Same-sex lives between the language of international LGBT rights, international aid and anti-homosexuality

This article considers how international development aid is used in engaging with sexuality rights in Africa. It considers both the emergence of LGBT rights as aid conditionality in international aid relations and responses to these from African political leaders. The central issue identified is that political leaders for and against these rights have marginalized and ignored voices of the sexually diverse people in their engagements in African settings. Here, a problem emerges that people’s own claims for rights are subsumed within the broader agendas set by politicians at international and national levels. This article analyses these relations and their outcomes for activists and civil society groups in diverse African settings by considering the language of LGBT rights used by international political actors and the ways in which African political leaders develop their own language on the issue

Social policy and conflict: the Gezi Park–Taksim demonstrations and uses of social policy for reimagining Turkey

This article argues that conflicts are productive forces within which new ideas are developed and new social relations are articulated. The critical issue here is the way in which such conflicts are managed and mediated. The paper analyses the Gezi Events of May–June 2013 in Istanbul and considers the way in which people’s reactions in these events are linked with the intersection of everyday lives and the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi – AKP) government’s social policy initiatives, which are increasingly framing these everyday lives. Social policy is considered to be the domain of this intersection, as the government uses policies to inform a particular way of orienting individuals’ everyday context

Institutional denialism as public policy: using films as a tool to deny the Armenian genocide in Turkey

This article focuses on how films are used as part of public policy to reproduce institutional denialism, normalizing denialist narratives in the public understanding of what happened to Ottoman Armenians in 1915–1918. I analyse the deployment in Turkey of two films that reimagine the events of 1915: 120 (2008) and The Ottoman Lieutenant (Osmanlı Subayı, 2017). The films seek to educate the public regarding how to understand and remember events that international actors have “unjustly” depicted as genocide. The films are thus "defensive tactics" to protect the institutional denialist architecture. This article highlights an evolving public policy strategy that uses denialist representations to bolster public belief. The analysis shows how such policies strengthen an “us/them” logic, where “us” indicates a “rightness” framed by ethnoreligious othering that underpins “our” narratives of belonging in contemporary Turkey

The Law of the Sea and the South Pacific: An ecological critique of the philosophical basis of international relations.

The second half of the twentieth century has witnessed the emergence of ecological issues as among the most important problems in the global political agenda. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that the challenge of ecology is larger than it initially appears to be. It argues that ecological problems represent a deeper problem in the way that the relation of human being to nature is conceptualised in International Relations. The structure of the thesis works through three layers. In the first layer, chapters 1 and 2, the problems in the oceans' ecosystem are presented, with particular emphasis on ocean management system in the south Pacific Cooperation. The impact of the United Nations Convention on the Law of The Sea III (UNCLOS III) in the region and on the ecosystem is analysed with particular emphasis on the species of Tuna. In this analysis the focus is the newly formed Exclusive Economic Zones and the concept of sovereignty. The second layer, chapter 3, begins with an overview of the importance of the concept of sovereignty for the discipline of International Relations. The analysis of the deployment of the concept in UNCLOS III constitutes the middle section. The last section presents the concept of sovereignty in terms of its operational aspect. It argues that sovereign decisions always decide about an exception on life. This move opens up the philosophical constitution of the concept by pointing to the deeper relationship between human beings and nature. The third layer, chapters 4 and 5, engages with the philosophical discussion of the human subject and nature. In chapter 4, the particular anthropocentric constitution of human being through Cartesian and Kantian philosophies is critically analysed. In chapter 5, a Heideggerian formulation of human subjectivity is presented as a new ground of thinking about nature. The conclusion, then, seeks to outline more precisely the implications of the thesis' argument with respect to International Relations

15 years of 'War on AIDS': what impact has the global HIV/AIDS response had on the political economy of Africa?

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Review of African Political Economy on 21st August 2015, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/03056244.2015.1064370

Probing for proof, plausibility, principle and possibility: a new approach to assessing evidence in a systematic evidence review

This article proposes a new approach to assessing evidence during a systematic evidence review aiming to inform international development policy. Drawing lessons from a number of social science systematic evidence reviews, the paper identifies how the method’s limiting perspective on evidence (including the exclusive focus on ‘golden standard’ empirical information) has serious disadvantages for the usability of evidence reviews for policy. This article aims to provide an alternative framework that allows for a less exclusionary, yet policy-practical way of assessing evidence. We propose four perspectives on evidence, appropriate for different stages in the policy process: principle when setting or prioritising broad policy goals, plausibility when assessing specific future policies, proof when evaluating past policies and possibility when striving for innovation and allowing exchange of ideas