Gendered and Racialised Border Security: Displaced People and the Politics of Fear

This article examines the dynamics of constructing current migration from the so-called Global South in ‘risk’, ‘crisis’ and ‘fear’ terms that translate into xenophobic, racialised and gendered processes of ‘othering’ people who are displaced. This is done within the framework of a ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano 2000b) perspective, understood as the ‘colonial power matrix’ (Grosfoguel 2011. This is how the location from which the current racialised and gendered politics of fear is being constructed. The notion of racialised security leads to racialised masculinity of the ‘Other’, while stigmatising migrant men. These colonial narratives that have created ‘knowledge’ about other masculinities have been invoked and re-articulated within the current racialised processes of securitisation of migration. They have supported construction of the sexual assault of ‘our’ women as the public security concern. Consequently, racially marked rape becomes an important part of State security, linked to national territory and border control

SpAds: political sherpas bridging minister and civil servant

This paper examines how opinion-shaping political and civil service stakeholders view the role and contribution of Special Political Advisers (SpAds) within the Westminster system of government. The literature only recently paid considered attention to this role, partly due to the recent reforms that spawned the emergence of SpAds, but also because political advisers still only represent a small population within the government community. It is acknowledged that each country’s institutional and administrative traditions greatly influence SpAds’ tasks; arrangements with the UK being no exception. Recognising that SpAds take on the role of “temporary civil servants” whose duties vary according to ministerial direction, the study reported in this paper concludes that SpAds can make an invaluable contribution to policy delivery by acting as a bridge between Secretary of State and Permanent Secretary. The capability to bridge the tensions between ministerial urgency to realise policy goals and civil servant realism to accurately assess the “fracture points” to be overcome in the process of policy delivery is reported as particularly valued by the public official. This paper concludes that the SpAd’s relentless pursuit of the Minister’s agenda is distinctly counterproductive for both Minister and civil servant, but adopting the function of bridging across contrasting interests enhances policy delivery effectiveness

Market Orientation of Theatres in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Market orientation has lately become one of the major research issues in Bosnia and Herzegovina, mainly because of the country transition to market economy. This process requires essential changes in business behavior of organizations which need to become market oriented. Our study measures the level of market orientation of theaters in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We tried to find out up to which level theaters in Bosnia and Herzegovina implement activities known as intelligence generation, intelligence dissemination and responsiveness. Research results show that the level of market orientation is, according to three MARKOR subscales, low. Theaters collect information from their environments and they have a certain process of organizational communication which results in the level of functional compatibility of (re)actions aimed to the market. Nevertheless, the conclusion is that all the analyzed activities are in their early stages of development.market orientation, business behavior

Frost resistance of grapevine cultivars of different origin

The tests of resistance to low temperature which included a large number of grapevine cultivars showed that the cultivars bore sign of their ecological-geographical and genetic origins with respect to the resistance to low temperature. The tests, conducted over several years, consisted of exposing cuttings of annual shoots to low temperature in a cold chamber. The tests were repeated three times each winter, following the uniform method and time, in order to be able to distinguish relative differences in the degree of resistance between the cultivars tested. Most cultivars from Western Europe (occidentalis NEGR., gallica NEM.) had a high degree of resistance to low temperature. They tended to reach the peak of the resistance in mid winter. The cultivars from the continental part of the Balkans (pontica NEGR, balcanica NEGR.) were unanimously sensitive to low temperature. The cultivars from the warm Mediterranean climate of Southern Europe (pontica NEGR., balcanica NEGR and occidentalis NEGR, iberica NEM.) were still more sensitive than the cultivars in the previously mentioned group. The wine cultivars developed from interspecific crosses of European grapevines and American species exhibited a high degree of resistance in the middle and at the end of winter while the hybrids vinifera x amurensis were highly resistant at the beginning and in the middle of winter. Both groups can be used as donors of resistance to low temperature in programs of breeding cold hardy grapevine cultivars. The tested table cultivars were found to be sensitive to low temperature, with the exception of the well-known cultivars Muscat Hamburg and Chasselas and the new cultivars Strugurash and Moldova

Gender, conflict, and social Capital: Bonding and bridging in war in the former Yugoslavia

The 1990s are marked by unprecedented mobilisation for armed conflict at the local or state level. With 44 countries, or 25 per cent of the world’s states at war during this period, the world experienced more violent conflict than ever before. Conflicts of the 1990s are often called new wars (Kaldor 1999; Duffield 2001) as they are importantly shaped by the processes of globalisation, structural changes in the world economy and politics. This chapter aims to contribute to gendered analyses of conflict and social capital by examining how the process of mobilisation of social capital for war or peace is gendered and context-specific. The author’s analysis also supports substantial empirical evidence that women-as-women organising in specific contexts promotes civic bridging links and supports a type of alternative politics that is embedded in cross-ethnic and cross-boundary trust and reciprocity. This type of links and communication are central to the reconciliation processes, conflict resolution, and post-conflict reconstruction. Further research and analysis is required to uncover other links and factors affecting these (gendered) processes in order to identify and support the ones which represent a resource for democracy and peace

The Lack of Integration Policy and Experiences of Settlement: A Case Study of Refugees in Rome

This article examines the question of an absence of an integration policy, and specifically how this lack of state intervention is perceived by refugees themselves, and how it shapes their attitudes towards and strategies for integration. The emphasis in examining integration of refugees in this paper is on the importance of human agency in the process of structuring and re-structuring social relations across space and time. The article is based upon research among a group of refugees from former Yugoslavia settled in Rome. Their experiences presented in this paper document a case of integration in which the refugees, for the most part, have not encountered any kind of assistance programme. This situation caused considerable difficulty in the process of their settlement, particularly during its early stages, yet it permitted spontaneous and personalized encounters between the refugees' native culture(s) and that of the receiving society. It is suggested that the nature of these encounters contributed to strengthening the adaptability of the refugees. It also affected their subjective wellbeing and tended to compensate for the numerous problems associated with other aspects of their integration

Policy, agency, and intercultural dialogue: Experiences of refugees from war-torn Yugoslavia in Italy

This article examines the process of policy and bureaucratic labelling of refugees and its intersection with race, ethnicity, class and/or gender, as well as with other exclusionary mechanisms operating in the places of their settlement. It critically examines the prospects and process of settlement of people who fled war-torn Yugoslavia and were granted the right to work and/or study in Italy based on a special Government decree, without any lengthy determination procedure. The analysis is based on the ethnographic research conducted in Rome, in 1999 and 2000. It explores mechanisms and processes that enabled them to benefit from the rights they were granted upon arrival. The discussion points to the connections between assistance strategies or policies, structural constraints they embody and the type of agency they encourage. It explores the role of co-ethnic, cross-ethnic, and minority-majority social networks in settlement. This article argues that if acquisition of formal legal and social rights to inclusion and equality are not accompanied by informal bridging, micro-level minority-majority contacts and ties the experience of minority groups will remain strongly shaped by their feelings of ‘otherness’, perceptions of inequality and exclusion. This is because the development of trust between minority (ethnic) and majority groups only partially depends on a set of rights that can be granted to the ‘ethnic’ or ‘minority’ groups