalism debates

Neo-liberalism has become one of the boom concepts of our time. From its original reference point as a descriptor of the economics of the ‘Chicago School’ or authors such as Friedrich von Hayek, neo-liberalism has become an all-purpose concept, explanatory device and basis for social critique. This presentation evaluates Michel Foucault’s 1978–79 lectures, published as The Birth of Biopolitics, to consider how he used the term neo-liberalism, and how this equates with its current uses in critical social and cultural theory. It will be argued that Foucault did not understand neo-liberalism as a dominant ideology in these lectures, but rather as marking a point of inflection in the historical evolution of liberal political philosophies of government. It will also be argued that his interpretation of neo-liberalism was more nuanced and more comparative than more recent contributions. The article points towards an attempt to theorize comparative historical models of liberal capitalism.

Neo-planning : location-based social media to engage Australia’s new digital locals

Community engagement with time poor and seemingly apathetic citizens continues to challenge local governments. Capturing the attention of a digitally literate community who are technology and socially savvy adds a new quality to this challenge. Community engagement is resource and time intensive, yet local governments have to manage on continually tightened budgets. The benefits of assisting citizens in taking ownership in making their community and city a better place to live in collaboration with planners and local governments are well established. This study investigates a new collaborative form of civic participation and engagement for urban planning that employs in-place digital augmentation. It enhances people’s experience of physical spaces with digital technologies that are directly accessible within that space, in particular through interaction with mobile phones and public displays. The study developed and deployed a system called Discussions in Space (DIS) in conjunction with a major urban planning project in Brisbane. Planners used the system to ask local residents planning-related questions via a public screen, and passers-by sent responses via SMS or Twitter onto the screen for others to read and reflect, hence encouraging in-situ, real-time, civic discourse. The low barrier of entry proved to be successful in engaging a wide range of residents who are generally not heard due to their lack of time or interest. The system also reflected positively on the local government for reaching out in this way. Challenges and implications of the short-texted and ephemeral nature of this medium were evaluated in two focus groups with urban planners. The paper concludes with an analysis of the planners’ feedback evaluating the merits of the data generated by the system to better engage with Australia’s new digital locals.

Neo-planning: Location-based social media to engage Australia’s new digital locals

Community engagement with time poor and seemingly apathetic citizens continues to challenge local governments. Capturing the attention of a digitally literate community who are technology and socially savvy adds a new quality to this challenge. Community engagement is resource and time intensive, yet local governments have to manage on continually tightened budgets. The benefits of assisting citizens in taking ownership in making their community and city a better place to live in collaboration with planners and local governments are well established. This study investigates a new collaborative form of civic participation and engagement for urban planning that employs in-place digital augmentation. It enhances people’s experience of physical spaces with digital technologies that are directly accessible within that space, in particular through interaction with mobile phones and public displays. The study developed and deployed a system called Discussions in Space (DIS) in conjunction with a major urban planning project in Brisbane. Planners used the system to ask local residents planning-related questions via a public screen, and passers-by sent responses via SMS or Twitter onto the screen for others to read and reflect, hence encouraging in-situ, real-time, civic discourse. The low barrier of entry proved to be successful in engaging a wide range of residents who are generally not heard due to their lack of time or interest. The system also reflected positively on the local government for reaching out in this way. Challenges and implications of the short-texted and ephemeral nature of this medium were evaluated in two focus groups with urban planners. The paper concludes with an analysis of the planners’ feedback evaluating the merits of the data generated by the system to better engage with Australia’s new digital locals.

Some empirical results for neo-Piagetian reasoning in novice programmers and the relationship to code explanation questions

Recent research on novice programmers has suggested that they pass through neo-Piagetian stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, and concrete operational stages, before eventually reaching programming competence at the formal operational stage. This paper presents empirical results in support of this neo-Piagetian perspective. The major novel contributions of this paper are empirical results for some exam questions aimed at testing novices for the concrete operational abilities to reason with quantities that are conserved, processes that are reversible, and properties that hold under transitive inference. While the questions we used had been proposed earlier by Lister, he did not present any data for how students performed on these questions. Our empirical results demonstrate that many students struggle to answer these problems, despite the apparent simplicity of these problems. We then compare student performance on these questions with their performance on six explain in plain English questions.

Canadian Crime Control in the New Millennium: The Influence of Neo-conservative U.S. Policies and Practices

An important issue facing Canadians today is crime control and prevention. Research done in the late 1980s and early 1990s by three sociologists shows that Canadian federal criminal justice policies and practices adopted by the Mulroney government from 1984 to 1990 were inconsistent with US ‘law and order’ models in place at that time. However, since the mid‐1990s, Canadian federal and provincial governments have mimicked some US authoritarian and gender‐blind means of curbing crime. The main objective of this paper is to provide some key examples of criminal justice policy transfer from the USA in Canada. At first glance, Canada may appear to be a ‘kinder, gentler nation,’ but not to the extent assumed by many, if not most, outside observers.

"Old-fashioned and forward looking" : neo-liberalism and nostalgia in the Daring Books for Girls

An apparent resurgence in gender-specific marketing of products for children has been linked to post-millennial anxieties about the destabilizing of categories such as gender and nationality. Although links can be traced to past patterns of gender segregation in print culture for children, in this paper we are interested in tracking incongruities in texts in the present context. In this paper we analyze critically the franchise anchored around Andrea J. Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz’s The Daring Book for Girls,