"The author would like to show the complexity of migration decision-making among parents, on both the macro and the micro levels. Their motivation is often directed toward economic goals. The economy, in particular job availability in the local and host markets is crucial, and it gives rise to significant regional differences, for instance in the proportion of mothers in the migration stream. However other features of parental migration, like the length, structure (single parent/both the parents' departure) and forms of childcare during absence of parents do not depend only on economical factors, but also on social and cultural ones. The main aim is to identify regional and status inequalities that influence characteristics of parental migration. On theoretical level rational choice theory approach with interpretivist cultural analysis will be combined. The family is a set of individuals acting under the influence of a complex of factors. The combined influence of these factors, including those of the economic sphere (i.e. unemployment, income differences), the political sphere (i.e. access to the external job markets), the social sphere (migration networks, cooperation within the extended family), and the cultural sphere (cultural aims and means) is reinforced by social inequalities and shapes the structure of parental migration." (author's abstract).
"The author would like to show the complexity of migration decision-making among parents, on both the macro and the micro levels. Their motivation is often directed toward economic goals. The economy, in particular job availability in the local and host markets is crucial, and it gives rise to significant regional differences, for instance in the proportion of mothers in the migration stream. However other features of parental migration, like the length, structure (single parent/both the parents' departure) and forms of childcare during absence of parents do not depend only on economical factors, but also on social and cultural ones. The main aim is to identify regional and status inequalities that influence characteristics of parental migration. On theoretical level rational choice theory approach with interpretivist cultural analysis will be combined. The family is a set of individuals acting under the influence of a complex of factors. The combined influence of these factors, including those of the economic sphere (i.e. unemployment, income differences), the political sphere (i.e. access to the external job markets), the social sphere (migration networks, cooperation within the extended family), and the cultural sphere (cultural aims and means) is reinforced by social inequalities and shapes the structure of parental migration." (author's abstract)
"The author opens up the debate by looking at the example of climate change. While over a long time only perceived as a threat to the elusive and abstract concept of 'environment' or to people far away either in time or in space or both, today climate change is on everyone's lips, not only as a fact, but undoubtedly also as a global risk. This becomes also evident by the inclusion of climate change into the discourses on national and international security. Richert analyses how, on the one hand, this 'securitization' of the topic, i.e. its treatment in a framework of security, has affected political decision-making and how, on the other hand, this very process has altered the meaning of security. By taking the climate politics in the US Senate from 2000 to 2008 as an example, he argues that the perception of climate change as risk or threat has been the main driver behind climate policy. At the same time, the perception of climate change as a threat has intensified. On the question of how the securitization is affecting climate change decision-making, empirical findings appear ambiguous. Although securitization has indeed led to traditional security legislation, as critics of securitization as strategy for agenda setting would have expected, these initiatives are outweighed by the securitization's effect on climate policymaking. Nevertheless, the debate has 'allowed for a significant step forward in the climate policy of the US Senate'." (extract)
By signing and ratifying the Association Agreement, Republic of Moldova reconfirmed its willingness to adjust itself to European values and standards of living. The implementation of the Agreement provisions requires extensive work to reform all spheres of life and areas of activity. These changes depend heavily on the ability of central and local public authorities to realize and carry out the imminent reforms. Thus, for a successful implementation of reforms, itis necessary to reform the administrative system itself that will put into practice the achivements of the provisions of the Association Agreement. An important role in the well functioning of public authorities has the territorial organization of public power. A clear division of powers within the framework of the public power decentralization is one of the factors that contributes to the harmonious development of society. An effective decentralization will foster regional development and contribute to strengthening local territorial communities, and this fact will allow the provision of quality services locally. The aim of this study is to elucidate the problems regarding the territorial organization of public power in terms of implementing the Association Agreement. Does the application of the Agreement provisions require the territorial and administrative delimitation reform of Moldova, or is it likely to make reforms in the administrative-territorial division of Soviet origin revived by the 2003 anti-reform? The author have studied the provisions of Moldova-EU Association Agreement and documents related to it, the experience of some European countries regarding the territorial delimitation of public powers and political parties' visions on the territorial administrative division of Moldova to answer this question.
The subject of the analysis presented in this article is the legal context and political debates regarding access of illegal migrants to health care assistance and institutions of public health. Consequences of non-regulated legal status significantly impair or even deny illegal migrants the most basic access to medical care. The main condition of entitlement to specialized medical care is legal residence within a state in accordance with its legal provisions. Fearing a growth in illegal migration and increased expenditure, EU countries are not interested in extending social benefits to irregular migrants. Fearing deportation, dismissal from work and the enormous costs of private health care, they usually do not ask for professional medical assistance. By analyzing the most important health risks for migrants the author has also highlighted the current legal and political debates on this issue. Lawful residence based on migration status and rules governing the welfare state must be coordinated with migrants' access to health care on the basis of universality and non-discrimination. In many EU countries such as Sweden and Denmark, the right of undocumented migrants to free emergency care and more advanced health care is restricted and may be subject to payment. Examining international treaties and explanatory documents from the Council of Europe and the United Nations, I try to analyze relevant international laws affecting several groups of undocumented migrants concerning the right to health and access to health care institutions. This article also highlights activities undertaken in recent years by NGOs with the aim of establishing access to health for undocumented migrants in EU countries and placing this issue on the international agenda.
"This article examines the potentials and limitations of enhancing a teaching- and learning-based profile at a young, middle-sized university in Germany. The current development of the German higher education system points towards an increasing separation of the teaching function and the research function at universities. This separation might lead to a steady decline of the importance of teaching and learning. In a growing national and international competition for reputation and resources, universities seem to focus primarily on their research function today. Given this situation, the author wants to contribute to answer the question, how a better balance between a university's teaching function and its research function can be achieved. He assumes that it is necessary and useful to enhance a university's teaching- and learning-based profile in this regard. The article aims to explore under what conditions and in which way young, middle-sized universities can establish and enhance a teaching- and learning-based profile. This question should be answered with a qualitative study at University Kassel. University Kassel represents the case of young, middle-sized universities in Germany, with little chances to succeed in the competition for research 'excellence', and no ambition to become a pure 'teaching institution'. The empirical study was conducted according to the principles of the Grounded Theory. The data for the study was collected with seven expert interviews with representatives from the university's faculties and the university management, mainly administration, respectively. The method of Theoretical Sampling was used to select the experts, the data was collected according to the principle of Theoretical Saturation, and it was analysed with a five-step coding process." (Text excerpt, IAB-Doku) ((en))
"The author sets out to explain the European Union's military operations in Africa. Are they, he asks, humanitarian responses to alleviate human suffering at the other end of the world? And are they intended to react to an increasing number of internal conflicts before their sheer number and scope turn into a global risk? Burckhardt analyses the international role of the EU as great power versus civilian power by looking at the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), and the EU missions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2003 and 2006 in particular. He argues that the activities of the EU can best be explained in the framework of realism and by considering the EU as a great power since it intervenes to gain prestige - and not to alleviate misery and stop serious violations of human rights. Thus, Burckhardt concludes, the EU undertakes military intervention to serve first and foremost its own concerns and not acting out of humanitarian concerns. With regards to global risks, it seems that the EU uses situations that are commonly perceived as (global) risks, i.e. deadly internal conflicts in Africa, to put forward its own interest in strengthening its status as a great power. This behaviour, in turn, can lead to the emergence of other, new risks: less cooperation with other actors such as the UN and hence a weakening of multilateral institutions, arbitrary (non-)reaction to or disregard of situations in which reaction is really needed (e.g. Darfur), and over-emphasis of military responses to international threats to the detriment of preventive measures and international law." (extract)
"The second contribution in this part deals with a completely different but highly topical risk. By switching focus from state actors to private actors, Joris Larik searches for ways to curtail the currently largely unfettered power of multinational corporations. With yearly turnovers that sometimes exceed the gross national product of states and corresponding political influence, such corporations not only theoretically can, but in the past repeatedly have, created detrimental effects for states and individuals in their sphere of operations. On the other hand, viable international solutions to subject multinational corporations to international rules and obligations comparable to those applicable to states are missing, except for voluntary partnerships like the UN Global Compact introduced by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan or efforts to make human rights obligations applicable to multinational corporations. Larik therefore explores possibilities to extent the applicability of international criminal law to legal persons such as corporations. Instead of interpreting a given treaty, the author shows how often-mentioned theoretical 'stumbling blocks' such as establishing a corporation's criminal intent (mens rea), corporate complicity, and means of punishment for corporations can be overcome. He demonstrates that all three issues are not irresolvable and that international criminal law bears the potential to give remedy to victims not only to crimes committed by states and individuals but also by multinational corporations. Only in extending the scope of international criminal law to multinational corporations, Larik argues, can the former live up to its role not only as a means to punish but also to protect." (extract)
"Sino-Vatican diplomatic relation was established in 1924 but was formally cut in 1951 with the expulsion of the Papal Nuncio Archbishop Riberi from China (Chen/Jiang 2003, 162-276). With Mao Zedong's emphasis an dass struggle and his intolerance toward ideological issues, religious idealism in China, including Catholicism, had to give way to the dialectical materialism of Marxist-Leninism and Maoist thought. Also Vatican represented a dass which Mao aimed to get rid of. Only after Deng Xiaoping initiated the modernization policy in 1978 and China began to merge from its isolation was there a possibility for a dialogue, with the view of establishing a Sino-Vatican Concordat. In the context of Vatican's Ostpolitik with Communist states, in 1981, Cardinal Casaroli, then Secretary of the State of the Vatican, made the first overture to China, aiming at normalizing the relationl. China frowned upon the Vatican's unilateral appointment of Bishop Dominic Deng Yiming in 1982, a released prisoner of conscience after 22-years imprisonment as the Archbishop of Guangzhou. By Beijing's order, contact had been temporaries suspended for a short while as retaliation. However, informal contact between the Vatican and China was resumed shortly thereafter, and progress was made. In November 1987, Zhao Ziyang, then Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), met Cardinal Jaime Sin of Manila in Beijing and they agreed to have their aides-de-camp threshing out more details to initiate formal Sino-Vatican negotiation. The meeting gave hope for heralding a new dawn in the Sino-Vatican rapprochement. Twenty years have passed (1987-2007). Since then, it seems the sun has set on the prospects for further dialogue, and that no rapprochement can be imagined for the near future. The change in the political landscape in the international arena and within China added new factors to the SinoVatican negotiation, including the Hong Kong issue. When old problems of appointing bishops have not been resolved, two new requests from Beijing add difficulties to the complexity of the negotiation. These are 1) the transference of the ecclesiastical power of administration to the civil authority in local dioceses and 2) demanding the Vatican to validate appointed bishops. Above all, the tensed Catholic-government relations in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) is among other factors which caused international attention and it should prompt Beijing and the Vatican to reconsider serious about the dormant negotiation. This article aims at discussing 1) the role played by Hong Kong in the Sino-Vatican relations vis-ä-vis in the revival of the Chinese Catholic Church, and 2) the conflicting Catholic and government relations in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. The research Eindings reflect on Hong Kong's political participation as viewed from the perspectives from China and the Vatican might throw some light on the Hong Kong Factor in the Sino-Vatican negotiation." (author's abstract)
"The current European Commission policies are guided by the 'Europe 2020' strategy paper under which the 'Innovation Union' forms one of the mayor policy flagship initiatives for the years to come. These policies are led by the Commissioner of Research and Innovation. The Innovation Union document understands innovation in a much broader sense than it was traditionally the case with seeing innovation as a technology-based process. This recent policy consensus includes social innovation as an integral part of the Innovation Union Flagship Initiative and the documents foresee a monitoring of innovation in order to control the progress made by innovative actions at European Union and at Member State level. Measuring innovation and in particular social innovation is quite a new and challenging approach in methodological and practical terms. Therefore, the author reflects on the feasibility of measuring progress caused by social innovations and on pre-conditions to monitoring policy impact in relation to social innovations at international level. Currently, innovation monitoring chiefly is applied with an economic focus although social data base developments have been funded by the European Commission research and development programs over years. The paper presents selected EU research activities as well as the method and policy relevance of two innovation monitoring approaches targeting the economic dimension in the EU: the Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) and the Community Innovation Survey (CIS). The approaches shed some light on how monitoring instruments of social innovation may be developed. The paper concludes that a high obstacle to monitoring social innovation is its proliferation of targets in various policy fields. Therefore, the notion of social innovations may be blurred too much in the current policy debate in order to be instrumental for measurement. Consensus needs to be reached on the point of view if either targets of specific policies (innovation, security, health, social, environment, transport, etc.) shall be monitored to which social innovation is instrumental, or if social innovation is a subject in its own to be monitored." (author's abstract)
"The question at hand seems relatively simple and straightforward: whether and to what extent the protection and promotion of human rights is necessary for efforts to address conflict and build peace. The issue has been much debated over time. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights forcefully associated the protection of human rights with the prevention of violent conflict, stating that 'it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law' (UN 1948, preamble). Yet in 1996, an anonymous author in Human Rights Quarterly accused the international human rights movement of prolonging the war in Bosnia Herzegovina. There, human rights activists had rejected pragmatic deals that could have ended the violence and, from hindsight, were no worse than the eventual agreement in rewarding ethnic cleansing and aggression. In that author's view, it made 'today's living the dead of tomorrow' by pursuing a perfectly just and moral peace that would bring 'justice for yesterday's victims of atrocities' (Anonymous 1996, 259). Since then, the idea that the normative nature of human rights standards may complicate the practical demands of peacemaking has been a recurrent theme in discussions on the relationship between human rights and efforts to address violent conflict. This is especially the case when the latter is conceived of in terms of conflict settlement or resolution. Questions of definitions and objectives are thus key. Also relevant are the time frame, context and level of intervention one focuses on, though few authors on the subject make this explicit. In addition, narrow perceptions and generalizations abound in this debate as people working on human rights, peace and conflict have been grouped into categories of 'human rights activists' and 'conflict resolvers' as if these were homogenous and coherent clusters of actors. In this chapter, the authoress argues that considering human rights and conflict transformation in conjunction deepens one's analysis of what is involved in moving from violence to sustainable peace. It is informed by the idea that the two fill 'gaps' in one another, in that each contributes to a better understanding of the other by highlighting elements that are relatively under-explored in the theory and practice of each separate field. For conflict transformation, which will be the main focus here, the perspective of human rights forces a greater emphasis on structural conditions, especially the role of the state, systems of governance and issues of power in generating, escalating and transforming violent conflict. Considering human rights in relation to conflict transformation, moreover, highlights the need to employ a holistic, multidimensional understanding of human rights that does not reduce them to their legal foundations. This chapter suggests that conflict transformation, because of its explicit grounding in social justice, and hence inherently normative foundation, may provide a more nuanced and fruitful conceptual space for thinking about human rights, conflict and peace than conflict resolution and conflict management. Placing constructive social change at its core, conflict transformation acknowledges the need for addressing power imbalances and recognizes a role for advocacy and the importance of voices that challenge the status quo. Its concern with direct, structural and cultural violence is thus also highly relevant from a rights perspective. In order to place these ideas in context, the chapter will briefly comment on literature that has been published on human rights and approaches for addressing conflict and building peace (section 2). Section 3 proposes a framework for understanding the relationship between human rights and conflict transformation, using the metaphor of an iceberg, with its graphic image of things visible connected to matters unseen. It also introduces four dimensions of human rights that need to be taken into account in processes to build a just and sustainable peace. Section 4 discusses some of the practical implications of adopting a human rights perspective on conflict transformation. Nepal, South Africa, and other countries where the authoress has worked over the past 15 years, are used as illustrative examples throughout sections 3 and 4. Finally, section 5 concludes and points to some areas for further research." (excerpt)
