bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Active Labour Market Programmes and Employer Engagement in the UK and Germany
Authors: Wiggan Jay , Knuth Matthias
Published: September 2023

Active labour market policies aim at helping jobseekers into work. It is employers, however, who are the gatekeepers of employment. Paradoxically, neither policymakers nor policy evaluators seem to think much about this truism. While employers prefer simplicity, transparency and continuity in programme design so that their engagement would imply minimum additional transaction costs, policymakers tend to relaunch, redesign and rename programmes at short intervals in order to demonstrate concern and innovation. Employment assistance is all the more presuppositional because, in the view of employers, the need to publicly support a particular jobseeker initially comes across as a stigma. How active labour market policies in Germany and the UK have dealt with these multiple contradictions more gropingly than purposefully is shown through consideration of selected evaluation reports on programmes in which employer engagement played some role.
Who Are the Engaged Employers? Strategic Entry-Level Resourcing in Low-Wage Sectors
Authors: McGurk Patrick , Meredith Richard
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines employers’ recruitment of staff via active labour market programmes (ALMPs) through the lens of corporate human resource (HR) strategy. It reviews the available evidence on the characteristics of employers engaged with ALMPs in England and highlights their concentration in low-waged sectors, such as retail, hospitality, social care and cleaning. The chapter then draws on HR management theory to propose a model of ‘strategic entry-level resourcing’ to explain why employers in such sectors invest in the recruitment and retention of low-skill employees through engagement with ALMPs. The HR-based proposition is explored through a case study of a supermarket retailer’s engagement with the Work Programme, the UK’s flagship ALMP initiative from 2011 to 2017. The case illustrates how engagement is driven by strategic imperatives and sustained by some local managers, yet also constrained by other local managers and various corporate and extraneous factors.
HRM and Social Security: It Takes Two to Create a Transitional Labour Market
Authors: Borghouts Irmgard , Freese Charissa
Published: September 2023

This chapter aims to bring together the scientific domains of HRM and social security research to gain more insight into how HRM policy can be optimally aligned with social security policy in order to facilitate desired and necessary labour market transitions aimed at creating employment security. First, HRM and social security are discussed separately. Then the authors bring them together in a transition-inclusive HRM-labour market model which describes securing four labour market transitions for vulnerable (potential) workers. One of the four transitions of this model is further elaborated in the contribution, namely the transition from job to job in the event of redundancy.
Theorizing Local Peacebuilding
Authors: Leonardsson Hanna
Published: September 2023

This chapter outlines the analytical framework used for analysing the role of local governments in local peacebuilding. First, the chapter discusses local service delivery, arguing that providing for local needs is central to local legitimacy, which essentially promotes stability and peace. Second, it discusses local interactions, crucial to ground peace in the everyday lives of the population, which make peacebuilding relevant for the population. Third, it discusses vertical relationships, emphasizing that they matter for peace because they enable other developments on the ground, connecting the local to a greater whole. In addition, the chapter conceptualizes service delivery, local interactions and vertical relationships as peacebuilding functions, highlighting that peacebuilding matters based on the function it performs, rather than the form of peace being built. As peacebuilding functions, the analytical focus is on peacebuilding practices, arguing that peacebuilding, and perceptions of peace, develop based on performance and local expectations on outcomes. As such, peacebuilding is non-linear, situated within local understandings of context, institutions and legitimacy, and performed through politics.
Lebanese Municipalities, Centralized Peacebuilding and Possibilities for Change
Authors: Leonardsson Hanna
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines local governance in Lebanon in relation to Lebanese conflicts and peacebuilding. It discusses the Lebanese civil war and its aftermath, emphasizing developments in sectarian and political divides, modes of governance and present-day challenges. In addition, the chapter frames Lebanon and Lebanese municipalities within the local peacebuilding debate, illustrating how a particular regional approach to peacebuilding coexists with Western liberal intervention and a growing interest in municipalities as recipients of aid.
Local Interactions: Formal and Informal Everyday Interactions
Authors: Leonardsson Hanna
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses local interactions in the municipalities of Tyre, Bourj Hammoud and Saida as a peacebuilding function. The empirical discussions on structures for inclusion, daily interactions and inclusion in service delivery are analysed through the themes of participation, influence and fostering trust in the local government and trust between local communities. Empirically, the chapter scrutinizes formal and informal avenues for interactions to illustrate how local governments include the local population in peacebuilding or exclude it from the same. Such formal or informal structures of interaction include the constellation of municipal councils, interactions with the population as a local authority, or in relation to the provision of services to the local inhabitants. Although all three municipalities engage in local interactions, they do so in different ways, emphasizing contextualized ways of grounding local peacebuilding.
King William’s Overdraft
Authors: Roscoe Philip
Published: September 2023

Chapter 3 explores the historical interdependency of market and state, via the early history of London’s stock market. It shows how markets support states, taking the case of London. The London Stock Exchange developed as a mechanism for generating liquidity in the UK’s national debt, allowing the government to fund its colonialist activities. It examines how the occupation of stockjobber (the early market-makers) arose and the contestations, especially in terms of gender, that surrounded it. The chapter then looks at how states support markets, via the dispute between the Chicago Board of Trade and the city’s bucket shops, which eventually led to the legalization of options trading.
God Bless Margaret Thatcher
Authors: Roscoe Philip
Published: September 2023

Chapter 5 tracks the political economic changes that transformed the London Stock Exchange – and the world of finance – in the 1980s. It begins with a short political-economic history of the period, before zooming in on the abolition of exchange controls and the Big Bang reforms of 27 October 1986. It shows how a string of privatizations helped inflate profits for jobbers, just as the firms became open to foreign ownership, and the takeover frenzy that resulted. It notes the changes that were wrought to the social structure of the City during that period, especially the end of the partnership structure.
Finding Prices, Making Prices
Authors: Roscoe Philip
Published: September 2023

Setting out from Joseph Wright of Derby’s two paintings of scientific discovery (‘An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump’ and ‘The Alchemist, in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone’), Chapter 6 explores two rival conceptions of economic activity: discovering and making of prices. It sets out the proposition, drawn from science and technology studies, that financial facts are made through networks of experimentation and debate. These ideas are fleshed out using examples: the daily LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) fixing, and then, in more detail, the development of the CBOE (Chicago Board Options Exchange) underpinned by new ideas in mathematical finance. The chapter concludes with the construction of the first mortgage-backed securities by Salomon Brothers in the 1980s, an example of ‘securitization’, a novel mode of financial operation.
Other People’s Money
Authors: Roscoe Philip
Published: September 2023

Chapter 9 moves to the dotcom bubble of 1999. It introduces an autobiographical element, reflecting on the author’s own experiences as a financial journalist during this period. It then picks up the story of the founding of OFEX, a small company-focused stock exchange, which emerged from the London Stock Exchange’s own over-the-counter (OTC) rules. It highlights the role of technology in this development, centring on the Stock Exchange’s ‘non-SEAQ’ screen. The chapter concludes with an account of the growing business of financing dotcom start-ups, and the cultural circuit in which the author was active as a journalist, all of it paid for by other people’s money, or OPM.
The Burden of Empire
Authors: Roscoe Philip
Published: September 2023

A breakfast meeting in March 2000 sets the scene for a discussion of the role London’s markets have played in financing colonialist endeavours. The book’s narrative continues with an account of the closure of the London Stock Exchange’s junior market and the subsequent outcry from the financial community. This, and strategic pressures from the new market OFEX, led to the formation of the Exchange’s Alternative Investment Market, or AIM, which was by 2000 becoming a hub for mineral exploration finance. Chapter 11 concludes with an account of the Shanghai rubber bubble of the early 20th century and the British plantations in Malaya, where indentured labour generated high returns for investors that funded them. The chapter notes the similarities in deal structure between these financings and those of the dotcom era discussed in Chapter 10.
Extractive Industries
Authors: Roscoe Philip
Published: September 2023

Chapter 12 continues the theme of Chapter 11, with a focus on the financing of mining. It shows that neocolonialist thinking is still ingrained into contemporary mining finance, especially in the valuation practice known as the ‘discount rate’. It highlights the role of spectacle in finance, via a brief detour into the mining fraud of Bre-X. The chapter then moves to the construction of mortgage-backed collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), the financial device responsible for the 2008 crash, arguing that there are similar asymmetries of power and practices of extraction at work. It concludes with a return to the OFEX story, where the market’s founders suffer a failed fundraising and lose control of the market.
The EU Generation and Their Migration Motivations
Authors: Hof Helena
Published: September 2023

Part I of this book, Spatial Mobility to Asia: Moving Ahead by Moving out, examines the EU Generation’s physical movement, that is, migration to Asia. Chapter 1 uses statistics and qualitative data from interlocutors’ youth in Europe in order to delineate how European university students of the EU Generation grew up in what they perceive to be a thrilling yet competitive educational environment – one that values overseas experiences and suggests these to be a prerequisite for a fulfilling and successful professional career. The chapter then discusses the related literature on intra-European mobility, educational migration and the labour market before it introduces the theoretical approach to class in migration. The remaining chapter categorises the EU Generation’s varied migration motivations into four major types. The typology demonstrates how different forms of capital are converted or validated in the migration of each type and underlines that across all types mobility becomes a form of capital in itself, one that helps explain how the EU Generation secure employment in Asian global cities.
Career Trajectories through an Intersectional Lens
Authors: Hof Helena
Published: September 2023

Chapter 6 unearths how the entanglements of gender, ‘race’, age and generation, as well as class identities shape the EU Generation’s work experience in the destination cities. This chapter conceptualises migrants’ employment and career development by their ‘Other’ identity as a way to unearth how work and (im)mobility affect each other. Integrating gender in the analysis reveals differences in the two cities. Yet, the comparison also highlights how this generational cohort value work as an undeniable factor of identity-making. As middle-class migrants, they are often unwilling and insecure about forfeiting their career for a family. This raises questions about the value of work in neoliberal labour markets but also about the taken-for-grantedness of having a family at a certain life stage – or at all. Augmented by ongoing geographical mobility, frequent organisational mobility, and the anxiety of becoming socially immobile, many migrants project family plans into a vague point in the future.
Belonging through Romantic Relationships
Authors: Hof Helena
Published: September 2023

Chapter 8 foregrounds how intimacy and romantic relationships, or the lack thereof, and (im)mobility are intertwined, and present another factor shaping migratory ‘work-life pathways’. This chapter reveals how perspectives and rationales change over time and teases out how intimate relationships provide the stability and security to anchor migrants in the long term. It demonstrates that the EU Generation gradually experience emplacement and develop ties to communities in and segments of their migrant receiving societies in the Asian global cities Singapore and Tokyo. That said, mobility has become an underlying thread of the life trajectories of these middle-class migrants. While the migrants might feel at home, they seldom rule out the possibility of leaving again. Mobility and roots, and thus the possibility of having a home abroad without settling down, do not contradict. Further mobility or staying decisions increasingly depend on romantic partners and the possibility of both partners legally residing and working in the host country.
Cryptocurrency, Decentralized Finance, and Blockchain: Gender Issues in Political Economy and Security
Authors: Henshaw Alexis
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores how new financial technologies including blockchain, cryptocurrency, and decentralized finance present distinctly gendered challenges. Examining a range of cases, it calls for more attention to the deployment of decentralized finance in the Global South, noting that such interventions often fail to live up to their promise while circumventing best practices associated with ethics and gender mainstreaming.
How to Study Alienation: Marx’s Four Relations
Authors: Kassem Sarrah
Published: September 2023

This chapter sets out its theoretical foundation before delving into the first part of its analytical framework based on examining alienation. Understanding the development of material production, and thereby social life, as the guiding force of history, its theoretical foundation is informed by an understanding of historical materialism, dialectics and labor theory of value based primarily on Volume I of Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. In doing so, it centers the workers within capitalist class relations and focuses on the systematic analysis of the relations of alienation based on Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. These relations are fourfold: alienation to the labor activity, labor’s product, species-being and fellow humans. When regarded holistically, these relations underline the different dimensions by which workers are estranged and fragmented through their organization and working conditions within capital’s larger circuit of accumulation. The relations of alienations are crucial for the later analysis of the case studies, where their appearance can differ depending on the organization of the platform, demonstrating how these foster atomization and individualization, and, in part, explaining why workers may not organize.
“I Am Not a Robot”: (Trans)national Labor Organization at the Warehouses
Authors: Kassem Sarrah
Published: September 2023

This chapter provides the second half of the analysis of the Amazon warehouse case study by focusing on how such a platform provides both challenges and possibilities for these workers to express their agency. It examines their four power resources in relation to the organization of the platform: structural power, associational power, institutional power and societal power. It integrates in its analysis the larger political–economic context, the larger (trans)national context and Amazon’s union-busting, which can prove to be additional obstacles to the organization of workers, as Amazon continuously attempts to disrupt, undermine and diminish their efforts. Despite weak marketplace power workers may navigate their material obstacles and Amazon’s counterstrategies to instrumentalize their workplace and disruptive power derived from their assembly within warehouses. While labor organizations, from traditional and grassroots unions to transnational and digital movements, support associational and institutional powers to improve their working conditions and fight back against the various facets of alienation, workers are increasingly gaining momentum in organizing themselves and making their movement intrinsic to the wider public debate. In doing so, they are claiming their agency and conceiving of it more holistically in terms of a possible transnational, inter-platform and inter-sectoral movement.
“Artificial Artificial Intelligence”: Gigging on Amazon Mechanical Turk
Authors: Kassem Sarrah
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the second case study, Amazon Mechanical Turk. In stark contrast to warehouse workers, these are organized on a web-based platform to complete piecework. This chapter investigates the relation of these dimensions to the alienation of MTurk workers regarding their labor activity, the product of labor, their species-being and their fellow humans. These are premised on an anonymized relation between the worker, who receives an alphanumerical ID, and the requester, who may not identify themselves on the platform. Workers are essentially regarded as independent contractors onto whom all possible costs are shifted, with the exception of Amazon’s physical and digital infrastructure in the form of the MTurk platform. Laboring microtasks, termed Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), from behind their screens, workers are confronted within various hyperoutsourced and virtual assembly and production lines across geographical and temporal zones. These gigs can range from classifying videos to identifying objects and answering surveys for which workers receive a piece-wage upon their completion and evaluation. Their human labor, and their labor products in the form of data, can be further used for machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) more generally. This can prove to be central to general contemporary and future technological developments which are bound to have their own repercussions.
Alienation across Amazon and the Platform Economy
Authors: Kassem Sarrah
Published: September 2023

As the two Amazon case studies have been isolated from one another to grasp their complexity, this chapter contrasts these and contextualizes them within the larger platform economy. It highlights how the case of Amazon warehouse workers illustrates, on the one hand, the historical continuation of traditional time-wage laboring where workers are assembled in the same physical space within the platform economy, sharing similarities with platforms such as Google. MTurk, on the other hand, sheds light on a different historical continuation, namely of piece-laboring, adopted by capital into the new dimension of the digital. Although even other time-wage laboring platforms are known to contract labor and depend on the ghost work of laborers like that of MTurk, the MTurk case is meant to give insights into the significance of laboring remotely through the web and that of piecework. The gig economy is founded precisely on the latter, constituting an essential part of the platform economy (see also location-based gig platforms). This chapter ultimately highlights how the platform economy may contain some peculiarities, but ultimately (re)produces current capitalist trends towards algorithmic management of labor processes, hypertaylorization of work, fragmentation of the workforce and precarization of the labor market.
Conclusion
Authors: Kassem Sarrah
Published: September 2023

Having looked at the two contrasting Amazon platforms in terms of their platform organization, and having compared and contextualized these within the larger platform economy, this short concluding chapter takes a step back to underline the importance of researching the agency of workers generally, and the platform economy more specifically. It stresses the importance of and necessity for future and further research, both in terms of grasping labor and the labor movement in relation to gendered and racialized dynamics, material contexts and subjectivities and in terms of changing political–economic realities as a result of COVID-19 and ongoing wars that further exacerbate inequalities. Acknowledging the importance of platform cooperatives as alternatives, this book concludes by interweaving reflections to: the reader and consumers, who as members of society are exposed to the omnipresence of platforms; researchers, who support the power resources of workers; the workers, who labor and power the heart of platforms; unions, which have historically pushed for rights and are now co-evolving along intersectional lines and grassroots efforts; and finally regulators, who must hold platforms accountable given their growing political–economic, societal and technological powers.
The Pursuit of a Hierarchical Order in the People’s Republic of China
Authors: Roth Antoine
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines PRC leaders’ attitudes towards international order and their hierarchical understanding of it. It tells the story of their consistent advocacy for the establishment of a new, more just, and stable order that would guarantee equality with Western great powers for China and ensure its leadership of Asia. It also discusses Chinese statesmen and intellectuals’ focus on the hierarchical aspects of the established, Western-dominated order, one based in their view on raw power competition. The PRC has strived to raise its ‘comprehensive national power’ and its status within this established order, and to obtain support in this task from its neighbours through a proactive engagement policy. The chapter finally shows how, under Xi Jinping, a now powerful China has become much clearer about its expectation that neighbouring states will accept its role as overseer of order in the region and behave with the necessary deference.
Traditional Tools of Rulership in the Modern World
Authors: Roth Antoine
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses the use by PRC leaders of the traditional tools of statecraft that are the mastery over names (or language in general), the awesomeness that comes from superior power, and the provision of material benefits to followers. First, the Chinese belief in the power of names continues to transpire in efforts to establish a sophisticated propaganda apparatus, used internationally to try to shape the international discourse on China’s place in the world. China has also recreated a sort of modern incarnation of the imperial ranks and titles system through its network of partnerships. Second, the use of force is still viewed by Chinese leaders today as it was in imperial times, namely, as a means to awe neighbours into submission and to punish those considered to have violated the rules of good behaviour in their relation with the PRC. Third, the lure of the profits to be gained from access to China’s vast market and sophisticated products is still consciously used to incentivize compliance with the Chinese vision of order and to induce deference from neighbouring states with pledges of economic cooperation and threats of economic retaliation for any ‘offence’.
The New World of Digital Work: Structural Changes and Labour Recomposition
Authors: Porta Donatella della , Chesta Riccardo Emilio , Cini Lorenzo
Published: September 2023

The chapter looks at the structural transformations triggered by the processes of digitalization by showing how they have been able to redefine global competition based on digital innovation, at the macro-level, restructure companies in terms of a network-based organization at the meso-level, and change the nature of the workplace and its constraints and opportunities for worker collective organizations at the micro-level. The chapter covers the current wave of digitalization and automation by building upon classical works that define technology as neither neutral nor autonomous, but rather as an outcome of the social interests embedded in its design and application. These directly refer to the power of designers and planners in their use of technological innovation to reshape traditional functions of labour-saving and labour control. At the same time, the chapter develops the critique of technological determinism developed by the social shaping of the technology paradigm by looking at the interactions between digital transformation of the workplace and identity formation of new typologies of digital workers.
Challenges to Collective Action in Digital Work
Authors: Porta Donatella della , Chesta Riccardo Emilio , Cini Lorenzo
Published: September 2023

The chapter presents and discusses the main structural and political challenges underlying platform workers’ organizational processes of collective action. Firstly, we present the definition of digital work on which we base our analysis of the rise of platform worker mobilizations. Drawing on the extant literature on the subject, we look at the main challenges to collective action for the two digital workers’ categories considered in the book, namely, food-delivery couriers and Amazon drivers. Secondly, by building a typology of labour process transformations connected to digital work, the chapter discusses the main challenges that these two categories of workers face in organizing collective action at the workplace level. Most of the obstacles to workers’ collective organizing in platform economy derive from specific processes of labour fragmentation that the digital intermediation of platforms induces either directly or indirectly. More specifically, we identify five processes of fragmentation in platform labour: legal, technological, organizational, spatial, and social. In the chapter, we introduce and discuss each of them at length for food-delivery couriers and Amazon drivers.
The Role of the Malaysian Armed Forces in Defence Diplomacy: A Foreign Policy Outworking of Civil–Military Relations in Malaysia
Authors: Han David
Published: September 2023

This chapter describes the process through which Malaysia’s civilian leadership has been able to convince the military to support policies that eschew overly militarized solutions to address changing security challenges domestically and internationally. Thus, the MAF were steered into supporting foreign and security policies in the form of HADR and peace operations in the late 1980s to facilitate national development. It is argued that this strategy has been particularly successful because military subordination ensured the neat execution of a comprehensive civilian strategy as well as the continuation of a stable civil–military relations balance. It is characteristic of the Asian model of military evolutions, however, that the MAF’s apparent apolitical stance has persisted together with the ethnocentric communalism inherent in all facets of the Malaysian state that guarantees Malay supremacy and leadership.
The Architecture and Evolution of Civil–Military Relations in Vietnam
Authors: Vuving Alexander L.
Published: September 2023

This chapter argues that the realities of civil–military relations in Vietnam defy the Western models that dominate the literature. The control architecture underlying this relationship is based on the mutual embeddedness of the military and the Communist Party. While the Party exerts political control over the military, the military’s participation and influence in elite politics and policymaking are not only legitimate but also an integral part of the architecture. The chapter explicates the architecture of Vietnam’s civil–military relations and charts the military’s influence in politics since the Third Indochina War. It shows that, paradoxically, military conflict is not the only and not even the main reason for a surge in the military’s influence in Vietnamese politics and foreign policy after the Cold War. The military gained more influence because it assumed a major political role. While the military’s influence has been on the wane recently, the Party’s control continues to prevail over the trends of commercialization and professionalization.
Military and Politics in Patrimonial North Korea
Authors: Woo Jongseok
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the political roles played by the Korean People’s Army (KPA) in North Korea. It addresses the main gap between extensive political roles by the KPA and its political weakness and continued loyalty to the Kim family rule by utilizing the Asian military evolution concept. It argues that North Korea is a patrimonial political system in which the single dictator is positioned above the partisan and ideological authorities and exercises unchecked political power. The analysis focuses on how the KPA played the regime’s security role in three of the most important stages that defined North Korea’s political path: (1) Kim Il-sung’s power struggle and creation of patrimonial authority in the 1950s–60s; (2) Kim Jong-il’s Songun politics in the late 1990s; and (3) family succession to Kim Jong-un and his political reshuffle since 2011. The analysis illustrates that the rise and fall of the KPA’s political role does not necessarily reflect its political power position. Rather, it merely reflects the dictator’s ruling method of choice – either ruling the country through the party institutions or through military force – for regime survival.
Defence Diplomacy and Civil–Military Relations: The Case of Bangladesh
Authors: Zaman Rashed Uz
Published: September 2023

For Bangladesh, defence diplomacy has evolved as a cornerstone of its military since the restoration of democracy in 1991. This chapter highlights the evolving roles and activities of the Bangladesh Armed Forces in this context as well as an extension of traditional diplomacy of the country. The military’s training and education facilities foster international cooperation and regularly host members of foreign armed forces. Bangladesh’s involvement in United Nations peacekeeping in particular has been instrumental in strengthening the defence diplomacy sector and has become an inseparable part of the military’s identity. It is argued that Bangladesh succeeded in promoting itself as a keeper of international peace and security through its participation in peacekeeping. Consequently, the chapter concludes that despite its peripheral position Bangladesh has been able to carve out its own space in international politics by virtue of promoting soft power through defence diplomacy, notwithstanding the fact that these activities are often circumscribed by manifold challenges.
Social Alternatives
Authors: Martell Luke
Published: September 2023

Chapter 2 overviews social alternatives. A discussion of alternative education looks at free universities, A.S. Neill’s writings and his school, Summerhill, Paolo Freire’s argument for dialogical education, and Illich’s advocacy of deschooling. Then the focus is on communal alternatives to the family, coupling, and conventional child-rearing. The chapter looks at food counterculture, such as freeganism and skip diving, that create green, decommodified, collective, and egalitarian alternatives. The chapter looks at alternative urban social centres and how they contrast with other forms of alternative society politics. It discusses the abolition of prison, defunding the police, and alternatives of restorative and transformative justice. The chapter looks at political alternatives arguing that the welfare state sets up non-capitalist institutions, signalling the possibility of an alternative society. The chapter discusses concrete utopias, bottom-up social reproduction practices in the Global South that provide post-development and decolonial alternatives to abstract utopias and Global North or Eurocentric models. The chapter outlines John Holloway’s search for prefigurative alternatives in cracks in capitalism, but argues that approaches to alternative societies should not be opposed to party or state politics.
Utopianism and Its Critics
Authors: Martell Luke
Published: September 2023

Many of the alternative societies looked at are utopias of one sort or another and Chapter 3 outlines utopianism and criticisms of it. The chapter covers classical and contemporary meanings of utopia, and current, future, macro, and micro utopianism. It discusses the functions of utopia, especially in facilitating change. It outlines how utopia overcomes the problem of aspiring to change without a detailed and tested idea of the objective. The chapter discusses Left-wing utopianism, indicating how some socialist utopianism now is of the current micro sort outlined in chapters 1 and 2. Feminist and anti-racist utopias are set out. The chapter responds to materialist and Marxist criticisms not by rejecting their perspective but by outlining how utopianism can meet their criteria for materialist and conflictual change. It responds to liberal and pluralist criticisms of utopianism as totalitarianism and endist – and so stopping change – not by rejecting liberal and pluralist concerns but by saying utopianism can encompass them and allow for continuing change. The chapter argues that many of the conflations or dichotomies that utopianism is put into by critics are false. This is in tune with the pluralist and multilevel approach of the book that rejects bipolarities and exclusivities.
International Theory at the Margins
Authors: Onuf Nicholas Greenwood
Published: September 2023

International Theory at the Margins reprints 13 of the author’s essays, all of which originally appeared in publications not often or readily accessed by most scholars and advanced students in the field of International Relations. They address themes of marginal concern to international theorists at the time of their publication (ranging from 1982 to 2018). They explore philosophical issues, such as reconciling social construction with materiality. They work through conceptual issues, such as relating power to powers. They touch on historical issues, such as epochal change in the modern world. They raise ethical issues, such as reliance on virtue. They investigate the properties of language such that the ‘world’ is what we say about it.
The essays in this volume approach these themes, and the issues they raise, from a variety of perspectives, variously augmenting the author’s well-known treatments of performative speech, rules, and the conditions of rule in every society, including international society. They build on the work of giants from Aristotle to Foucault. They draw on the work of diverse contemporary international theorists, including Johan Galtung, Morton Kaplan, Joseph Nye and James Rosenau. They evince a disposition to systematize what others leave aside. They raise more questions than they answer. They stay at the margins and make a virtue of doing so.
Comparative International Politics (1982)
Authors: Onuf Nicholas Greenwood
Published: September 2023

Chapter 1 has its origins as a response to Morton Kaplan’s System and Process in International Politics, in which he modelled several ‘types’ of international systems and stipulated ‘rules’ for each type. At the time, students of comparative politics adopted structural-functionalist conceptions of social systems and their functional requisites (rules by another name), and international theorists posited a succession of systems, consisting of numerous autonomous, interacting political systems, or states, from the Renaissance to the present. The anthropological literature on ‘primitive systems’ points in a different direction; defining culture in functional terms points up the material conditions in which any system functions. Comparing international system, however crudely, by reference to population density and climate zones suggests an alternative to Kaplan’s approach. Flirting with vulgar materialism for comparative purposes, this alternative was bound to fail—as would any rapprochement in the study of comparative politics and international relations.
Prometheus Prostrate (1984)
Authors: Onuf Nicholas Greenwood
Published: September 2023

The second chapter shifts attention from politics, generally considered as the way in which people makes crucial decisions in any society, to the production of valued things, or political economy, in the modern world. International relations fall out of the picture, and so do system types. With the Club of Rome and its sensational first report on ‘the predicament of mankind’ titled Limits to Growth as a source of inspiration, this essay offers a determined critique of liberal ideology and modern hubris from a broadly materialist perspective. It draws on discussions of long waves of expanding and declining growth in the world capitalist economy. Indebted to Ernest Mandel’s work on revolutions in power technology, it foresees a shift from heavy work to cheap technologies of social control, and it sets forth a view to the future that that would seem to be materializing roughly as, and when, expected.
Centre–Periphery Relations (2017)
Authors: Onuf Nicholas Greenwood
Published: September 2023

Chapter 3 picks up on one of the author’s early concerns: Johan Galtung’s schematic yet powerful work on the structural properties of aggression, violence and imperialism. Galtung’s model of radical inequality, which he applied so tellingly to centre–periphery relations in the modern world, is generalizable to almost any society. The key is to see how the pervasive presence of structural inequality and exploitation is effectuated with rules, manifest in rule, yet marginalized in liberal thought. International theorists routinely ignore or misconstrue structural inequality among states even as—or because—it is institutionalized in the conditions of rule framing world politics. Reconceptualizing Galtung’s structural model by reference to three primary kinds of rules and three generic forms of rule honours a long-standing intellectual debt and affirms the ethical thrust of Galtung’s life’s work.
Relative Strangers (2013)
Authors: Onuf Nicholas Greenwood
Published: September 2023

Chapter 7 considers hospitality as an expression of human sociality and perhaps a universal principle that could anchor a cosmopolitan ethics. The longest essay in this volume, it starts with Jacques Derrida’s treatment of hospitality. Drawing from diverse literatures, the essay goes on to argue that hospitality is indeed predicated on a human universal—the disposition to launch objects and observe the consequences of doing so. In every society this disposition translates into giving things to others, but not always in expectation of receiving something of comparable value in return. When gifts do not oblige giving back, they function as status-markers; they mark off what the author called ‘social distance’ long before COVID-19. State leaders and diplomats in international society conspicuously engage in the asymmetric exchange of gifts as a measure of respect and deference.
World-making, State-building (2014)
Authors: Onuf Nicholas Greenwood
Published: September 2023

Chapter 11 was written for a small conference on state-building that took place in Belgrade—a part of the world where state-building was then, and remains, an urgent concern. At that time, the author was pursuing an interest in the epochal unfolding of the modern world and had come to the conclusion that concepts are always metaphorical in source and use. The occasion offered an opportunity to combine these two interests. We moderns use metaphors deriving from our bodily experience in daily life to characterize our political arrangements. The essay adopts and extends the periodization of modernity informing Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge. Starting with the Renaissance, six epochs can be identified. Each has favoured its own metaphorical complex, which successively have supported the modern state in a world of states.
COVID-19 and the Immobility Turn
Authors: Cairns David , Clemente Mara
Published: September 2023

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the main theoretical terms of reference used in the book, including discussion of the ‘mobility turn’ and the accompanying ‘new mobilities paradigm’, developed to help explain multiplication in the forms and popularity of various forms of mobility, or mobilities, during the years prior to the pandemic. This is followed by an outline of the main characteristics of the immobility turn that accompanied the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the dramatic falls in international air passenger numbers, a potentially huge loss of earnings from tourism and the generation of uncertainty for many migrants. The authors also provide contextual information on the impact of immobility on Portugal – the country in which they conducted their empirical research – including relevant statistics on tourism, student mobility and labour migration.
Maintaining Migration during a Pandemic
Authors: Cairns David , Clemente Mara
Published: September 2023

Chapter 5 looks at international labour migration during the pandemic, focusing on the case study of seasonal agribusiness workers in Portugal. Labour migration is a topic that has considerable social, political and economic gravitas in many countries, including Portugal. As an important form of mobility, some forms of labour migration, including international and internal circulation, were able to continue during the height of the pandemic. Also apparent were distinct urban and rural dynamics, especially movement from the former to the latter. Evidence from policy makers and stakeholders in the migration field in Portugal illustrates a clash of values and brings to light some of the practical problems of maintaining open labour migration pathways during a pandemic. This includes the risk of generating new conflicts and racist sentiments due to associations being made between internal migration and the spread of COVID-19 and due to migrant workers’ precarious living conditions becoming more visible.
What Caused, and How Do We Fix, Our Crisis?
Authors: Caudill David S.
Published: September 2023

This chapter acknowledges the complexity of the crisis of expertise, as well as the danger of assuming that only one “side” is operating ideologically. The chapter surveys some recent explanations (of our crisis of expertise) offered by sociologists and endorses their suggestion that recourse to scientific explanations needs to be accompanied by some level of modesty. Finally, the chapter considers two institutions that some hope will solve the crisis of expertise, namely, the law and the scientific establishment. In other words, why not just impose scientific truths through legal regulation? Or, alternatively, why not just have a majority of scientists announce a compelling consensus that everyone should accept? The chapter explains that both of these institutions have failed, and will continue to fail, due to (1) the current capture of the legal system by political parties and (2) the fact that the consensus of a majority of scientists alone is not necessarily compelling nowadays.
Worldviews as “Religious” Frameworks
Authors: Caudill David S.
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses historically on the philosophical theory of quasi-religious worldviews in conflict by analyzing a 17th-century Dutch Golden Age painting. The painting reflects the effects of iconoclasm—destruction of images—in formerly Catholic churches by Dutch Calvinists, as well as providing an example of citizens—Protestants and Catholics—who live in different worlds, that is, who see things differently and have different values. There is an analogy here with Latour’s sense that there are two worlds in the climate-change debate, making it difficult for us to have a common understanding of a scientific issue. Finally, the chapter revisits a unique 19th-century critique of Enlightenment claims to have risen above religious belief. Dutch Calvinist thinkers identified a religion among the supporters of the French Revolution, not in the sense of a deistic religion, but a set of faith-like commitments—perhaps a “quasi-religion” or ideology.
The Quasi-Religious Aspect of the Crisis
Authors: Caudill David S.
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores some recent studies that support the argument for an ideological or religious orientation to the crisis of expertise, including Professor Shi-Ling Hsu’s identification of anti-science ideology in the Trump administration. Such studies are helpful in showing how science can become politicized—scientists become associated with a political party—and can lose its mooring in evidence. The problem with the term “anti-science ideology,” however, is the implication that believers in consensus science have no ideology—they (allegedly) simply follow the facts. The scientific enterprise, however, issues numerous facts, sometimes inconsistent and sometimes outdated in terms of scientific progress. Even consensus scientists belong to a community of believers with values and commitments.
Fragile Rights
Authors: Revillard Anne
Published: September 2023

Over the years, many disability-related rights have been legally recognized, but how has this changed the everyday lives of disabled people? This book offers an original perspective on disability rights by addressing the question of their (non-)realization at the individual level, taking the experiences of ordinary disabled people as a starting point. Drawing on biographical interviews collected from individuals with either mobility or visual impairments in France, the book analyses the reception of disability policies in the fields of education, employment, social rights, and accessibility. It examines to what extent these policies contribute to the realization of the associated rights among disabled people. In all the domains under study, the rights associated with disability suffer from major implementation flaws. In this context, disabled citizens play a very active role in the realization of their rights: they protest, negotiate, tinker, use, or circumvent policies in order to make their rights real, but also to assert themselves as subjects of rights.
Autonomy under Supervision
Authors: Revillard Anne
Published: September 2023

The reception of disability-related social rights (disabled adult benefit, disability compensation benefit) is marked by a paradox: although they are factors of autonomy, they are perceived negatively. This chapter explains this paradox by the link between rights consciousness and the administrative relationship. The effectiveness of benefits is diminished by the ways in which they are implemented and by users’ perceptions of this process. The experience – and expectation – of heavy supervision, conflicts over needs assessments and disability levels, interruptions in payments, and unmanageable delays create a lack of trust and predictability, as well as a perception of disrespect. Social rights then fail in their capacity to reduce uncertainty and to act on people’s perception of their social status by making them subjects of rights. Whether the eventual outcome is non-take-up, or distrustful or reluctant take-up, rights consciousness is therefore tenuous and unstable.