Humanitarian intervention and foreign policy in the Conservative-led coalition

This paper examines the role of humanitarian intervention as a tool of foreign policy in the Conservative-led Coalition. The first section of the paper provides historical context and assesses the traditional approaches to humanitarian intervention as an instrument of foreign policy of Conservative governments since the end of the Cold War. This analytical narrative considers the Major Government's response to the Bosnian War. The second section of the paper considers the Conservative-led Coalition's approach to humanitarian intervention in two ways: first by an examination of the influence of Blair's humanitarian intervention and secondly, by an evaluation of British involvement in the Libyan Revolution of 2011. The third and final section of the paper offers an explanatory interpretation of the Conservative-led Coalition's humanitarian intervention. This interpretation is predicated on an English School theoretical framework for understanding international relations and, in particular, advances the argument that the global worldview of David Cameron, William Hague and their liberal Conservative colleagues can be understood as solidarist

The Faces of Contemporary Islam: Fresh Perspectives on Theory, Practice, and Foreign Policy

Summarizes discussions from a November 2008 conference on ways to promote understanding between the Muslim world and the West. Examines perceptions about the compatibility of Islam and democracy, Muslim women, Western attitudes, and the role of the media

Country Reports of the European CCC’s, January – June 2001

A compilation of country reports on the activities of the various European Clean Clothes Campaigns from January 2001 to June 2001

Civil Society Monitoring Report 2012

TUSEV published the first Civil Society Monitoring Report in 2011 in order to more closely observe and evaluate developments in the area of civil society. The purposes of this report are for civil society to be recognized, better understood and bring awareness to challenges faced, as well as portraying developments over the past ten years. We believe that the favorable assessment of the Civil Society Monitoring Report by the representatives of civil society and the various institutions in the international arena is a significant progress. The Civil Society Monitoring Report 2012 presents the developments and achievements in the area of civil society, as well as the shortcomings and difficulties observed in practice within the period of 2011-2012. Also, the report compares findings of this year with the previous year

Does Protest Influence Political Speech? Evidence from UK Climate Protest, 2017-2019

How does protest affect political speech? Protest is an important form of political claim-making, yet our understanding of its influence on how individual legislators communicate remains limited. Our paper thus extends a theoretical framework on protests as information about voter preferences, and evaluates it using crowd-sourced protest data from the 2017-2019 Fridays for Future protests in the UK. We combine these data with ∼2.4m tweets from 553 legislators over this period and text data from ∼150k parliamentary speech records. We find that local protests prompted MPs to speak more about the climate, but only online. These results demonstrate that protest can shape the timing and substance of political communication by individual elected representatives. They also highlight an important difference between legislators' offline and online speech, suggesting that more work is needed to understand how political strategies differ across these arenas

Portraits of Empowerment Exhibited by One Million Signatures Campaign Activists

Iranian women have shown themselves to be anything but victims (Afkhami, 2009; Price, 1996; Shiranipour, 2002). Although they live in an oppressive regime (Nafisi, 1999; ―Symbolic annihilation,‖ 1999), grassroots efforts of their One Million Signatures Campaign transformed gender politics in Iran (Khorasani, 2009). The Campaign has become international, and Iranian Americans have played a prominent role in furthering its message (Tohidi, 2010). Iranian women‘s struggles reflect the global phenomenon of women‘s movements (Ferree, 2006). Empowerment is used to conceptualize such movements, but few studies have explored individuals from the Middle East (e.g. Dufour & Giraud, 2007). The present study addressed these deficiencies by recording the stories of eight activists of the One Million Signatures Campaign. My approach was influenced by personal experiences, my worldview, women\u27s empowerment research, and literature on Iranian women‘s issues. I positioned myself in the research by explaining how parental influences, graduate school experiences, and an independent research project in Tehran led me to this study. I adopted the transformative worldview that science should be used to improve society (Mertens, 2008). I synthesized previous literature on women‘s empowerment and Iranian women. Procedures of the study followed that of portraiture design (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997). Data collection included interviews, observations, and document review. I analyzed the data using systematic and interpretative techniques to develop three composite portraits. Each portrait represented two or three individuals. The first portrait was of Soheila, an artist whose self-confidence was apparent in every word and gesture. The second portrait was Paria, a warm individual who possessed a deep passion for understanding people. The individual in the third portrait, Dariush, possessed a genuineness and calm persistence that inspired me to act. Themes that emerged across portraits were (a) finding purpose in adversity, (b) the development of gender consciousness, (c) self-awareness, and (d) uncertainty. I discuss implications of the findings. I conclude with limitations, research directions, and strengths of this study. The present study informs women‘s rights activists in social movements

Migration as a Political and Public Phenomenon: The Case of Slovak Republic

Publication within the project “The V4 towards migration challenges in Europe. An analysis and recommendations” is financed by Visegrad Fund

When Free Speech Disrupts Diversity Initiatives: What We Value and What We Do Not

In this essay, I argue that the debate on free speech as pushed by the conservative right is a strategic apparatus to undermine the various diversity initiatives on college and university campuses. While supporters of the right wing extremists around the globe have pushed for various modes of exclusions (social, racial, ethnic, cultural, religious and sexual), here in the United States, such exclusions are most evident in the collapse of academic freedom and the rise of civility codes as students and educators use the platform of free speech to promote various forms of injustices and exclusions. Our neoliberal college and universities and their administrators, I argue, are caught in this precarious and tenuous conflict of protecting academic freedom against the pressures from the outside (the political right) to stage ideas and ideologies that are harmful for the public good in the name of “free speech.