Challenging Expert Rule: The Politics of Global Governance

In my Julius Stone Memorial Address, I explored the hypothesis that everyday decisions made by the professionals who manage norms and institutions which seem to lie in the background of global politics may be more important to global wealth and poverty than what we customarily think of as the big political and economic decisions made by parliaments and presidents or brought about by war and peace. If you have the energy to protest, criticise and change the distribution of wealth and status in our newly globalised world, it can be hard to locate points at which allocative decisions can be politically contested. The urgent political disputes that become international front-page news can seem peripheral to the decisions responsible for the distribution of things in the world. Although meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the G–7 (Group of Seven) provide useful backdrops for street protest and media attention, it is not clear that the decisions being taken inside those meeting rooms are either meaningfully responsible for global distributions of wealth and power or contestable in conventional political terms. Although it is easy to think of international affairs as a rolling sea of politics over which we have managed to throw but a thin net of legal rules, in truth the situation today is more the reverse. There is law at every turn — and only the most marginal opportunities for engaged political contestation. The footprint of national rules and national adjudication extends far beyond their nominal territorial jurisdiction. Private ordering, standards bodies, financial institutions and payment systems, tax systems, trade regimes — all are managed by legal expertise. Indeed, to say the world is covered in law is also to say we are increasingly governed by experts — legal experts. Even the story of the war in Iraq is overwhelmingly one of law, of military force mobilised, coordinated and legitimated by law. The difficulty is to understand more adequately what these experts do, the nature and limits of their vocabulary, and the possibilities for translating their work into politically contestable terms — or promoting the experience of responsible human freedom among the experts who govern our world

Law and the Political Economy of the World

The interpenetration of global political and economic life has placed questions of ‘political economy’ on the scholarly agenda across the social sciences. The author argues that international law could contribute to understanding and transforming centre–periphery patterns of dynamic inequality in global political economic life. The core elements of both economic and political activity – capital, labour, credit, and money, as well as public or private power and right – are legal institutions. Law is the link binding centres and peripheries to one another and structuring their interaction. It is also the vernacular through which power and wealth justify their exercise and shroud their authority. The author proposes rethinking international law as a terrain for political and economic struggle rather than as a normative or technical substitute for political choice, itself indifferent to natural flows of economic activity

Fast-field cycling NMR is sensitive to the method of cross-linking in BSA gels

This work was supported by ARUK (grant number 19689).Non peer reviewedPublisher PD

Risk evaluations and condom use decisions of homeless youth: a multi-level qualitative investigation.

BackgroundHomeless youth are at higher risk for sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancy than non-homeless youth. However, little is known about how they evaluate risk within the context of their sexual relationships. It is important to understand homeless youths' condom use decisions in light of their sexual relationships because condom use decisions are influenced by relationship dynamics in addition to individual attitudes and event circumstances. It is also important to understand how relationship level factors, sexual event circumstances, and individual characteristics compare and intersect.MethodsTo explore these issues, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 37 homeless youth in Los Angeles County in 2011 concerning their recent sexual relationships and analyzed the data using systematic methods of team-based qualitative data analysis.ResultsWe identified themes of risk-related evaluations and decisions at the relationship/partner, event, and individual level. We also identified three different risk profiles that emerged from analyzing how different levels of risk intersected across individual respondents. The three profiles included 1) Risk Takers, who consistently engage in risk and have low concern about consequences of risk behavior, 2) Risk Avoiders, who consistently show high concern about protection and consistently avoid risk, and 3) Risk Reactors, those who are inconsistent in their concerns about risk and protection and mainly take risks in reaction to relationship and event circumstances.ConclusionsInterventions targeting homeless youth should reflect multiple levels of risk behavior and evaluation in order to address the diversity of risk profiles. Relationship/partner-, event-, and individual-level factors are all important but have different levels of importance for different homeless youth. Interventions should be tailored to address the most important factor contributing to homeless youth reproductive needs

Refections on the Cross-Cultural Challenge to Western Psychology : Implications for Theory and Practice

　This paper has sought to document significant aspects of the cross-cultural challenge to psychology as an academic discipline and a profession. As an academic discipline, psychology is increasingly obliged to incorporate the notions of cultural and historical context in its formulations of the dynamics of a wide range of psychological phenomena. Ethnocentric biases in such efforts must now at least be recognized if not eliminated. Those who offer psychological services in culturally pluralistic communities must be aware of the complications which may arise if the perspectives and practices they bring to bear on a problem are inconsistent with its culturally-linked origins and symptomology and the expectations of the client. Fowers and Richardson (1996) have recently noted how powerful a force multiculturalism has become in contemporary American psychology. The growing appreciation that American norms, or the norms of any particular society, are not necessarily universal has encouraged the American Psychological Association (APA) to publish guidelines for the practice of psychology with culturally diverse populations such as are found in the United States. Psychology is facing an ongoing cross-cultural challenge which will ultimately transform the discipline and the practice in highly significant ways. As Fowers and Richardson attest, multiculturalism in psychology, while initially threatening to the status quo in many ways, is essentially good in the longer run in forcing researchers and practitioners to consider the wider validity of their assumptions, models, theories and professional practice