Today’s Geopolitics

The invention of the term geopolitics coincided with a certain modernist belief that it was possible to view the world in its totality. In the earlier texts the physical environment was frequently conceptualized as a fixed stage on which political events occurred, rather than a dynamic and shifting problem which influence the very conceptualization of world politics. Later, critical geopolitical writers have argued that geopolitics is a discourse concerned with the relationship between power knowledge and social and political relations. Critical approaches to world politics suggest that unless one challenges contemporary structures and power relations, then academic approaches run the risk of merely legitimizing the power politics of states.

In these highly globalized times, representing the world along the lines of nation states and national interest becomes all the more difficult or complex when every practical feature of state sovereignty, such as the capacity to determine national laws and foreign policy, is open to challenge by other bodies of governance. The significance of these observations lies in the appreciation that each representation should not only be evaluated critically in the sense that there is no one accurate view of our many worlds but also in terms of probable inequalities of social and political power. There is no neutral or objective way of looking at the world, because our representations are always strategic and selective in the sense that some parts of the world are emphasized more than others.

The processes of globalization and regional integration have to be considered against the important backdrop of geopolitical fragmentation. Tension between integrative and disintegrative forces could be said to be a defining feature of a century described as an age of extremes. It has been argued that globalization and fragmentation have ebbed and flowed throughout the previous century, and for much of this period the world was not only threatened by nuclear annihilation but also characterized by extreme levels of violence and a willingness to spend US$ 860 billion per year on arm procurement (1993 figure).

The growth of multilateral organisations, international agencies and multinational corporations has challenged the capacity of the state to formulate and implement legislation. The management of national economies has had to be carried out in a context where the wishes of state elites coexist with the demands of international money markets, international obligations and globalized flows of capital. Issues such as inflation, environmental damage, drugs and UNEMPLOYMENT are transboundary in the sense that no one state or grouping of states can control these concerns. New forms of international cooperation have been required, such as the European Union’s Social Chapter, which sought to regulate social and economic affairs within European states. Non governmental organisations have challenged the functional capacities of states as globalization is thought to have increased the range of actions available to small groups and firms.

Some commentators suggest that future flash points in world conflict are likely to centre on numerous areas inhabited by stateless national minorities scattered along the Central Asia. The Kurds, the Macedonians, the Kashmiris and the Azerbaijanis of Iran are among the peoples whose nationalism may be aroused and create sever international tensions. Phrases such as “the return of tribalism” in the south to describe the state of the world after the Cold War are often emblematic of ethnocentric and racist geographical imaginations. The emergence of wars in Central Africa and the Balkans in the 90s was often considered by northern commentators to be symptomatic of a return to irrational tribalism. Bloody nationalism in Algeria, Bosnia, and Liberia was underpinned by dangerous and unpredictable forms of ethnic hatred and religious fundamentalism.

Increasing numbers of states and political leaders have recognized that the power of “long distance nationalists” can be considerable, as Greek and former Yugoslav communities in Australia, North America and Western Europe pressurize governments into taking lines of action. In contrast to previous conflicts, the “local conflicts” are increasingly globally mediated by the demands of identity politics and ethnic cleansing rather than the cold war struggle against communism or capitalism.

For Iran, coalition around powerful political actor is sought - one who is able to ensure the sovereignty of the country in the future. The prospect of the economic and social sustainability stands entirely on the objectivity of its newly elected president to devolve power to the experts. Measures should be taken by social actors to prevent sinister sense of direction that is weakening the society and the state. The key is to renounce fatal policies, by unquestioning allegiance to the True Father of Reform, Rafsanjani. He has been manipulatively and unfairly singled out, in similar manner as has been schemed for many political elites. In so doing, a “dignified” and unbiased role for the country is maintained for Iran on the world political scene.

NASRIN AZADEH, July 2005

The Human Tradition

‘I believe in an aristocracy
Of the sensitive,
The considerate and the
Plucky.

Its members are to be found
In all nations and classes,
And all through the ages,
And there is a secret
Understanding when
They meet.

They represent the true
Human tradition, the one
Permanent victory over
Cruelty and chaos.’

E. M. Forster

Women in Politics

Women’s Engagement in Management Roles

One of the key problems with much that is written about organisation, is that rather simplistic frameworks are applied to what are complex systems. We tend to focus on the parts rather than seeing the whole. The organisation is a complex system of people and coalitions, each with particular interest, beliefs, values, inclinations and thoughts. Where organisation is considered a natural system, informal power relationship is highlighted with personnel assumed of as political actors, and organisations themselves shift to the political scenes. Other view of organisation as rational system stresses on formal relationships and specific goals. Under this presupposition, the organisation's employees are economic and rational entities. For political organisations, power is the most important criterion defining organisational behaviour and actors involved in constant power struggle to access the scarce organisational resources . In such systems, informal networks and coalitions are dynamic, making clash, discord and conflict as inevitable. The primary means are imposition and influence which divert and sustain power through political activities. Therefore, power, politics and influence constitute the process of organisational life and draws essential elements of the management positions.

In the theoretical debates of management, the notion is that gender affects the behaviours of managers through inter related processes as in gender politics. There are debates on factors affecting women's managerial positions and barriers forming hidden resistance and building glace ceiling - which might lead to their lower incentive to fill up higher occupational position. In most societies, there are certain stereotypes about women's management and work. That is to say women tend to rank family obligations above job commitments or women's employment is regarded as an extra income, thus don’t contest for promotions, and that women take negative feedback personally, not professionally and are easily discouraged by criticism, lacking mental capacity for higher level management and critical decision making. Devolution of power is rare for women managers making their executive positions less significant while they are judged according to their appearance rather than their conduct or force of character. Presuppositions such as these result in her work not been taken much seriously.

To study the main factors related to gender gap in management, numerous studies are conducted on the actual differences between male and female managers. Some studies stressed on the fact that women are less self confident, and have lower leadership skills when compared to men. Others point to the lack of achievement motivation to the inadequate presence of women in management positions. However there is few evidence to support the idea of the differences in achievement motivation of both gender. They are assigned more to often to lower level organisational positions which involve repetitious tasks. Usually women work in administrative positions or as assistants to manager, and executive responsibilities are rare occasions. Thus women least influence directly in the organisational decision making structure. Since they are absent in coalitions of decision making systems, therefore do not hold appropriate positions and lack organisational power. It should be noted that the current trend of engineering of society and formation of public opinion have led to over simplification of higher social positions.

Ultimately despite women's outstanding achievement in education and social activities, they have not been able to take their fair share in management positions. It is necessary to study the obstacles to the process of job mobility for female employees. Decision makers might hold back female managers because they fear that they will be discredited for having promoted an individual to a higher position in which she might show incompetence. As a result they prefer to appoint individuals that would least trigger general opinion. The implication of this fear is to weaken the female manager that she is inept and incapable or is too much dependent on the support, delay decision making. To gain power in organisations women should present will power, stamina and risk taking that is necessary to engage in challenging power games.



Women in Politics


A gender disparity exists… and will persist… Unless we work towards change!

Despite having won the right to vote and to stand for election, across the globe women constitute only 15.2% of all national parliaments. A mere 15 countries have achieved 30% or more representation of women in their national governments. While not parity, this percentage is nonetheless deemed “critical” — studies suggest that after reaching this threshold, women’s perspectives and interests will more likely be taken into account and pro-women legislation will more likely be adopted by the government.1

This gender disparity is lessening only very slowly, with the percentage of women legislators worldwide increasing a mere +0.5% per year. At this rate, global parity in national parliaments will not be achieved until the turn of the 22nd century.2

And in the UK…

Even though there are 118 women in the House of Commons, this constitutes just 18% of the 659 MPs at Westminster.7 Moreover, only one quarter of the highest level civil servants in Britain are women.8

The United Kingdom ranks only 51st in the world in women’s parliamentary representation. It is ahead of the United States, France and Italy, but behind the Scandinavian countries, Cuba, Spain, Argentina, South Africa and Bulgaria.9

And in nearly all areas of international policy-making…

Of the 159 trade policy experts selected in 1998 for the WTO roster of dispute (the body that settles trade-related disagreements) only 12 (7.5 %) were women.12 Of the country representatives who attended the fourth WTO Ministerial Conference, held in Doha, Qatar in November 2001, only 8.4% were women.13

At the IMF, women comprise 6.3% of alternates to the Board of Governors, and only 4.2% of alternates to the Board of Directors. At the World Bank, women comprise 9% of alternates to the Board of Governors, and only 16.7% of alternates to the Board of Directors.14

In the United Nation’s principal economic agency, UNCTAD, 31% of staff are women. However, at the higher levels, women’s representation declines and there are no women in the top four positions.15

And this gender disparity is evident even beyond the world of ‘politics’…

Of the UK’s 107 High Court judges, ten (9.35%) are women. Of the 433 District Court judges, 83 (19.2%) are women.16 Even though judicial positions were opened to women in 1919, the first woman law lord, Dame Brenda Hale, was only appointed in January 2004.17

According to the Cranfield Female FTSE Index, which tracks women’s representation among directors of the FTSE 100 companies, women held 101 directorships on the FTSE 100 boards in 2003. This was a milestone. Yet, 32 of the FTSE 100 boards still include no women members and the 101 directorships still represent a mere 8.6% of the total 1175 (up from 6.5% in 2001).18 Moreover, only 17 (3.7%) of the FTSE 100 Executive Directorships are held by women.19

Only 8% of senior police officers, 9% of top business leaders, 12% of local authority council leaders, 15% of university vice chancellors, and 9% of national newspaper editors in the UK are women.20


Participation in Decision Making


The traditional view of leadership, is based on assumptions of people’s powerlessness, their lack of personal vision and inability to master the forces of change, deficits which can be remedied only by a few great leaders. Against this traditional view there is a view of leadership that centres on subtler forms, participation, horizontal and systemic approach that focuses on mutual learning and contribution. There is argument that learning organizations provide a ground for new view of leadership. In a learning organization, leaders are designers, stewards and teachers. Here, for women there is capacity and space to engage in organisations’ leadership. In this view, participation in higher level of management means that women set their mind to question and challenge performance and plans, to engage in decision making process.

For political participation the main objectives are to achieve both equity and efficiency in government, to produce a government which is equitably responsive to all sections of the electorate. Thus incentives should be provided to the parties such that the government they form is responsive not merely to a majority of electors, but to all electors. There should be no disregarded minority, whose needs the government ignores. Each section of the electorate should have equal influence with the government, and get equal treatment from it. At the same time, these incentives to equal treatment should be provided in such a way as still to enable the government to be stable and effective.

Invariably, insufficient participation of women in higher political and social positions is the result of environmental and cultural factors rather than gender differences. Social conditioning does contribute to traditional gender roles to a great extend. And the resulting unfairness is deeply embedded in the structure of human society. We do need to be radicalized, to recognize and challenge the gender role injustices we are still too often blind to. It is inadequate to reply that many women don’t object to their restricted gender role. Limited experience may limit imagination and the desire for anything better. And people tend to adapt what they want to their deprived circumstances, to avoid the frustration of wanting what they cannot expect to get. Hence, coping with deficits in a rational way.

However, women can have great influence on decision makers in roles such as non-executive managers where there is opportunity to both support executives in their leadership and to monitor and control their conduct. In this concept both aspects of the role is carried out through strong and rigorous processes of accountability and engagement within the organisation. In practice, such accountability is achieved through a wide range of different behaviours – challenging, questioning, probing, discussing, testing, informing, debating and exploring – that are at the very heart of how non-executives seek to be effective across the spectrum of different managerial relationships and their strategic and monitoring roles.

There is too much to learn to find ways of achieving higher level of socio political participation and education in order to overcome the barriers and identify the opportunities particularly in the context where the impact of cultural socialization has resulted in women's inclination towards non management careers and positions. Questioning, challenge, explanation and debate form part of an ongoing dialogue that draws upon women experience of influencing and participating in higher level and to hold executives accountable. Within such processes of accountability women can constantly seek to establish and maintain their own confidence in the conduct of the organisation; the performance and behaviour of the executives, the development of strategy, the risk assessment. Involvements in strategy development and implementation, audit, and their role as a source of confidence and trust to stakeholders should be a continuous process if they are to gain support to fill up higher echelon of political, and social positions.





References:

1 Getting the Balance Right in National Parliaments. Fact sheet from the Women’s Environment and Development Organization [pdf]. Accessed 10 Nov 2004

2 Inglehart, Ronald and Pippa Norris. Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 129. Cites data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union, 2000.

3 Oxford University Student Union website. Accessed 10 Nov 2004.

4 University of Oxford Politics department website. Accessed 10 Nov 2004.

5 University of Oxford Law faculty website. Accessed 10 Nov 2004.

6 Oxford Union Society website. Accessed 10 Nov 2004.

7 Sex and Power: Who runs Britain? 2005 Report by the Equal Opportunities Commission [pdf]. Accessed 18 Jan 2005.

8 European Commission website on women and men in decision-making. Accessed 05 Dec 2004.

9 The other countries were Norway, Finland and France; www.terra.es/personal2/monolith/00women3.htm accessed 29 Nov 2004. The parliamentary statistics can be found at http://www.ipu.org/; accessed 29 Nov 2004.

10 European Women’s lobby. Accessed 05 Dec 2004.

11 European Commission website on women and men in decision-making. Accessed 05 Dec 2004.

12–15 Women’s Environment and Development Organization. Accessed 10 Nov 2004.

16 Department for Constitutional Affairs. Accessed 29 Nov 2004.

17 UK’s first woman law lord appointed. The Guardian article. Accessed 29 Nov 2004.

18, 19 The Cranfield School of Management Female FTSE Index 2003 report [pdf]. Accessed 29 Nov 2004.

20 Sex and Power: Who runs Britain? 2005 Report by the Equal Opportunities Commission [pdf]. Accessed 18 Jan 2005.

Oxford Women in Politics · c/o Department of Politics and International Relations · Manor Road · Oxford OX1 3UQ · United Kingdom

Environmental Concerns

Environmental Concerns

URANIUM is the most recent addition to the list of primary energy sources from which humans have learned to recover useful energy. Nuclear fuels manufactured from uranium are unique in two respects: they have an energy/weight ratio which is orders of magnitude greater than any other fuel and they, along with the equipment used in processing and converting them, are potentially lethal to all forms of life for extended periods of time.

Functional Components

The Uranium supply chain is not only technologically more complex than other supply chains but it si also different in kind. Combustion residuals from fossil fuels are noxious and if dumped into environmental systems in sufficient quantities are harmful but only rarely are they lethal. Residuals from nuclear fission are lethal and cannot be allowed to enter the environment directly. Consequently it is more appropriate in this section to consider the full nuclear fuel cycle rather than just the supply chain up to the point of end use. This serves to emphasise the commitment that has to be made to permanent storage and /or reprocessing of nuclear residuals.

Environment Aspects

In all stages of t he Nuclear Fuel Cycle except mining and milling the material being handled. The equipment used and the residuals must be isolated from the biosphere. Even during mining and milling special care must be taken to protect miners from radon gas and to contain tailings. Nuclear materials and residuals may be broadly distinguished on the basis of whether they emit low or high levels of radiation and whether the level persists for short (months/years), intermediate (decades, centuries), or long periods. The intensity of radiation determines the degree of containment required and the persistence determines the length of time containment and isolation from the environment must be provided. At present nuclear residuals we contained and placed into short intermediate water filled stainless steel and concrete larks usually at the site ofr t he plant at which they were produced. Long term or permanent storage sites are not yet in use. Investigations are under way to determine the suitability of storage either in underground cavities in impermeable, completely stable geological structures or burial in red clays at the bottome of ocean deeps. Before the end of this century some of the early nuclear reactors used in the generation of electricity will be decommissioned raising the question of their disposal. Temporary measures involve shutting down the plant and the establishment of a complete security system to prevent re-entry. Long term measures require partial or complete dismantling and the entombment of equipment in a massive cocoon of reinforced concrete.

Organisational Structure

The mining and milling of uranium ores, outside the centrally planned economics, is in the hands of large private mining companies, some of them divisions of energy conglomerates. The remaining stages of the front end of the nuclear cycle are still generally carried out by government controlled agencies or corporations. The reactors themselves are owned by electric utility companies and the back end of the cycle (to the extent that it is developed) involves a mix private and public sector organisations. Research and development is also shared between the two sectors (with the emphasis on the public sector) where as the design and construction of reactors and ancillary equipment is largely carried out by a relatively small number of international E. The nuclear fuel industry is the most widely and stringently regulated of the energy industries. International and national agencies attempt to control and monitor every stage of the nuclear cycle by means of continuously evolving regulatory and licensing procedures and in the case of national government by direct participation.

The Right to Vote

Women+Suffragists+Courage+Struggle+
Determination = The Right to Vote

USE IT , DONT LOSE IT






WHAT IS STATUS ANXIETY?

I Problems:

Babies
Snobbery
Expectations
Meritocracy

II Solutions

Religious
Socrates
Art
Death
Perspective
Success

Good Governance - Justice in full capacity

Good Governance - Justice in full capacity

Governance failures are a fundamental problem of our time. Failed, inadequate, incompetent,or abusive national authority structures have sabotaged the economic well being, violated the basic human rights, and undermined the physical security of their populations. The problems generated by inadequate governance cannot be adequately addressed within the confines of conventional sovereignty which stipulates that all states should enjoy both autonomy and international recognition. Alternative institutional arrangements, need to be developed including de facto if not de jure global trusteeships arrangements that engage external international institutions in judicial and rights based aspects of domestic governance on a quasi permanent basis. The fundamental rules of conventional sovereignty -- recognize juridically independent territorial entities and do not intervene in the internal affairs of other states -- although frequently violated in practice have rarely been challenged in principle. But these rules no longer work, and their inadequacies have had harmful consequences for the strong as well as the weak. The policy tools that powerful well governed states have available to fix badly governed or occupied polities . Development programs for assisting good governance carried out by the United Nations, World Bank or IMF or other institutions are inadequate in their outcomes to institutionalize democracy and social justice. Better domestic governance in badly governed or occupied polities will require transcending accepted rules in specific issue areas and possibly some new form of trusteeship as well. There is a conspicuous gap between the analytical emphasis on international institutions’ decision-making processes to initiate or intervene during a conflict, and violation of human rights. While there is a great and growing literature on humanitarian intervention during a conflict, there is little corresponding study of international policies to address exploitive authorities involved with widespread and systematic violations of human rights. Deciding whether and how to deal with suspected atrocity perpetrators is of critical importance to policymaking and judiciary system.



Key words: Justice, judiciary, governance, human rights, corruption, transparency



Exploitative Political Leaders

The state has a role to play in providing public goods such as educating the youth of the country as well as in reflecting the political and social values, such as throwing out parties who turn a blind eye to corrupt privatisation. Yet, “capacities to govern” must be developed – capacities related to setting strategic direction, building capacity to implement policy, and building new ways of financing public goods and services.

Weak governed countries globally are confronting endemic violence, exploitative political leaders, falling life expectancy, declining per capita income, and even state sponsored genocide. In Colombia much of the territory is controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a Marxist rebel group. In Rwanda more than 700,000 people were slaughtered in a matter of weeks in 1994. The consequences of failed and inadequate governance have not been limited to the societies directly affected. Poorly governed societies can generate conflicts that flow across international borders. Trans-national criminal and terrorist networks, human and drug traffickers can operate in territories that are not controlled by the internationally recognized government. Humanitarian disasters not only prick the conscience of political leaders in advanced democratic societies but also leave them with no good political choices.

In conflicts beside the real human cost of misery, injury and death, there is also the economic cost of the loss of human life, destruction of property, and economic activity foregone. The persistent misuse of arms by law enforcement agencies, particularly the police and paramilitaries, encouraged by the ability to secure further supplies of arms, can itself be a significant contributing factor in undermining development, because economic actors lose confidence in the justice sector. Where small arms are widely misused, potential business investors may well look elsewhere for a more secure environment in which to invest their capital. States that experience failure or poor governance more generally are beset by many problems. In such states infrastructure deteriorates; corruption is widespread; borders are unregulated; GNP is declining or stagnant; crime is rampant; and the national currency is not widely accepted. Armed groups operate within the state’s boundaries but outside the control of the government.

Political leaders who are operating in an environment in which material and institutional resources are limited have often themselves chosen policies that make things worse. For some leaders disorder and uncertainty are more attractive than order and stability. In a more chaotic environment they are better able to extract resources from the society. Decisions affecting the distribution of wealth are based on personal connections rather than bureaucratic regulations or the rule of law. Leaders create multiple armed units that can be played off against each other.

Factors around governance are crucial in order to assess the level of responsibility of the government in terms of the way the imported arms may be used. There is a clear relationship between governance standards and military spending. At a meeting in 1997, donors formally recognised that the defence-spending decision-making process pursued by a government influences its spending priorities. Research, as well as government statements, suggest that transparent, accountable, and participatory processes for defence-spending decision making are more likely to produce .appropriate. spending policies that take into account development needs.160 Such processes are also likely to apply to appropriate spending on law enforcement.

The denial of people's right to influence decision makers has been a central cause of suffering in the world. Systematic denial of people's right to participate erodes the accountability and effectiveness of organisations, and governments, making these institutions much more prone to the corruption, malpractice, and malfeasance that exacerbate poverty. In 1989 one of the most damaging flaw undermining the UNHCR’s Comprehensive Plan of Action CPA, was the extent of corruption among immigration officials, most notably, in the Philippines and Indonesia. Under the CPA, the UNHCR was tasked with overseeing the screening process and ensuring that it would comply with international standards. However, there was little the UNHCR could do about violations. Its mandate power to overturn negative decisions on the grounds of gross injustice was used in only exceptional circumstances (Brook 2001: 48).

Organised crime is also potentially subversive of democracy and inhibits inward investment, whilst relationships of connivance between organised crime and some politicians forms a ‘parallel’ state that undermine the quality of, democracy. Although organised crime and corruption are analytically separate phenomena, where the former is deep rooted, the latter finds particularly fertile soil and vice versa. Corruption involves the suspension of normatively defined criteria for the allocation of resources, in favour of market exchanges – whose distributive consequences in turn depend on the arbitrary and unequal distribution of money and other resources. By undermining principles of equality and transparency, corruption is subversive of rules of democracy. It inflates the costs of public services and perpetuates administrative inefficiency besides being self-generating. Corruption becomes systematic and routine when the places of the official actors and administrators are gradually taken by lower moral calibre supported by the monopolizing system of governance. The organized crime and corruption can accelerate by factors such as universal suffrage, weak governance, and absence of strong international institution to bring abusers to justice. Therefore, politicians should not be able to provide protection from judicial investigation to over rule social and moral agenda. What incentives then do politicians have to tackle corruption and organised crime when public indifference mean that the status quo is the preferred option of all concerned? Corruption is self perpetuating in a context with a strong or predominant executive, weak legislatures, public indifference, and exemption from prosecution, each of which require discrete solutions. Transparency is held to be central to contemporary discussions of democratic governance, since open access to information and elimination of secrecy is taken to be a condition for the prevention of corruption and promoting public accountability.

Of the most striking aspects of the contemporary world is the extent to which domestic sovereignty has faltered so badly in states which still enjoy international legal and other legitimated and accepted institutional forms. Conventional sovereignty is now the only fully legitimated institutional form but, unfortunately, conventional sovereignty is abused by local authoritarian rulers. Some leaders will find exploitation of their own populations more advantageous than the introduction of reforms. The leverage of external actors will usually be constrained.

Transitional administration is difficult: the demands are high; advance planning which must prejudge outcomes is complicated, especially for the UN; and resources -- economic, institutional, military, often limited. The responsibilities of transitional administration must include more severely human rights monitoring, election assistance, disarmament and demobilization of armed forces, and protection of humanitarian relief workers.

Alternatively, local leaders who become dependent on external actors during a transitional administration, but who lack support within their own country, do not have an incentive to invest in the development of new institutional arrangements that would allow their external benefactors to leave at an earlier date. The endorsement of a new institutional arrangement would provide a new option, a new choice.

Human Rights Crises

Humanitarian crises and deeply felt human rights issues have engaged electorates in advanced democracies and created no win situations for political leaders who are damned if they intervene or damned if they do not. And, attempts by stronger countries to interfere in the human rights abuse cases, they are confronted with the governments justifications such as national sovereignty. The availability of small and heavy weapons, ease of movement across borders for traffickers in human and drugs, and terrorist networks have generated capability for criminals to kill large numbers of people. Non state actors, such as anarchist groups in the 19th century could throw bombs that might kill 50 or even several hundred people, but not more. Irresponsible states with limited means can procure chemical and biological weapons. Nuclear weapons demand more resources, but they are not out of reach of radicals. Humanitarian disasters, widespread migrations, slavery and forced labour are pressurizing decision makers in democratic countries to face with serious global issues. Weapons deployed by radical tempered, and trans-national terrorists networks that might operate from failed and failing states can kill ten of thousands or even millions of citizens in other states. If external actors intervene militarily, either because of security threats or a breakdown of internal order, they cannot ignore the question of how new domestic authority structures will be constituted.


Transitional Justice

In some parts of the world disorder, including civil war, has become endemic. For the period 1955 to 1998 more than 136 state-failure events in countries were identified with populations above 500,000. State failure was operationalized as one of four kinds of internal political crisis: revolutionary wars, ethnic wars, adverse regime change, and genocides. In 1955 less than 6 percent of the countries were in failure. In the early 1990s the figure had risen to almost 30 percent.

Options, rarely used, considered for dealing with suspected war criminals are narrow such as: prosecutions through an international criminal tribunal (ict), executions on sight, executions en masse later, show trials and then executions, exile, concentration camps, amnesty, and, as Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill suggested for suspected atrocity perpetrators in World War II, castration.

Recent events have reinforced the salience of these issues. The International Criminal Court (icc), which was established by the Rome Statute on 17 July 1998 and which entered into force on 1 July 2002, recently announced that its first two investigations will concern mass violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (particularly the northeast) and Uganda (particularly the north), where tens of thousands of people have suffered atrocities, including murder, summary executions, torture, mutilation, sexual violence, forcible displacement, and cannibalism. For the past two decades, Sudan (particularly the western region of Darfur) has been consumed by a civil war that, in 2003, erupted into mass atrocities, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of individuals and the displacement of 1.5 million more. thorough investigation of transitional justice options and the issues surrounding them is crucial for the process of evaluating responses to past atrocities and for developing appropriate and effective policy to address suspected atrocity perpetrators in the future.

Essentially a collective, extra-judicial punishment through presumed guilt by political association, lustration is often seen as a quick and relatively easy method of dealing with a large number of suspected atrocity perpetrators and their accomplices. Some argue that this process violates laws concerning discrimination based on political association, specifically international law, such as the Fourth Geneva Convention and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, or domestic law.

Political authorities in badly governed countries must be held accountable to international institutions and have to be encouraged to use their international legal sovereignty, their right to commit to international agreements, to create shared sovereignty arrangements that compromise their lack of concern for establishing law and justice in their jurisdictions. International aids should be given to train judges, re-write criminal codes, increase transparency, fight corruption, professionalize the police, encourage an open media, strengthen political parties, and monitor election. Ignorance of rule of law and weak judiciary is not only misleading the effective legal process to establish justice but is also dangerous to prevail crime, corruption over the borders.

Transitional justice involves states and societies shifting from a situation of conflict to one of peace and, in the process, using judicial and/or non-judicial mechanisms to address past human rights violations. Recent efforts to bring to justice Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić, Ratko Mladić, Charles Taylor, Théoneste Bagasora, Augusto Pinochet, Hissène Habré, Luis Echeverría, and other suspected perpetrators of atrocities in the Balkans, Rwanda, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Burundi, Chad, Chile, East Timor, Cambodia, Iraq, Mexico, demonstrate how relevant and crucial issues of effective justice system are today and, unfortunately, will be for the foreseeable future.

There is a conspicuous gap between the analytical emphasis on international institutions’ decision-making processes to initiate or intervene during a conflict, and violation of human rights. While there is a great and growing literature on humanitarian intervention during a conflict, there is little corresponding study of international policies to address exploitive authorities involved with widespread and systematic violations of human rights. Deciding whether and how to deal with suspected atrocity perpetrators is of critical importance to policymaking and judiciary system.



Re-organizing Good Governance and Justice institutions

In 1997 the World Bank’s World Development Report was sub-titled The State in a Changing World. The Report stated that the clamour for greater government effectiveness has reached crisis proportions in many developing countries where the state has failed to deliver even such fundamental public goods as property rights, roads, and basic health and education..

“THE passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations.”

Yet, the modern ideas of rationality and of free individual choice has become a new dogma of anti dogmatism era and is applied in just about all fields of social life: in the political and the economic, in the moral and the aesthetic, in the collective and the individual spheres, and in yet others. One of the most important of the aspects of its operation is that it tends in a decisive respect to deny the relevance of power to truth and that in an epoch of unprecedentedly advanced techniques of political and commercial mass manipulation!

Organisational sociology suggests that values can be imparted throughout an organisation, and individuals can internalise its values, so that what starts as social conditioning and emulation for acceptance may eventually turn into something which is practically indistinguishable from a developed ethical awareness, as long as the values are clearly and regularly signalled. Nevertheless, the problem remains that individuals will vary in their susceptibility to these processes.

Furthermore, codes of conducts were innovated in systems where boundaries are better maintained, as opposed to systems where influence is exercised by the political class over the judicial system. However, codes of conduct introduce new and potentially ambiguous criteria of performance judgement. In so far as they deal with issues that are not encapsulated in hard law, they introduce considerations into the employment relationship that expose public servants to controls and sanctions by either political masters or public managers that are at the least risky. As such, codes of conduct are expected to be adopted for both elected representatives and appointed officials, with the accountability mechanism concerns about governance that include constitutional or quasi-constitutional relationships especially between officials and elected representatives, impartiality, efficiency, institutional repute, and service delivery.

Looking at democratic values of both Western and Eastern society, Michiel de
Vries offers a dynamic analysis of value change at the local level in Lithuania, Belarus, Russia, Sweden and the Netherlands. By using policymaker surveys to look at attitudes toward leadership, minorities in decision making processes, participation, conflict resolution, parochialism, central-local relations, and income policies, he finds that “period-effects seem to be most important for explaining value change and that values are especially characteristic for periods and less for generations and age-groups.”

Democratic values and processes range of projects in human rights in UK have initiated the inclusion of issues in prison and police training on behalf of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, university courses on human rights, and theatre projects in prisons to raise awareness of human rights. The question is raised whether improved management of public institutions, such as the police and prison service, reduce corruption and abuses? What are the political and institutional problems facing would-be reformers? These are important themes to learn from one another’s experiences as to what works in the areas of: police reform; prison system reform, alternatives to custody and human rights within prison; and the interlinked problems of corruption and organised crime and the role of judicial institutions in tackling these issues.

Good governance contributes to the protection of human rights through promotion of the rule of law. Accountability and transparency in the justice institutions, and encouragement of governmental responsibility for civil liberties. The argument is that human rights need to be grounded in good practices, with professionalism, procedures, and stable, accountable institutions replacing arbitrariness. For this to happen, human rights need to be made relevant to the day-to-day operation of the justice system, including those who work within it.

The Act of Human Rights requires a re-evaluation of the relationship between government and citizen. In placing the language of rights at the centre of our legal and political systems, it also presents an opportunity to further the protection of a wide range of rights, such as social rights.

In this context new arrangements such as the concept of community police are regarded as more police, helpful and less violent and corrupt. However, they are also regarded as ‘less efficient’, a measure that for many is the bottom line. Confidence in the police and lower levels of fear are present where community police are formed and, crucially, the local populace are acquainted with them. Community policing works but only when it is sufficiently visible and understood to inspire greater support from population and police alike.

Where coercive power is paramount, citizen security needs to be separated from other issues, whilst legitimacy needs to be restored on several levels, for political parties, civil society and for institutions. With community policing, arbitrary justice is quick whilst restoring the rule of law is slow. Moving from policing by fear to policing by consent in El Salvador has been hampered by low social capital, high political polarization, and low institutionality. Given the continuing politicisation of the judiciary, and the fact that 80 per cent of homicides are due to social violence in the community, home and street, not to acquisitive crime, the police can only function with the backing of political and civil society. Tolerance and negotiation need to be built around the police force and responsibility for human rights and reducing crime shared by everyone.

It is true that responsibility for protecting human rights must be shared between state and civil society. Whilst reform of the criminal justice institutions is crucial, they need to be supported by changed societal attitudes as well in relation to crime and human rights. To expand democratic governance, protect human rights; and to reduce international threats and improve the right of civilians in badly governed polities, alternative institutional arrangements supported by external actors should be added to the policy toolkit. Such new institutional arrangements may also be critical for establishing decent and effective governance in post conflict situations, whether caused by civil, ethnic, tribal wars or by invasion and occupation by more powerful states.


References:

Programme Impact Report, Oxfam GB’s work with partners and allies around the world, July 2004

Guns or Growth, Assessing the impact of arm sales on sustainable development, Oxfam, Amnesty, Iansa, Control Arms Campaign, June 2004

‘TRANSPARENCY: THE TERM AND THE DOCTRINES’: A British Academy-ESRC Public Services Programme Sponsored Workshop, www.britac.ac.uk

REPORT ON HUMAN RIGHTS CONFERENCE: Promoting human rights through good governance in Brazil, June 2003, St Antony’s College Oxford, Dr Fiona Macaulay and Marcos Rolim.

Andrezj Bolesta, Conflict and displacement, international politics in the developing world, International Politics in the Developing World,

Z.D. Kaufman ‘The Future of Transitional Justice’, stair 1, No 1 (2005): 58-81.

R. Willman, Hobbes on the Law of Heresy, in Preston King, Thomas Hobbes: Critical Assessments, London, Routledge, 1993:103-5

GOVERNANCE FAILURES AND ALTERNATIVES TO SOVEREIGNTY, Stephen D. Krasner, Department of Political Science, Stanford University, 3/22/2004

World Bank, World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World (Washington D.C.: World Bank, 1997), p. 2.

Codes of conduct for public officials in Europe, common label, divergent purposes, “Governance and Political Ethics”,David Hine, University of Oxford, May 2004

New trends and policy shift in the Italian Mezzogiorn, by Fabrizio Barca, “Italy: Resilient and Vulnerable, Volume I: The European Challenge” Issued as Volume 130, Number 2, of the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Introduction: The Challenge of Capacity Building in Central and Eastern Europe, Bryane Michael


Taking the widely-quoted Transparency Corruption Perceptions Index, the UK stands highest (for probity). The UK ranks 11th in the global rating; These widely-reported rankings have been fairly stable over time.

Social Capital - The Right Connections

Scholars define social capital as a socio-structural resource that is considered to be the capital of individuals. This asset is not a single object; it is actually a set of characteristics in the social structure that facilitates social action for individuals (Coleman 1998:467). Social ties allow the flow of information and resources, and they are thus valuable both as a stock of support and as transmission channels. They are also the raw material of reciprocity and trust: these can only be maintained when interactions take place in sufficiently dense networks, that is, when it becomes possible to monitor individual reputations. Social capital is thus a unique mixture of 'structure and content' (Degenne and Forsé 1999, p. 116), a concept that aims to capture the nature of social interactions through which, paraphrasing Mandeville, private vices can become public benefits. It is in the field of political participation that this twofold dimension finds a highly relevant example. The idea that social capital promotes democratic virtue and civic engagement, popularised by Putnam a decade ago (Putnam 1995; Putnam 2000; Putnam et al. 1993), has become a common place in sociology.

It is assumed that Networks have positive externalities that go beyond the benefits individuals pursue: They promote norms of generalised reciprocity and the emergence of trust, they facilitate coordination and communication, they contribute to the spread of political expertise, they reduce opportunism and foster collaboration and they enhance the participant’s “taste” for collective benefits (Putnam 2000, pp. 20-22).

On the other hand, there is some analytical evidence against the idea that dense networks of interaction lead to a reduction of opportunism: when transmitting information, these can actually increase free-riding (Lazer 2003). What Putman and his disciples show is a correlation between membership and political action with no structural component. In his approach, Putnam “fails to account for the ways in which phenomena such as levels of trust in a society are endogenous outcomes of social relations” (Durlauf, 2002: 263). In this respect, the result of a study in a more systematic approach shows that political engagement is a function of:

1)the size of the network,
2)the political expertise of its members and
3)the frequency of interaction between them (La Due Lake and Huckfeldt 1998).

However, Traditional network analysis, on the other hand, takes into account the full importance of network structural properties to the transmission of information and resources, and their access and control. This approach stresses the relevance of the distinct positions individuals hold in the global network, a structural location that gives them a more or less privileged access to resources. That structure matters is one of the core claims of social capital research. How fast and efficiently information and resources can spread will therefore depend on the network ‘structural properties‘. We know that failure to build dynamic network ties [capturing emergent norms and conventions] has negative political consequences, such as the loss of common experience and a consequent fragmentation of society (Sunstein 2001).

The overall network connectedness is assumed to enrich information flow and, with this, the pool of ideas and interests that have to be publicly defended. Networks are said to contribute to the existence of a forum where everybody has the chance to spread their views. Political information flows through social networks, and in these networks public life is discussed - networks of civic engagement instil in their members habits of cooperation and public spiritedness, as well as the practical skills necessary to partake in public life” (Putnam 2000, p. 338) - but also trustworthiness and cooperation: “Dense social ties facilitate gossip and other valuable ways of cultivating reputation” (Putnam 2000, p. 21). In this literature, it is not only “civic virtues” that matter, but also other technical (and more mundane) skills such as learning how to value and assess arguments, how to work out opinions or how to develop ideas. It is having confidence in the value of one’s opinion that matters.

Social capital, to sum up, is alleged to benefit democracy by educating its citizens, by putting them together and making them learn from each other. In other words, the core assumption in the literature is that social capital “serves to enhance human capital on the cheap” (La Due Lake and Huckfeldt 1998, p. 581).

Nonetheless, the study on structure of networks shows that there is more to diffusion effects than just the density of networks: the distribution of ties, and its impact in the overall structure, also plays a significant role in the diffusion efficiency, the role that Putnam ignores. A lower density does not necessarily mean that civic networks do not accomplish their function of spreading political information any more. They might be accomplishing it even better if the right number of individuals have the right number of connections. The link between level of associationism, networks, and democracy is not as straightforward as social capital literature assumes. what matters is not how much individuals are connected but rather how a particular number of individuals manage to connect the rest.

These “highly connected individuals” have an influence disproportionate to their number (Watts 2003, p. 105). The dynamics that take place on networks depend on their structure. And their structure determines whether the alleged effects of social capital are true or not. Networks facilitate these processes under certain circumstances that cannot be simply reduced to the level of associationism and the consequent density of networks.

Social capital theory still has to explain how networks promote cooperation at the same time that they promote an efficient information diffusion. It has to differentiate between density and efficiency, and between efficiency in the transmission of information and efficiency in the promotion of cooperation. Finally, when the outcome under analysis is democracy and political participation, another distinction is needed: a normative definition of efficiency has to be clearly delimited to compare it with the technical definition. A network where all nodes are exclusively connected to a central node is highly efficient, but it is closer to Orwell’s totalitarian society than to a civic community. Different network designs can be equally effective in diffusing information or resources, but designs do not contain information about the ‘good’ or ‘evil’ of their implementation. A normative “criterion” is necessary to define “efficiency” when applied to the role networks play in the field of political participation.


Extracted from:
The Role of Dynamic Networks in Social Capital: A Simulation Experiment
University of Oxford, Dept of Sociology, 2004

Social capital, thus is measured according to the intensity and quality of relations, interactions among individuals and groups, as well as reciprocal respect for shared norms and values. It is a sense of belonging and integrity, which form the basis of social cohesion (Kareken and Johnson, 1998)

UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS UDHR

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, elaborated the scope of human rights. Article 1 summarizes all of the subsequent articles states, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." More than 20 years after adopting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the international community agreed on two covenants spelling out in more detail the rights embodied in the declaration. UDHR therefore have been grouped into two separate covenants for further developing into an enforceable set of principles. These were the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (often referred to as the political covenant) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (often referred to as the economic rights covenant). Both entered into effect in 1976. These are legally binding on states that have ratified them. However, many member states have not done so, and many others have done so only with substantial reservations. (States can make reservations to treaty articles that they do not wish to be bound by, as long as these are not contrary to the meaning of the treaty). The concept of national sovereignty is a dominant argument for the states to prevent interference in the home affairs of other nations.

The International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International
Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural
Rights (ICESCR) were completed in 1966 and
entered into force in 1976. Together with the
UDHR, these three instruments comprise what
is known as the International Bill of Rights,
which provides the international legal framework
for the promotion and protection of all human
rights.

These rights include:

ICCPR:
• the right to life
• the right to a fair trial
• the right to freedom of expression
• prohibition against torture
• the right to liberty and security
• the right to freedom of religion and conscience


ICESCR:
• the right to work
• the right to the highest attainable standard of health
• the right to education
• the right to an adequate standard of living
• the right to social security




THE EUROPEAN CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS

In general, treaties protecting civil and political rights have incorporated complaints mechanisms, enabling individuals alleging violations of their
rights to submit petitions for adjudication. By contrast, treaties protecting ESC rights were accorded more restricted methods of supervision, namely monitoring of reports submitted to them by States Parties (i.e. those States that ratified the treaties). Thus, at the UN level, both the ICCPR and the ICESCR require States
Parties to submit periodic reports to their respective treaty-monitoring bodies on measures taken to comply with the provisions of the Covenants. However, only the ICCPR has a complaints mechanism; a comparable procedure under the ICESCR is under consideration but has so far eluded agreement. As a consequence, while the ICCPR has generated a wealth of case law which interprets and gives life to its provisions, the ICESCR has not had the benefit of such a system.

The Council of Europe drafted the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedom, with the view to political considerations within the framework of rights that the member states have adopted therefore are enforceable. The two main parts of the Convention is initially the substantive rights protected by the Treaty and further those rights that deal with procedural matters, namely rules and procedures for the admissibility of complaints.

The Convention, Article 1, Guarantees that all rights are to be secured for everyone; Article 2 Protects the right to life but allows courts to issue death penalty, Article 3 Prohibits torture, Article 4 Prohibits slavery, Article 5 Protects the right to liberty and security of person, Article 6 requires minimum rules for fair civil and criminal hearings, Article 7 Prohibits the retrospective application of criminal law or increased sentencing, Article 8 Protects the right to privacy and respect for family life, home and correspondence, Article 9 Protects the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, Article 10 Protects the right to freedom of expression, Article 11 Protects the right to freedom of association with others, Article 12 Protects the right to marry and found a family, Article 13 Requires an effective domestic remedy for any violation, Article 14 Prohibits discrimination in relation to the enjoyment of the Convention’s rights, Article 15 Allows certain rights to be restricted in times of “war or other public emergency threatening the life of the nation”, Article 16 Allows restrictions on the political activity of aliens, Article 17 Specifies that activities aimed at the destruction of the Convention’s rights and freedoms are not protected by the Convention, Article 18 Emphasises that where the Convention permits certain restrictions on a right, those restrictions will be strictly construed.

Part two of the Convention Article 19-51, deals with the judicial enforcement to ensure observance, and it has been further revised by Protocol 11 which came into effect on Nov 1998.

The Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights

The implementation of the Human Rights Act represented a significant milestone in the
promotion of human rights in the UK. For the first time, human rights standards are directly applicable and enforceable in UK law, and will be binding on government and public administration. The introduction of the Act also raises questions about the nature, status, and implementation of other key human rights instruments. In relation to social and economic and cultural rights, these include the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Social Charter of the Council of Europe, other more specific UN and ILO Conventions, and the European Union’s
Charter of Fundamental Rights.

The UK government’s Annual Human Rights Report, published in 1999 by the Foreign
and Commonwealth Office (FCO), stressed the importance of recognising the ‘indivisibility’ (i.e. the equal value) of the whole family of rights
– not just civil and political rights, but also social and economic rights. The two sets of rights are indivisible: that is, they form a single unified body of rights.
Until relatively recently, the link between poverty, social exclusion, and the denial of human rights was rarely recognised. However, understanding has grown of the close interrelationship between these issues. At the international level, the UN
General Assembly reaffirmed in 2001:

… that extreme poverty and exclusion from society constitute a violation of human dignity and that urgent national and international action is therefore required to eliminate them;

Criteria for Admissibility

A pioneering act in international law was put forward by Protocol 11 that has given the right to individuals to make states accountable before an international court in case of breaching their international obligations. This is an unprecedented permission given by an international procedure to persons to have direct access to an international court with the power to deliver judgments which are binding in international law. The judgments are enforceable by the Committee of Ministers.

Under Article 34 of the Convention the right of individual petition is now a mandatory part of the Convention, though it remains optional for overseas territories. The jurisdiction of the court is limited. Complaints can only be considered if they meet the admissibility criteria set out in Article 35. These can be summarised as:

Submission by an eligible person, the issue of concern in the Convention, the time limit that the state was bound by the treaty, in the extend of jurisdiction of the Convention, all domestic remedies have been exhausted, within six months of the last remedy, as well as raising the arguments in the domestic courts. The states are further obliged not to restrict the effective practice of these rights and to allow individuals to put forward their cases of abuse.


Eligible Person to Complain, Who and about Whom?

Any person, NGO or group of individuals claiming to be the victim of a violation can bring forward their complains under the Convention. This can include physical persons, including children and other victims of violence, whether or not represented by their legal representative, their parents, legal persons such as companies, NGOs, religious groups, and political parties. Individuals or legal persons do not have to be citizens of the state concerned. Similarly they don’t have to be the nationals of any state of the Council of Europe, though this may involve their rights under Article 1 of Protocol 1. Anonymous complains are not acceptable, but complainants can ask for confidentiality of their identity although they must be named for the abusive state.

Group Complaints

The right of complaint extends to NGOs and groups. This local government councils are not allowed to complain, but politicians in their personal capacity or political parties have given this right. NGOs or groups cannot bring complaint simply because they wish to challenge a particular action of the state. The Convention does not recognise a complaint brought by concerned persons who are not themselves victims of a violation. Trade Unions and NGOs can only provide representation of their members and cannot themselves bring complaints on behalf of their members - however, they can complain about an act directed towards the Union or the organisation.

CHILDREN may appear personally for the complaints or through their parent, guardian, or their official representative such as the Official Solicitor in the United Kingdom, or through their lawyer. The rules have been adopted to be more flexible than the national laws.

VICTIMS - Article 34 requires that the applicant must claim “to be the victim of a violation”, that is to say, s/he has been personally affected or is at risk of being affected by a law, or at least affected as an indirect person such as close family member of the victim who is imprisoned or deported.



The Accountable State

The Convention signed by the states, therefore only signatory states can commit violations. Complaints must therefore allege that a state which is a party to the Convention has failed to carry out its obligations.

Complaints cannot be brought against private persons or institutions, and the Court has continuously repeated that it does not deal with decisions of national courts. However. There are other ways to approach the Court as non state actors are also obliged and consequently include in the jurisprudence of the Convention. States are obliged to secure the rights and freedom therefore they must support legal procedures that ensure these rights.


The Time limit

Article 35 requires that complaints be introduced within six months of the final decision of the national authorities. The Court can only examine complaints which allege that the state has violated its obligations under the Convention.

Place of Violation

States can only be liable for violations which occur within their jurisdiction. All events which occur on their territory will normally be within their jurisdiction.


Complaint Subjects

The Court can only examine complaints which relate to the rights and freedoms contained in the Convention. Not all Member States have ratified all the protocols to the Convention. Complaints cannot be brought in relation to protocols which a state has not ratified. Since Protocol 11 came into force, states are no longer able to exclude from the right of individual petition complaints relating to any protocol which they have ratified. Many human rights issues are outside the Convention’s provisions: for example there is no right to divorce, to a particular nationality, to diplomatic protection or to use the language of one’s choice in dealings with the authorities. Other rights may appear be outside the scope of the Convention’s provisions, for example it contains no right to refugee status, no right to social security, no right to work or to question the length of a sentence duly imposed by a court. However these rights may be indirectly protected in some way by cognate provisions. Asylum seekers for example may be protected by the prohibition on torture or inhuman and degrading treatment, which includes a prohibition on impulsion to face the risk of such treatment. Refusal of social security benefits which have a contributory element may involve the determination of civil rights under Article 6, as may the right to compensation for unfair dismissal.

Some protected rights are not clearly marked out in the text of the Convention, such as physical safety as an example. Article 3 of the Convention prohibits inhuman and degrading treatment but since this prohibition is absolute, the threshold of severity test is very high. In Article 5 it guarantees the right to liberty and security of the person, it does not guarantee personal safety but only protection from arrest and detention. Physical or psychological ill treatment falling short by Article 3 might appear to fall outside the scope of the Convention’s protection. However, the right to “moral and physical integrity” could be found in the private life rubric of Article 8.

Exhaustion of domestic remedies

The most important procedural aspects of the Convention is the exhaustion of domestic remedies that limit further admissibility if it is undermined by the victim and his/her representative. Under Article 1 of the Convention, states are under an obligation which includes mandatory legal framework to ‘secure’ the rights and freedoms to everyone within its jurisdiction. The fundamental obligation under Article 1 is enhanced and highlighted by Article 13 which requires that ‘everyone whose rights and freedoms as set forth in this Convention are violated shall have an effective remedy before a national authority….’ It clearly points out that unless it is proved that the state had breached its obligations - approved in a national court of law - the complaints can not go any further.



Process of the Complaint

The applicant’s aim must be to use each opportunity to express the complaint clearly and to relate it directly, in simple language, to one or more of the Convention Articles. The Court’s investigation is divided into two separate parts. Initially as the admissibility stage - the screening process takes place where it assesses whether the complaint has crossed the procedural barriers. The following phase is the Court’s investigation of the truth of the complaint and includes the possibility of a friendly settlement. Although the two parts are dealt with separately below, the Court inevitable has regard to the merits of a complaint as it considers admissibility. Where observations on admissibility are sought to or an oral hearing arranged, the Court will also use the opportunity to obtain comment and information on the merits at the same time.

NA, 4 June

Oxfam GB, Beyond Civil Rights, Developing Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the UK, Sandy Ruxton and Razia Karim, First published in 2001 by Oxfam GB

Harnessing Natural Energy - The Question of Identity

"Romantic Concept of Identity"


"Life is a theatre, self is ‘a multi-sided die,’ enacting its many roles through impression and expression management, and dramatic realisation. Success requires, 'belief' in the part one is playing." The idea of performative quality of human life is embraced by the inner dynamics of the individual psyche (romanticism) - emotional rather than cognitive - fuelled with the natural energy of love, loyalty, devotion, duty, attachment, and respect that sustain the powerful sense of “belonging“.

For Locke a person is a ‘thinking, intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places, which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and it seems to me essential to it'(Locke 90).

Our sense of self is a continuous history of my body and consciousness, a sense of continuity. During 1950s with romantic idea of culture as the soul of society, “identity” was linked to popularisation of psychotherapy. For Ericsson identity was the very core of personality. The identity had to be nurtured in its relationship with culture. You had to understand where you belonged to know who you are. Sartre had other concerns with the idea of free rational person reflecting on ones life; he contested the bad faith of taking the identity from the shelf, ready made - of stereotyped group - as he termed the authenticity of identity. Identity notion today is updated as the story or narrative one tells of oneself that make sense - a relation between an individual and something else, a nation or a fault line that distinguishes oneself.

In the sociological traditions of symbolic interactionism and phenomenology, or their contemporary derivative referred to as social constructionism, a sense of self as a human individual cannot develop without social processes. Interactions with others, the symbolic exchanges of gestures and language in which meanings are negotiated and shape the inner dialogue of the self. Social constructionist authors argue that what we feel, as well as what we think about our feelings, how we hold ourselves physically are profoundly influenced by social interaction to the society which we are connected most with the sense of belonging.

Recently there has been the “cultural turn” in describing a shift in explanatory emphasis from the presumed to be determining power of social structures to a claimed diffusion of power in language cultural signifiers and discourse. Recent work has often stressed that individuals have multiple or hybrid identities and even with in one setting may appeal to a range of identities, moreover, it has become common to emphasize the process of making and claiming identities, identities are not attributes that people have or are but resources that people use, something that they do, Stuart Hall (1996).

Other theoretical approaches widely adopted in sociology, acknowledge the possibility of tacit knowledge, things that are learned more by practice and doing than thinking, and are not fully accessible to conscious thought. Many practices of language use and rules of social interaction are unconscious practices that bracket off and take for granted many aspects of both identity and social reality. As humans, we are all born or brought up into social setting where systems of symbolic interaction predate our existence. While language, customs and all humanly constructed systems are only sustained through creative use and are constantly open to change , a sense of their existence as prior to the self can result in them being taken for granted as unchanging frameworks for social interaction. However, unconsciously learned and habitual practices, in theory, always remain open to being brought back into conscious thought and to being recognized as potentially able to be changed. Identities are maintained as well as produced through social interaction, they are always open to challenge and renegotiation in social interaction.

As Goffman 1969, Strauss 1969, and Berger and Luckmann 1966 classically documented, in social interaction humans sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously present different faces to others. This can be experienced as deliberately doning a mask or as enjoying or playing up an authentic aspect of the self. The term identities can be used to encompass facets of the self that are only in play in some social contexts and not others. Identities need not be experienced as a constantly defining characteristic of the self, although some identities may be experienced in this way.

Hence, identities are never as profoundly fixed as psychoanalysis suggest. In this respect, some extra weight is placed on the emotional potency of parental or other caring relationships while personal relationships are viewed by social constructionists as more significant for identity than other relationships through out life. For example, a particular weight is given to interactions with ‘significant others’, emotionally important ‘others‘. The enhanced significance of ‘significant others’ is because these are emotionally charged relationships that people care more about than others as well as because they have involved more meaningful social interaction.

With civil right movements of 1965 the identity became political. The revival of ethnicity in post war US were thought of as what label are used to characterize identity. The state was not unitary and was made up of separate cultured groups each of which had their own identities. The key here for identity politics became the question of representation. The term multiculturalism that came first in Canada, pointing out to groups on what they had in common, how they could be integrated and insisted on recognition. However, Europeans fear of the danger of religious ethnicity and think religious should be thought of as a private matter. Political identity however, with US stressing her superiority, pursuing one formulation of cultural domination over weaker culture groups, is concerned with identities that are compelled to behave in particular way where cultural relativism is taken for granted, and difference is a key value.

The identity politics today has a lot going for it - it challenges an old notion of identity of nation and people for other identities both sub national and trans-national. Political psychologists, on the other hand, are attempting to integrate political scientists interest in social change and institutional development with psychologists interest in “cognition“, “emotion” and “personality“. The essentially normative character of both political and psychological analysis has been widely recognized. In closely related fashion, politics consists of a contest for the definition and realization of the good and psychology addresses what is healthy and normal. Political psychology tend to design and integrate the interests and concerns of political science and psychology. In this context, a number of research concerns include social change and democratization, ideology, altruism, social and political identity, voting behaviour, mass media effects and international integration. Political psychology offer an integrative analysis of political life - one which considers the interrelationship between political organization and culture on the one hand and individual thought and emotion on the other - for a broader definition of the sense of identity and social reality.



"I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.


But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.


In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more."

Lord Alfred Tennyson
The Oxford Book of English Verses, 2004


References;
- Dunn, John. Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984
- John Locke (1632-1704 British Empiricist) Of Identity and Diversity
- Burman, E & Parker, I (Eds.) (1996) Discourse Analytic Research. London: Routledge
- Burr, V. (1995) An Introduction to Social Constructionism. London: Routledge
- Davies, B & Harre, R (1990) Positioning: the discursive production of selves
- Parker, I (1992) Discourse dynamics. London: Routledge
- Understanding the Self. London: Sage/OUP
- The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman (1959)
- Iyengar, Shanto, 1993, "An Overview of the Field of Political Psychology"
- Professor Adam Kuper:Identity politics, The British Academy, April 2005.
- The British Academy, Identity Politics Seminar, April 2005

The Mutual State - Models for Managing Public Services

History:

The craft guilds were the small companies of the eleventh century.
Indeed the term 'company' comes from the Latin terms con
and panis, meaning to take bread together. As the workshop
and sales shop was also the master’s house in the town, all
the members of the guild, journeymen and apprentices
included, had lunch together.

Each guild was defined by common work and common trade.
They ranged from lawyers, priests and scholars to butchers,
bakers and hosiers. Work was strictly regulated. An average
day was eight hours – though this varied with the seasons.
Night work was strictly forbidden. Guild work was not
allowed on Saints’ Days, of which there were at least 150:
there have never been so many annual holidays since. Saint
Days were not “days off”, though. They were reserved for
civic work – building a cathedral, attending to the needs of
the poor and elderly.

By the rise to ascendancy of the nation state the local
regulation of commerce was lost and the long-distance merchant
guilds gained the upper hand over the local craft guilds.
Social service guilds (the neighbourhood guilds and almshouses) either
went into decline, were brought under the 1601 Charity Law or
made the responsibility of the national poor law rate system.

The cooperative movement started with the Friendly Society Act of 1757 - leaders of this movement, in 18 century Britain, Ireland, USA and France shared a utopian socialist ideal – that of creating a mutual aid economy. The Co-op shop movement in the UK grew in strength until the 1950s.

Demutualisation, a word which came to prominence in the 1990s, simply accelerated
the same trend. Mutuality on a large scale failed to engage members, who opted for the benefits of private ownership. There is remarkable upsurge in "social enterprises" – credit unions, social firms, housing co-operatives, fair-trade and ecological enterprises, managed workspaces, farmers’ markets, recycling initiatives, employment services, community shops, arts ventures, social care co-operatives and time banks.



Building the Mutual State

The search for more responsive models for managing public services, and the discovery of the limits to market and state, forms the background to the new-found interest in “social enterprise”. The business minded non-profits and voluntary organisations, led by social entrepreneurs. They operate with a public ethos, but they are entrepreneurial, selfgoverning and have proved effective at engaging the participation of users.

Self-governance is an essential recipe for what we have described as the Mutual State. After all, if management is to have significant freedom to innovate and respond to need, then creating single-purpose self-governing organisations is the way to do it. But how do you promote self governance without creating incentives for free-riding, lack of coordination and poor quality? The answer is to look for models of organisation that internalise public service excellence and cooperation with other parts of the public service jigsaw, rather than have to have this imposed through costly regulation. This is the “new mutuality”. The rationale was that there is a lot of practice already going on,
but it is rarely brought together or properly understood.

outline the underlying principles that inform the new mutuality: co-production, accountability, citizenship and scale. models for mutualisation, covering legal and other aspects designed to create replicable social enterprises across public services within a framework of quality assurance. However, the decentralisation of power in this way also creates firstly, the need for new forms of accountability /governance and secondly, the opportunity for new forms of citizens’ involvement. opportunities for creative mutualisation across a range of public services.


CO-PRODUCTION

The time banking, as “co-production”. The idea of coproduction reconceives public services. Instead of a traditional model, in which disinterested and expert professionals deliver services on behalf of, or for the use of, passive users, coproduction is about finding ways to unlock the knowledge and contribution of service users, valuing them as partners. The co-production approach also addresses one of the major paradoxes of the welfare state, which is that, in trying to target assistance to people in need, it can generate stigma and, in fields such as welfare benefit, deny people’s dignity. And where inflexible systems combine with a lack of human scale, as David Boyle argues in Section A, the result is a public disservice. Coproduction is an opportunity for people to act as citizens from the most effective of motives, which is the combination of selfinterest and public concern.


GOVERNANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY

Co-production is clearly linked to issues of governance and accountability. Decentralisation moves decision-making closer to users and improves the quality of service, whilst participation in governance can clarify lines of accountability and responsibility. A key concern here is how to promote innovation and social entrepreneurship allied to
democratically managed and accessible services, improved autonomy for workers, and more control and choice for citizens as discussed by Jack Dromey. Successful innovations in social enterprise stitch together aspects of the public, private and voluntary sectors. What is at issue here is capacity building: the development of skills and
resources from across sectors to develop future capacity within social enterprises. The view here is that regeneration projects are more likely to succeed if local people are involved, and if best use is made of public, private and voluntary sector expertise in the local area. Co-ordination of effort would lead to the bundling together of assets and services on a neighbourhood basis.


ENTREPRENEURIAL CITIZENSHIP

Involving citizens in the design and delivery of public services, and thus in the running of the Mutual State, inevitably changes the relationship between the citizen and the state. In sum, it extends the notion of citizenship for the simple reason that, in contrast to the myth of standardised, universal services, the more you put in, the more
you get out. There is a sense in which the new forms of civil society are demanding the creation of new democratic and public spaces within social life. Such spaces are not necessarily antagonistic to, but certainly cannot be simply mapped onto, older forms of community and solidarity.

This is the impetus behind the Mutual State. But, how can changing ideas about citizenship, democratic participation, community and the social good be linked to the changing role of the State and to a new vision of the relationship between the social and the economic? The key issue here, as we have already stressed, is that communities and individuals need to be involved, alongside the State and professionals, in the design and delivery of public services. having a clear public service ethos and not-for-profit basis;

• giving greater control to patients and service users and opening up options for greater accountability to local communities;
• more active involvement and control for both staff and management;
• offering freedom from “topdown” management from Whitehall;
• immunity to takeover by organisations which will not provide such benefits.


CITIZENSHIP

Marking a name of electoral form might be, and, for many people may well be, the sum total of our participation as a citizen in our country’s democratic and civic process.
We are all now customers or consumers, being treated as a customer or consumer, we are likely to insist on our consumer rights, demanding performance of the contract under which we are paying for services, and seeking compensation if we do not get it. We are consumers, not citizens. Clearly not everyone would be interested in participation, though with modern communications systems, many are interested in receiving more information. Modern mutuals are aware of the need to nurture active membership, and the variety of means of communication and methods of engaging people are being used to deliver this. Citizenship is the life-blood of the new mutuality.
A society in which links that bind people are stronger, where people have respect for community assets, and where they treat each other with respect, is a desirable goal. The benefits in reducing crime, promoting employment, and improving the quality of life do not need elaborating.


CONCLUSION

The big prize of democratic and institutional renewal in public services won’t happen by itself. It won’t happen by the heroic but scattered experimentation
of pioneers. To come close, the government now needs to do is to develop a systematic policy framework to remove the barriers and to let mutuality work.
As a first step, therefore, we need to assess how good we
are as a society, and a state, in securing genuine
participation. We need, in other words, a participation
audit, to draw out the lessons from existing community
involvement and act as a focus for best practice in the
future.

A mutuality agenda would enable local authorities to respond better to citizens’ needs. To an extent, this is already happening. The 1999 Local Government Act places a legal duty on local authorities to consult with stakeholders. However, hand in hand with decentralisation we also need a new professionalism for the public services that is based on empowerment and inclusion. It is not hard for paid experts
to pick up a degree of conceit. It is hard, but ultimately more rewarding, to learn how to share knowledge, occasionally to let go of control and to enable the participation of users.

A social enterprise is not an arm of government: it is an independent model outside the traditional public sector. Typically it is led by a social entrepreneur and is
socially owned or accountable. It may make profits, but they are not for private benefit. They are reinvested socially, either in the service or the community. This is to ensure that community resources are held in trust for future generations. We also need new powers to raise finance. The issue of local bonds, for example, enables
citizens to become social investors, with a stake in the improvement of local services beyond that of passive taxpayer. In Sheffield, the employment bond pioneered by Citylife has raised over £1 million for job creation from local people,
including celebrities such as Michael Palin. In Italy, co-operatives and voluntary organisations are able to apply for a special social enterprise status, in this case with tax advantages. In the USA, public services can operate as public benefit
corporations, with powers to raise finance. In cities such as Bristol and Brighton, trades unions have been active in promoting worker co-operatives as a successful alternative to privatisation. One of the benefits of mutuality would be the emergence of “horizontal accountability”, in which the immediate stakeholders – the local people and organisations who are in the best position to judge what is going on – hold public service organisations to account. The role of the National Audit Office would shift from straightforward inspection to enabling – providing the knowledge and capacity that would equip stakeholders to “self-audit”. The new generation of mutuals will need to be root-fed – patiently, methodically, with the right mixture of nutrients. As the Sure Start programme has shown, developing the capacity in communities to assume governance and management roles takes time.
The key word, perhaps, is pragmatism – mutuality, whether or not we are aware of it as such, has made striking advances in recent years, because people have come to realise it is often the best practical solution.

Some of the most positive examples are in health. The remarkable rise of self-help groups – there are now as many of these per thousand adults as there are doctors – is a reminder that a nation’s health is not primarily delivered by a state service that cares for us when we are sick. Through education, nutrition or exercise we can take responsibility for our own health. West Walker primary school in Newcastle, once close to collapse, has been “rescued” through participation, with parents and the wider local community pulling out all the stops to help turn it round. The school now boasts an adult education centre, a lively cafe and a nature garden, built of course by the children and parents.

Time banking, pioneered in the UK by the New Economics Foundation, has shown what can be achieved through social reciprocity – getting something back in return for helping the community. In Watford older residents earn time “credits” for monitoring council cleaning and waste and recycling services, and for reporting dog fouling, litter and abandoned shopping trolleys Local school children conducted a crime survey in Merthyr Tydfil in 1996, which the police recognised to be more reliable than their local records because people were prepared to tell them the truth!

Similarly what makes for good health or social services is the relationship and quality of interaction between user and provider. This is not something that you can set out in contracts. So if you are going to contract out, organisations that work in a participative or “mission driven” way offer the best guarantee of quality.
At best, this could produce a paradigm shift in the way good public services are conceived and delivered. Participation is the key to this – helping people feel they have a relationship with, and an influence over, the public services they pay for
through taxation. There are now many examples of successful mutuality, in health, housing, education, leisure, transport, social services and environmental work. The last two decades have seen a remarkable upsurge in social businesses, from credit unions and housing co- operatives to farmers’ markets, community shops, and time banks.

The priorities for mutualisation are: health, primary and secondary education, care for the elderly, childcare, employment advice, parks and libraries, leisure, recycling, housing, youth justice and regeneration partnerships.

The concept of the Mutual State represents not a step away from the collective interest but rather a new form of democratic governance. As Manuel Castells argues, NGOs “are to my taste the most innovative, dynamic and representative forms of aggregation of social interests. But I have a tendency to consider them ‘neogovernmental organisations’ rather than non-governmental organisations, because in many instances they are directly or indirectly subsidised by governments, and ultimately represent a form of political decentralisation rather than an alternative form of democracy. They are part of the emerging network state, with its variable geometry of institutional levels and political constituencies.” there are in principle, widespread opportunities to test:

• user participation in existing public services;

• social enterprises to operate public services, while the involvement of different stakeholders will vary according to the nature of the service; citizens auditing of public
services;

• Multi-stakeholder models of governance for public services.

One motto for public service reform in the 21st century is going to be not “rolling back the state”, but “rolling forward the community”. If this vision is to become a reality then ordinary people, as well as policy makers, politicians and public service staff, will have to champion it and to make it part of their understanding of what they expect from a modern state. What this report both demonstrates and argues is that there is a compelling case for allowing them the opportunity to do so. In an era of globalisation, we can advance a new, forward-looking model of democratic, network governance.





Extracts:

The Mutual State, Ed Mayo and Henrietta Moore, NEF, 2003,
www.worldbank.com/participation/webfiles/MutualState.pdf
Web: www.neweconomics.org.uk
www.themutualstate.org

Oxfam survey of attitudes ‘Ethics girls and boys’

Today’s teenagers aspire to be ‘Ethics girls and boys’ rather than ‘Chavs’, an Oxfam survey of attitudes towards charities and volunteering has shown.

The research carried out by Oxfam to mark Volunteer Week, between 1-7 June, proves a desire among young people – underlined by the thousands expected to attend the Live 8 concerts in July – to use their time and energy to benefit others. Oxfam asked more than 300 people about giving time to a charity. The survey found that:

Ninety-two per cent of teenagers would consider volunteering for a charity, and over a third (36%) had volunteered in the last 12 months. Eighty-seven percent of the 16-24 year old interviewees cited Oxfam as a charity they would volunteer with.
Eighty-nine per cent of teenagers are prepared to make sacrifices in the name of charity. Sixty per cent stated they would give up ‘Watching Big Brother’ to accommodate volunteering in their lifestyle. ‘A night in the pub’ was cited as being a potential sacrifice by 43%.

The survey results show a clear altruism among young people. Over half (56%) gave ‘the chance to use your time to do something good and useful’ as their primary stimulus for wanting to volunteer. Enhancing their CV was only the fifth most popular motivation.

Kate Earl, 24, a volunteer at the Headingley shop in Leeds, echoed this, saying, “Young people aren’t all apathetic, hoody-wearing yobs. Volunteering means my spare time is used positively. I’ve gained the confidence to do other things and have actually got a new job as a result of it.”

The survey results also suggest that volunteering could be the solution to the hot political issue of ‘yob culture’, with over 51 per cent of the teenage respondents advocating its inclusion in the compulsory school curriculum. Sixty-four per cent believed the government should provide stronger incentives to their age group to volunteer.

Commenting on the findings, Oxfam’s Volunteering Manager, Carolyn Myers, said: “Teenagers have a bad image at the moment – they are pigeonholed as materialist, yobbish and celebrity-obsessed. However, our survey points to a backlash against this. Many young people want do something tangible to help those suffering from poverty or social injustice, and the idea of it being included in the school timetable is a positive suggestion.

“Volunteer Week is a the perfect opportunity for them to spend time in one of our 750 shops to see how their time is vital to our wider humanitarian and campaigning efforts, and that volunteering is something from which they will gain personal satisfaction.“

The survey was conducted across six UK towns and cities during March and April 2005, and sampled a diverse mix of social groups.

Oxfam’s shops are staffed by more than 20,000 volunteers, who give around 102,000 hours per week. Volunteer responsibilities commonly include selecting items for sale, pricing, and customer service. Full training is given. For more information on volunteering in an Oxfam shop contact your local Oxfam Shop, see: www.oxfam.org.uk/volunteer, or call 0845 3000311.