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AbstractThe election of Donald Trump and his decision to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) represented a shock to the Canadian and Mexican governments and business elites. Drawing on the New Regionalism(s) Approach (NRA), this article reviews the response of the Canadian state to the crisis in the North American regional project. I argue that this newer theoretical approach better explains the dynamics of regionalization or regional decomposition than mainstream theories by integrating the role played by uneven globalization, normative and ideational dimensions, and civil society in processes of regional integration and/or decomposition.

Canadian scholars have a long tradition of analysis of Canada s relations with the United States, but only recently have they turned their attention to the North American continent as a whole. This article provides an overview of Canadian scholarship on Canada s position in North America. It argues that Canadian authors and policy-makers have for decades been caught up in an economistic debate between nationalist and so-called continentalist positions. These positions have been reinforced in the context of recent calls for deepened integration. Both the nationalist and the continentalist positions are, however, of limited utility for understanding the unique character of economic and political integration on the North American continent. The article reviews some recent contributions by Canadian scholars that attempt tomove beyond the nationalist/continentalist dichotomy. It argues that what is currently needed is both more balanced empirical work that documents the changing realities of North American integration and an engagement with new theoretical perspectives.

It is argued that the transnational social coalitions that have emerged contesting free trade in the Americas exhibit exclusionary practices, especially in the marginalization of women's movements. In the trade area, women's movements face technical issues that are typically a male domain, & may not engage their grassroots base. In support of this hypothesis, this case study analyzes the evolution of a gender & trade transnational issues network with the 1980s onset of the Canada-US Free Trade agreement, highlighting the barriers women encounter in trying to link gender & trade issues. Anti-North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) coalitions in the US did not particularly espouse women's concerns & the Mexican women's movement had little influence on anti-NAFTA networks there. Since NAFTA, the gendered impact of liberalized trade has received greater attention, eg, at the 1990 World Trade Organization protest in Seattle & at the Santiago & Quebec City protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas. The recent development of the International Gender & Trade Network, a cooperative effort among 7 regional women's networks, is described. References. M. Pflum

It is argued that the transnational social coalitions that have emerged contesting free trade in the Americas exhibit exclusionary practices, especially in the marginalization of women's movements. In the trade area, women's movements face technical issues that are typically a male domain, & may not engage their grassroots base. In support of this hypothesis, this case study analyzes the evolution of a gender & trade transnational issues network with the 1980s onset of the Canada-US Free Trade agreement, highlighting the barriers women encounter in trying to link gender & trade issues. Anti-North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) coalitions in the US did not particularly espouse women's concerns & the Mexican women's movement had little influence on anti-NAFTA networks there. Since NAFTA, the gendered impact of liberalized trade has received greater attention, eg, at the 1990 World Trade Organization protest in Seattle & at the Santiago & Quebec City protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas. The recent development of the International Gender & Trade Network, a cooperative effort among 7 regional women's networks, is described. References. M. Pflum

Generating Social Capital: Civil Society and Institutions in
Comparative Perspective, Marc Hooghe and Dietlind Stolle, eds., New York and Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 256The concept of "social capital" has become a popular buzzword. Like other authors, the contributors to this volume draw on Robert Putnam's well-known definition of social capital as "generalized trust, norms of reciprocity and networks" among individuals (2). Social capital is credited with providing a wide range of
social benefits, including tolerance of diversity, economic growth, lower crime rates, better health and more responsive government. The grandiose claims made on behalf of social capital and the large amounts of money being poured into developing social capital in diverse social settings, as
well as the fuzziness of the original concept, mean that careful analysis of the idea of social capital is badly needed.