Suchergebnisse

Readers of Perspectives will hopefully have noticed that in recent issues we have instituted a new practice of supplementing our journal's long-standing four-field classification of all books under review with a fifth "theme" section of book reviews—on such topics as gender and politics, democratization, and most recently immigration politics. This addition signifies more than a change of scholarly bookkeeping or journal formatting. It represents one of many ways that we have sought to bridge and to reconfigure standard subfield and methodological divides in our profession, and to open up new and more problem-oriented ways of thinking about the thing our profession is presumably organized to study—politics.

This issue of Polity contains six articles that explore the origins, workings, and permeability of different types of boundaries. All the articles mix empirical observation and theoretical reflection as they examine how social practices, such as patronage, philanthropy, and public prayer, affect citizens' loyalties and images of friend and foe. Adapted from the source document.

Professional boundaries are the essential limits that protect a practitioner's authority and vulnerable service users and are particularly important when working with children, young people and families

In judging a boundary from a geographer's point of view many physical as well as human aspects come under consideration. Stress has shifted from one aspect of the problem to another according to the particular bias of the times.At the time of the Paris peace conferences, geographers shared the general opinion that the linguistic factor should receive the greatest consideration in determining boundaries between national states. Language was regarded as the best criterion for drawing boundaries which would recognize what was called at that date "the right of self-determination." It was a new factor in diplomatic negotiations. Shift of emphasis from physical features to cultural characteristics as bases for boundary lines reflected the popular swing toward self-determination.

This evening I am asking you to consider with me for a while the subject of international boundaries, which, by a process involving many forces, has come to have a very important position in international law. Ratzel, the great German authority in the field of political geography, said that "the mathematical precision of boundaries is a special characteristic of higher civilization; the progress of geodesy and cartography have permitted the making in Europe of political boundaries as well as geographical abstractions." I employ the term "boundary" rather than the term "frontier," for "frontier" is used in two senses: one, that of the boundary; the other, that of the zone, narrower or wider, where one state ends and another begins, in which sometimes the exact limit of that frontier has never been exactly fixed.

The core, and arguably constitutive, problem confronted by an international political theory is that of the status of borders. This paper argues that pragmatism possesses useful resources for thinking about this issue, if understood in the right way. I begin by positing pragmatism as defined by four core commitments: holism, fallibilism, anti-scepticism, and the primacy of practice. The paper then examines four ways of endowing these basic commitments with more determinate political content: anti-revisionism, social holism, Richard Rorty's `ethnocentric' conception of political philosophy, and Deweyan democratic inquiry. The article rounds off by outlining a well hedged defence of this last perspective, as both normatively attractive and capable of addressing some of the problems posed by boundaries.