Suchergebnisse

Why do some rebel groups forcibly recruit children while others largely refrain from using this strategy? We argue that it depends, in part, on their ability to profit from natural resources. Rebel groups that earn funding from natural resources have less incentive to restrain abusive behavior such as the forced recruitment of children and more incentive to tolerate and even promote this recruitment strategy. To test our expectations, we collected new data on the level of forcible recruitment of children by rebel groups. This is distinct from the broader use of child soldiers, a significant portion of whom volunteer to join armed groups. We combined the information on forced recruitment with a recent data set on rebel groups' exploitation of natural resources. Our analyses show that rebel groups that profit from natural resources are significantly more likely to forcibly recruit children than groups that do not exploit natural resources. Looking at specific characteristics, rebels that extract lootable resources are more likely to engage in the forced recruitment of children than groups that profit only from non-lootable resources or from no natural resources at all. The findings have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between rebels' revenue streams and their engagement in human rights violations.

Sovereign credit ratings importantly influence the borrowing costs of governments in international capital markets. Yet, there is limited understanding of how credit-rating agencies determine sovereign bond ratings. I provide theoretical justification and empirical evidence to support the proposition that a substantial presence of established global banks, acting as foreign direct investors, enhances the perceived creditworthiness of the host countries that have weak domestic institutions. Foreign banks can render the host countries' commitments to make good on their debt obligations more credible by encouraging the transparency in the financial system, disciplining their fiscal policies, and mitigating the incentives for and impact of bank bailouts. Statistical evidence from countries in emerging Europe shows that countries with high levels of foreign bank ownership tend to be assigned better sovereign credit ratings and find it easier to obtain credit at lower interest rates in sovereign bond markets. My findings are robust to various estimation techniques, to extensive controls for alternative determinants of credit ratings, for the endogeneity of foreign bank entry, and for sample-selection bias. Interviews with bankers and senior analysts at credit-rating agencies were used to complement quantitative analyses. This article is the first attempt in the literature on sovereign borrowing and debt to examine whether private market agents, such as global banks, can enhance the government's international creditworthiness.

This article revisits long-standing questions about consent, membership and emigration in Locke's thought. Commentators such as A John Simmons have argued that Locke opens political membership to both express consenters and some kind of tacit consenters, and not just to the former, as some have suggested. Simmons's reading seems to render Locke more sensible in that it does not exclude large numbers of people from membership or burden the few members with all the civic duties, and also in that it allows at least tacit-consenting members the right to relocate, while this right is denied to express-consenting members. Against this reading, the article shows, by resolving seemingly conflicting claims in the text, that people become members only by express consent. It also responds to the criticism that the express-consent-only reading would limit membership to a few and so would render Locke's account implausible from a practical point of view. The article then addresses the purported restriction Locke imposes on express consenters' right to emigrate, arguing that the restriction concerns the change of membership and not the right to relocate.

In recent years, there has been a wide-ranging debate about the neo-republican principle of non-domination. Neo-republicans argue that domination is a capacity for one to intentionally use arbitrary power to interfere in someone's life. Critics of neo-republicanism argue that this definition of freedom as non-domination precludes a structural analysis of domination, which would explain and critique the ways in which societies produce structural domination unintentionally. The article focuses on capitalism's labor process and its labor markets. It argues that critics are correct to think that the neo-republican principle of non-domination has an insufficient scope, but that an alternative account of structural domination should still support the neo-republican idea that agency must be involved. Otherwise, we might simply fail to explain the social processes that reproduce structural domination. What is needed is to explain how the labor process creates incentives for agents to intentionally produce structures that have unintended, yet dominating effects, and in turn, how the intentions of agents are conditioned by their social positions. Domination is thus agential and structural.

In response to the republican revival of the ideal of freedom as non-domination, a number of 'radical', 'labour' and 'workplace' republicans have criticised the limitations of Philip Pettit's account of freedom and government. This article proposes that the missing link in these debates is the relationship between republicanism and socialism. Seeking to bring this connection back into view in historical and theoretical terms, the article draws from contemporary radical republicans and the writings of Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg to propose a socialist republican theory of freedom and government. This consists of a conception of freedom as collective autonomy and a participatory democratic vision of a decentralised state with parliamentary institutions, the rule of law, worker-controlled workplaces, community-directed investment and a political culture of solidarity and public-spiritedness. This theory of socialist republicanism seeks to overcome the weaknesses and limitations of each respective independent theory and should appeal to republicans and socialists alike.

AbstractThis article makes a case for incorporating the concept of 'Critical Security History' (CSH) into security studies. While history plays a powerful role in a cornucopia of security stories, we contend that it often goes unnoticed in scholarly research and teaching. Against this backdrop, we present a detailed guide to study how history is told and enacted in non-linear ways. To do this, the article outlines how CSH can contribute to securitisation and ontological security studies. As shown, this lens casts a new light on the legacies of (de)securitisation processes and how they are commemorated. It also illustrates that ontological security studies have only begun to call into question the concept of historicity. Working through these observations, the article marshals insights from Halvard Leira's notion of 'engaged historical amateurism' to entice scholars interested in 'doing' CSH. While acknowledging that this research agenda is hard to achieve, our study of the 2012 Sarajevo Red Line project helps to illustrate the added value of trying to 'do' CSH in theory and in practice. We end with some reflections for future research and continued conversations.

AbstractThis article advances a new account of security as an intensely relational and ontologically entangled phenomenon that does not exist prior to, nor independently of, its intra-action with other phenomena and agencies. Security's 'entanglement' is demonstrated through an analysis of the protracted security concerns engendered by 'dangerous' scientific experiments performed with lethal H5N1 flu viruses. Utilising methodological approaches recently developed in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), the article explicates the intensely 'co-productive' dynamics at play between security and science in those experiments, and which ultimately reveal security to be a deeply relational phenomenon continuously emerging out of its engagement with other agencies. Recovering this deeper ontological entanglement, the article argues, necessitates a different approach to the study of security that does not commence by fixing the meaning and boundaries of security in advance. Rather, such an approach needs to analyse the diverse sites, dynamics, and processes through which security and insecurity come to intra-actively materialise in international relations. It also demands a fundamental reconsideration of many of the discipline's most prominent security theories. They are not merely conceptual tools for studying security, but crucial participants in its intra-active materialisation.

Rather than an assumption of statehood, the state's monopoly on the legitimate use of force is better understood as a normative ideal that regulates behavior, and constitutes states as the sole legitimate authority on violence. Existing literature on this norm has explored its development in response to piracy in the early to mid-1800s, but it has overlooked significant developments that occurred in response to the violence of transnational anarchist terrorism. Anarchist philosophers in the late 1800s resisted the normative basis of the state monopoly on violence and articulated their own competing claims. While their normative ideas failed to gain widespread acceptance, they elicited significant responses by states. In the Rome Conference of 1898 and the St. Petersburg Protocol, states reiterated the constitutive aspects of the state monopoly norm, and articulated new, deeper obligations to coordinate anti-anarchist policies. State officials considered a protean form of collective security against the anarchists, and applied the state monopoly norm to the control of the violence of individual, rather than corporate, non-state actors for the first time. Similar to trends identified in existing literature on the state monopoly norm, this article notes that the response to the anarchists was bolstered by their perception as "outsiders of authority," or violators of core constitutive norms of state authority. This trend and these broader historical dynamics are explained with reference to theoretical literature on normative resistance.

Cicero's rhetorical theory offers an important critique of efforts to systematize persuasion. His resistance to this systematization is grounded in his reconception of the orator's virtus, which, amidst the crisis of the late Roman Republic, he reimagines as a capacity to endure risk in confrontation with an unruly public. In order to stress this risk, he must at the same time valorize the uncertainties of language: the absence of predictable, manipulable links between speech and audience response. Because this model of eloquence implies that the rhetorical audience cannot and should not be systematized, it places surprising pressures on Cicero's elitism. This article examines Cicero's antipathy toward the routinization of rhetoric, contrasts it with the more rationalized model of speech in De analogia, Julius Caesar's fragmentary work on style, and considers how Cicero's stress on the autonomy of the rhetorical audience can be recovered as a resource for democratic theory.

This article contributes to theoretical discussions in the field of transnational media management research. We argue that investigating media companies' activities abroad from a strategy-as-practice perspective can overcome shortcomings implied in research predominantly focusing on strategies applied by entire companies. This is especially valid in times of digitization where changing technological frameworks force media companies to internationalize and restructure their business models. Based on a comparative qualitative analysis of interviews with 34 international senior media managers, this article provides a typology of cross-border activities related to three types of motivations: economic, organizational and socio-political. Relating activities and motivations provides a useful heuristic to systematically compare activities of most diverse media companies beyond objectives such as profit and growth. This sheds light on processes of digitization as related to numerous emerging organizational activities abroad with yet unclear economic trade-offs.

Theorists of political obligation have long devoted special attention to civil disobedience, establishing its pride of place as an object of philosophical analysis, and as one of a short list of exceptions to an otherwise binding obligation to obey the law. Yet all of this attention to civil disobedience has left the broader terrain of resistance to injustice relatively under-theorized. What other forms of action are justifiable – even required – in the face of systemic injustice? Candice Delmas' A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil offers an original and powerful defense of the idea that we have a duty to resist, and that carrying out this duty may sometimes require going beyond civil disobedience – engaging in forms of action that are evasive, shocking, violent, or otherwise deemed "uncivil." Building on a wealth of recent scholarship and a rich set of examples, Delmas grounds the duty to resist in the same principles that political philosophers routinely use to defend an obligation to obey the law: the natural duty of justice, the principle of fair play, Samaritan duties to rescue others from peril, and the associative duties of membership. In making room for uncivil forms of dissent, however, I contend that Delmas ironically hollows out the category of civil disobedience, wedding it too tightly to a principle of decorum, and isolating it from protest that exceeds the boundaries of the communicative. Nevertheless, A Duty to Resist is an excellent – and much needed – contribution to the literature on dissent and disobedience.

Whether people live in echo-chambers when they consume political information online has been the subject of much academic and public debate. This article contributes to this debate combining survey and web-tracking online data from Spain, a country known for its high political parallelism. We find that users spend more time in outlets of their political leanings but, generally, they engage in considerable cross-partisan media exposure, especially those in the left. In addition, we use a quasi experiment to test how major news events affect regular patterns of news consumption, and particularly, selective exposure. We find that the nature of news explains changes in users' overall consumption behaviour, but this has less to do with the type of event than with the interest it arouses. More importantly, we find that users become more polarized along party lines as the level of news consumption and interest for news increases.