Suchergebnisse

From the contents: Kenya/Bo Göransson -- Zambia/Jeremy Gould -- Nigeria/Jirin Ibrahim -- South Africa/Heidi Hudson

On August 11, 2006, in response to the 34-day summer war between Israel and Hizb'allah, the United Nations Security Council passed resolution 1701, which called for a more robust international military presence along the United Nations-drawn Blue Line dividing Israel and southern Lebanon. But the strengthened United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) is likely to face a range of security threats that could undermine its peacekeeping duties and endanger its personnel. Among the more serious threats, underscored by intelligence reports over the past few years that indicate a growing al-Qaeda presence in Lebanon, is a catastrophic terrorist attack against UNIFIL by local salafist jihadist entities.

This study is the third in the series. The subject, Nordic urban research, is one that is increasing in importance. In 2007, for the first time in history, half of the world's population live, work, consume and pollute in cities. In the European Union, 80% of all citizens already live in urban areas. Consequently, many of the challenges we currently face, such as ensuring continued economic development, sustainable energy, public health and environmental quality are in part urban-based. In commissioning this study, NordForsk wished to explore the potential of Nordic research cooperation in the field of urban research as one means of meeting these chalenges.

This report tracks the history of historical responsibility in negotiations to and under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The concept aims at attributing individual country burdens in mitigating climate change based on the relative levels of past emissions. A hermeneutic approach and discursive theory has been applied to the empirical material consisting of documents form the main bodies of the UNFCCC. The historic narrative constitutes a basis for an analysis of how the UNFCCC framing of historical responsibility have affected discussions on equity and inclusiveness across the North-South divide. Even though the concept was part of the discursive struggle over the content of the UNFCCC, it has been more central in the struggle to make the principles on equity, established in the Convention, operational. Historical responsibility has been most elaborated in a proposal by Brazil to the 1997 pre-Kyoto negotiations. This proposal combined a biophysical approach (preferred by the North) with that of a political economic approach (preferred by the South). However, the proposal was soon pushed off the central agenda and discussions on the topic turned technical and centred on scientific uncertainties. The biophysical framing excluded discussions on equity. As the proposal was marginalised within UNFCCC as a whole it became central in discussions on comprehensive approaches to historical responsibility. Any who wanted to discuss comprehensive approaches were referred to this forum wherein talks on equity were excluded by rules of discussion. This echoes a world system with a periphery in the global South dependent upon core countries in the global North. The last mentioned have the capacity to set the agenda. The resulting discursive rules, excluding talks on equity, have not been good to the inclusiveness of Southern participants in the discussion process nor favoured much needed dialogue across the North/South divide in climate change negotiations.

This paper aims at discussing a research plan on educational leadership for educated teacher in pre-schools and is produced in the beginning of a doctoral project. Early childhood education and care in Sweden has been extended and reformed by the government as a part of the Swedish family welfare policy. The responsibility now lies within the Ministry of education and Science, and the supervisory responsibility with the National Agency for education. Pre-school (1-6) in Sweden are now a part of the educational system and has its own Curriculum. The School Act in 1998 has decentralized the responsibility to the municipalities, and thereby also the organization of the educational leadership. This change of the educational leadership for pre-school from a leadership located within the pre-school to a educational leader for a school district, is the initial ground for this research-interest. How does this change affect the educational leadership for pre-school teachers? This paper will account for what the regulatory documents and literature about educational leadership say about the importance of educative leadership.

What are the prospects for peace in Chechnya? Conflict dynamics suggest they are dim. While inofficial Russian discourse the situation in the war-torn republic is "normalizing", realities on theground suggest otherwise. Continued violations of human rights, well documented in reports byintergovernmental institutions such as the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe,respected non-governmental organizations such as Human Rights Watch, the Russian "Memorial"and others, nourish growing fear and distrust towards Russia and its proxies. The social fabric of theChechen society is disintegrating and the economic infrastructure of the republic is in ruins. A newgeneration of Chechen youth, which has experienced nothing but war and devastation, hasemerged. Terrorism is proliferating and evidence suggests that the conflict is spreading outsideChechnya proper.Compared to the previous period of violent confrontation the configuration of parties today is morecomplex. Since the termination of the previous war in 1996, the internal coherence within theleadership of independence-seeking Chechnya, also called Ichkeriya, has eroded. Popular support forthe Ichkeriya leaders is eroding as well. This has allowed the Russian side to pursue a strategy aimedat "internalizing" the conflict. While successful in terms of changing the power structures of theChechen republic – and thereby its relationship to Russia – the "chechenization" strategy hasundermined the possibilities for achieving a lasting peace. The strategy reflects an instrumentalistapproach to the conflict relying on elite manipulation and co-optation as a means to establish peace.Peace in Chechnya, however, can only be obtained through negotiations involving the RussianFederation and representatives of the Chechen population endowed with political legitimacy.

This article focuses on the idea of the educable adult subject in Sweden and the ways this idea has re-emerged in different practices during the twentieth century. It's a policy analysis where official documents from the twentieth century and early twenty-first century concerned with adult education in Sweden are analysed based on the Foucauldian notion of governmentality. The results show that the idea of the educable adult subject has been present during the major part of the twentieth century. But there are differences in how it is inscribed into the practices. The main difference is that the educable subject today is created in relation to a new rationality of governing where it is governed and constructed through its own choices and actions instead of through institutions based on knowledge produced by the social sciences and experts. Further, the ambition today is that everyone should be included in lifelong learning. At the same time, these ambitions also create exclusion. What happens to those who cannot or do not want to participate in lifelong learning? I argue that such practices of inclusion/exclusion are present in all the documents analysed, but that today, this practice has taken a specific shape. ; Original publication: Andreas Fejes, The Planetspeak Discourse of Lifelong Learning in Sweden: What is an Educable Adult?, 2006, Journal of Education Policy, (21), 6, 697-716.Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

The objective of this report is to illuminate the complex ways in which science is produced, used or otherwise of importance to Brazilian climate policies and politics and how it is interlinked with culture, power and politics, including the large number of factors that variously constrain or facilitate climate-related policy. It discusses arguments and evidence ofhow geopolitics, socio-cultural and political perspectives, and trust or lack thereof, shape – orare perceived to shape various lines of knowledge production, contestation and mobilization related to climate change and the negotiations under the United Nations FrameworkConvention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It argues for the need to understand the existence and consequences of distrust between the global North and South (i.e., industrialized countries and the developing countries) in climate related affairs, including the causes ofmistrust and, in particular, connections between distrust and disparities in both power andnational capacities to produce and frame the knowledge used in climate negotiations.Many developing countries lack the knowledge and support offered by social and economic infrastructure, scientific and technological capability when facing international negotiation onclimate change, and there are indications that this – in addition to equity and participationconcerns – troubles leaders of such countries and affects general receptivity to agendas, processes and reports associated with the IPCC, the UNFCCC and associated institutions suchas the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) under the direction of the World Bank. The reportpoints out that it is necessary to investigate the role of such concerns on the part of Brazilianpolitical leaders involved in the climate negotiations. An important contribution lies in the mere fact of documenting climate-related knowledge, processes and politics in Brazil. By contrast to richer nations in the world, and perhaps alsosome less developed countries (LDCs), there is an astonishing small amount of actualdocuments produced by the Brazilian government about Brazil's climate science capacity,knowledge gaps, and policies. The reasons for this need to be understood in terms of technicalas well as socio-cultural and political factors, as scarcity of studies and communicationconcerning such things as impact and vulnerability studies limits the mobilization of civilsociety on the issue of climate change, an important stimulus of social change and policy inLatin America.

The relationship between researchers and their objects of study has varied and continues to vary across time and disciplinary traditions. A key element in such variations is the degree of reflexivity involved in the process of knowledge production. To what extent are researchers aware of how they themselves produce knowledge? This question is discussed in the context of political science. It is suggested that the various forms the study of culture has taken in political science can serve as an indicator of different levels of reflexivity or modes of engagement. Three influential conceptualizations of "culture" in political science are presented as examples: political culture theory, civilizational theory, and constructivism. Toward the end, the case is made for a cosmopolitan engagement with culture and examples from political science of this type of engagement are introduced.

Since the ratification of the Amsterdam Treaty in 1999 the European Union is emerging as a key actor within migration policy. But in order to understand the current development it is important to have a clear picture of the EU's historical trajectory in the field of migration. In this paper the discussion thus focus esexclusively on the pre-Amsterdam era. It sets out with a brief historical overview of the early decades of European integration and accounts for labour migration's crucial function in the founding logic of the EEC. While supranational competence over migration policy was very limited during this period, the discussion shows that the way in which competence was allocated between supranational and national levels would be highly consequential for the future development. Following this, the major part of the paper is devoted to an examination of the Community's transformation during the second half of 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. The measures introduced under the banner of the Single Market, particularly those pertaining to the free movement of persons, instigated a development whereby immigration and asylum would be progressively treated as 'common' Community matters. Equally important, the paper shows that Community activity in the area of migration also addressed a range of other matters, many of which went beyond the issue of people moving across external and internal borders. From then on, Brussels began to address the situation of ethnic minorities of migrant background, thus bringing the growing problems of ethnic exclusion and racism on to the EU agenda. On the whole, it was the question of how to better 'integrate' 'legal immigrants' and ethnic minorities into Community societies that received the most attention. In this fashion, the present paper examines the EU's interventions in the area of immigration and asylum together with its efforts in the realm of migrant 'integration'. Although very few accounts have undertaken to analyze jointly the EU's approaches to immigration and migrant 'integration', this paper demonstrates that in order to provide a comprehensive analysis of the issues in question, these policy areas need to be approached as inextricably intertwined and as mutually conditioning.

The agreements reached within the frameworks of the Amsterdam Treaty and the Tampere European Council in 1999 would set off a flurry of activity in the areas of EU immigration, asylum and migrant/minority 'integration' policy. In conjunction with these policy areas moving up the EU agenda, moreover, this rapidly growing activity would expand well beyond the confines of the Amsterdam and Tampere programmes. The European Commission's bold move to declare an end to the era of'zero' extra-Community labour immigration, as well as the expanding 'externalization' of the EU's immigration and asylum policies to third countries, are just two of several examples highlighting this dynamic development. This paper focuses on the unfolding EU policies in the fields of 'integration', anti discrimination, immigration, and asylum. In terms of demarcations, it covers the development up until the conclusion of the Tampere Programme (1999–2004), leaving off at the beginning of its multi-annual successor agenda, the Hague Programme (2005–10). The examination proceeds through a double movement, surveying and analysing both internally and externally directed policies, as well as their intimate and often contradictory interplay. The paper sets out by scrutinizing supranational initiatives in the field of migrant/minority integration and anti-discrimination,focusing specifically on the strong interaction of this enterprise with labour-market policy and the issues of citizenship, social exclusion, and 'Europeanvalues'. It then goes on to explore the European Commission's objectives and assumptions concerning its calls for a sizeable increase in labour migration from third countries. Besides relating this to the internal requirements of the EU's transforming labour market, it also discusses the external ramifications of the EU's developing labour migration policy. The remaining sections scrutinize the EU's emerging asylum policy. It attends, inter alia, to the EU's ever-widening smorgasbord of restrictive asylum instruments and security-oriented immigration policies, which, as the paper goes on to argue, together serve to transform the right of asylum into a problem of 'illegal immigration'. Above all, this predicament is discussed in relation to the growing importance of immigration and asylum matters in the EU's external relations.

Nils Mattssons vetenskapliga produktion är omfattande och täcker många områden inom skatterätten, med en tyngdpunkt på företagsbeskattning. Om några områden särskilt skall nämnas är det handelsbolag, internationell beskattning och skattepolitik. Han har också skrivit många läroböcker, varav flera i imponerande många upplagor. Hans intresse för pedagogiska frågor är också stort. Även om han synts mycket har han verkat ännu mer. Han har inte bara skapat en stimulerande och kreativ forskarmiljö i Uppsala utan också aktivt bidragit till utvecklingen av den skatterättsliga forskningen utanför Uppsala, både inom och utom Sverige. Nils forskarkollegor och vänner hyllar honom i denna festskrift med bidrag som alla är skatterättsligt inriktade och behandlar stora delar av skatterätten.

The aim of the paper is to examine the current state of immigrant and small business research (ISBR) in Sweden. The ISBR field is relatively new and undeveloped in Sweden, so mostresearch in this field concerns issues that are crucial in establishing this as a field of study. Apart from a historical overview of immigrant entrepreneurship and definitions of the concept of ethnic or immigrant business, many of the texts concern the distribution of immigrant businesses in Sweden.The second important feature of ISBR in Sweden is that it has allowed itself, deliberately ornot, to be guided by the optimistic vision and expectations in relation to ISB that also inform the official political agenda. It has done this instead of trying to develop its own research agenda based on scientific priorities, and secondarily, on results of international ISBR. Another relevant characteristic of ISBR in Sweden is the fact that only a few scholars have been able to deal with these issues systematically, while the majority have simply written papers during ad hoc forays in to the field of study. The final important feature of ISBR in Sweden is the lack of communication between ISBR and mainstream small business research and other relevant research fields.

The European Community took, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a principled stand stressing the urgency to defend and further develop the welfare state and its historically established rights of citizenship on the supranational level. This was, among other, explicitly expressed in the programmes on poverty and social exclusion (European_Commission 1991, Room 1992). The analytical and normative-political framework for reform and renewal, which was here set up, was explicitly informed by the British sociologist T. H. Marshall's now classical theory of citizenship, most well-known from the widely red and commented essay, Citizenship and Social Class from 1950 (Marshall, 1992 (1950)). Here Marshall laid out a threefold analytical and theoretical framework for depicting the development of rights of citizenship, implicating a complex interplay between, what he called, civil, political and social rights of citizenship. Alongside the work of John Maynard Keynes in political economy Marshall's concept of citizenship belongs to the basic theoretical foundations of post-Second World War welfare state policies in Europe. While Keynes laid out the framework for those new strategies of state led intervention into western market economies that harvested great successes until the mid-1970s, Marshall's conception of modern citizenship represent an integrated analytical and moral-political framework for the theoretical understanding of the relationship between market, welfare and democratic polities (Strobel 1996).

This article aims to problematise the interpretative tensions of the relationship between the 'Ethic of Ultimate Ends' and the 'Ethic of Responsibility'in Weber's 1918 lecture, 'Politics as a Vocation' (first published 1919). To this end, we will first examine background factors relating both to Weber'swork itself and the later Weberian tradition in the social sciences, which decisively influence contemporary views and interpretations of Weber. Inopening, I discuss internal and external points of controversy in Weber'swork, which is followed by sections treating the relationship between Weberthe scientist and Weber the politician, as well as the fact−value issue.Finally I compare Weber the liberal with Weber the nationalist. My conclusionis that a large portion of Weber's oeuvre has not been included in a corresponding theoretical synthesis. Consequently, his work remains inmany ways unfinished and fragmentary and, more importantly, some of histheoretical statements are open to questionable interpretation. In the caseof the relationship between the 'The Ethic of Ultimate Ends' and 'The Ethicof Responsibility,' understanding of the relationship tends to be based onepistemological and axiological principles in conflict with the principlesupon which Weber's general theoretical concepts are based. More specifically, and setting aside Weber's fact−value distinction and his radical moral relativism, contemporary interpretations of the relationship between these two ethics tend to reinterpret Weber's original proposition regarding ethical criteria that are legitimate within today's liberal political theory and day-to-day liberal political rhetoric. This is in my opinion wrong, because itdoes not allow us, using Weber's authentic concept, to learn more of theless visible aspects of our contemporary liberal political reality.