Browse

This chapter focuses on the absence of certain marginal groups from the United Nations’ Women, Peace, and Security Agenda and suggests correctives to those exclusions. The chapter discusses how men and boys as victims of sexual and gender-based violence have been erased in this agenda, and the consequences of this erasure. It challenges the assumptions of militarized masculinity as a uniformly shared identity among conflict-engaged men. It also looks at the outcome of pregnancies resulting from wartime rape and shows how children born of rape are presented and treated in their communities. The chapter draws on research conducted in Peru and Colombia and shows the necessity of understanding both the perpetration and experience of violence in nuanced ways.

Carl Schmitt positioned his constitutional theory in the context of a “political theology” and referred to himself repeatedly as a Catholic. Schmitt scholarship has long pursued this self-depiction without establishing a convincing “Catholic” doctrine, political position, or life praxis. This chapter provides an overview and critical interrogation of Schmitt’s self-description. By emphasizing his political and theological distance from his early background and from the political Catholicism of the interwar period, the chapter analyzes his systematic connection of theism, personalism, and decisionism, and considers Schmitt as a “religious” author and person. Schmitt’s apocalyptically dramatized perception and stylization of life as a permanent “state of exception” can be seen as a religious practice of testing contingency and sovereignty and self-assigning to “salvation.” Schmitt must thus be understood not as a part of majority Catholicism, but beyond it, among the religious movements in the history of modern secular faith.

This handbook engages with the critical ordering of Schmitt’s writings, investing in the proper contextualization of his polycentric thought. More important than whether Schmitt’s positions and concepts are relevant in the twenty-first century is how to read Schmitt so as to grasp the original meanings of his many publications. The handbook intends to provoke debate about the relevance of his canon for thinking about the present. It argues that the motif of order is central to making sense of Schmitt’s contributions to law, the social sciences, and the humanities, as well as that his contributions to diverse disciplines constituted a trinity of thought. Schmitt’s political thought cannot be understood without reference to his legal and cultural thought; his legal thought was informed equally by his political and cultural thought; and his cultural thought contains important traces of his political and legal thought. This theoretical and substantive overlap was deliberate.

This chapter examines the politics of Swedish military activism and the paradoxes they involve. Since the end of the Cold War, Sweden has been involved a range of international military operations—from Bosnia and Congo to Afghanistan and Libya—that are very different from traditional peacekeeping. We argue that this military activism is driven both by the Swedish internationalist tradition of “doing good” in the world, but also for instrumental purposes. These include a desire for political influence in international institutions, an interest in collective milieu shaping, and a concern to improve the interoperability and effectiveness of the Swedish military.

This article discusses Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) and intelligence accountability in the United Kingdom. It discusses the origins of intelligence oversight in the United Kingdom including ISC's independence, its ability to maintain secrets, its means of access to information, and its expertise and investigative powers. The article also discusses the reforms undertaken by the ISC to retain public confidence in the committee such as recognizing its limitations and imposing accountability.

This chapter comments on Aaron Wildavsky’s seminal work, The Politics of the Budgetary Process, an in-depth look at the norms and rules of budgeting in the United States and the stable patterns of interaction between the various actors involved. Considered a classic of public administration scholarship, the book uses a simple yet fundamental theoretical framework for analyzing budgetary decisions. After summarizing the basic elements of Wildavsky’s theory of budgetary incrementalism, the chapter discusses challenges to incrementalism that arose mainly in the context of economic and fiscal crisis that influenced the way the federal government made budgetary decisions. It then considers the relevance and importance of Wildavsky’s work on the politics of the budgetary process by highlighting several elements that have had profound implications for scholarship on budgeting.

This article discusses the concept of institution by examining the components of an institution and the way in which institutionalization can increase or decrease. It considers the place to be given to organizations and to procedures based on the definition of institutions. It reveals the major differences across the social sciences and in particular political, social, and economic fields. The article is also concerned with institutionalization, and reveals marked differences among the social sciences.

The debate concerning how water access, availability, and change will impact conflict is bolstered by growing evidence that some influence exists, however inconsistent. Clear conclusions are obscured by the variety of water issues in developing countries, the difference between direct and indirect effects on conflict, and the additional uncertainty of what future climate changes may do to water availability and rights. This chapter summarizes how the conflict literature has integrated water issues into analyses of violence. In contrast, water researchers are mainly concerned with how little and how poorly water resources are used and managed across Africa. Resource management and politics emerge as the most serious contributors to water stress. Initial conclusions suggest that climate change and associated water shortages are far less of a problem than access and scarcity, and that water politics is leading to new contests, possibly violent, embedded in patterns of marginalization, exclusion, and poor governance.

This chapter was inspired by reading a number of contributions to The Oxford Handbook of Global LGBT and Sexual Diversity Politics and asks three interconnected questions: How can one best understand the range of experiences of and the attitudes toward people whose sexual orientation or gender expression is regarded as diverging from socially prescribed norms? Is the language of sexual rights the most appropriate in defending sexual and gender diversity when there appears to be growing global polarization around issues of sexuality? And how do we reconcile the growing gap between academic and activist understandings of sexual diversity and rights?

In this chapter, writing as a retired intelligence officer who worked for much of my career on terrorist issues, I consider how attitudes to academic work on terrorism have developed, from the perspective of a counterterrorism practitioner. The pressure on government to understand the context of Al Qaeda terrorism after 9/11 led to closer engagement, as did the need to explain the terrorist modus operandi dispassionately in the courts. Not only terrorism studies but also complementary disciplines such as behavioral science and technology have been recognized as relevant to counterterrorism. While the possibility exists that academic independence might be compromised through closer dialogue between academics and practitioners, in practice both sides have found that the benefits outweigh the risks.

This article focuses on the access objective of urban planning. It aims to articulate a clear role for measures of metropolitan accessibility, and to demonstrate the utility of these measures in informing and influencing policy. The article describes the use and measurement of accessibility for metropolitan areas, evaluates the current state of knowledge and literature, and identifies important issues about measurement. It suggests that problem definitions should be reformed to bring them in line with current transportation goals and argues that the concept of accessibility may offer a compelling, attractive, and alternative basis for policies related to the built environment when operationalized using cumulative-opportunities measures.

The formal organization of court systems and jurisdictional rules established by legislatures often determine which litigants will have their cases reviewed by an appellate court. While some procedural obstacles are straightforward in their application, others require judicial interpretation with research findings suggesting that judges’ policy goals are related to decision-making on threshold issues. Even if there are no jurisdictional constraints, some losing litigants weigh the costs and benefits of pursuing an appeal. Still, filing an appeal does not guarantee full consideration of the issues raised by an appellant. Caseload pressures have contributed to screening procedures that result in only a minority of cases being closely scrutinized by an appellate panel. This chapter examines research on this winnowing process that characterizes litigant access to intermediate appellate courts.

Ambiguity is intrinsic to life. Yet, mainstream accountability theory reduces its area of application by not taking ambiguity seriously. The literature treats too many aspects as exogenous to politics and is unlikely to capture accountability dynamics in contemporary representative democracies in transformation, including the European Union. Theorizing accountability requires going beyond predetermined principals and agents, detecting deviance from authoritative orders and rules, and disciplining unruly agents. An institutional perspective is offered, relaxing assumptions regarding what accountability means and implies; what is involved in demanding, rendering, assessing and responding to accounts; what factors foster effective accountability; and how accountability regimes emerge and change. The fluidity and unresolved conflicts of political life make it difficult to correctly assign causal responsibility and to learn from experience. Accountability processes, nevertheless, provide occasions for searching for and testing collective purpose, intelligence, meaning and political equality, as part of institutionalization and de-institutionalization processes.

This chapter advances three claims. First, it argues that the concepts of accountability and blame-avoidance have much in common and can be understood as mirror-image concepts for the “sanction-imposing” sense of accountability and the sense of blame avoidance that denotes outcome rather than activity. Second, it argues that there are different ways of conceiving and defining both concepts in their respective analytic literatures, and the mirror-image relationship tends to disappear once we move to those alternatives, particularly of accountability conceived as answerability and blame-avoidance conceived as activity rather than outcome. Third, it argues that cultural theory analysis can identify variants of both accountability and blame-avoidance which can deepen understanding of both the mirror-image aspects of the two phenomena and of relationships between them that go beyond a mirror-image.

This chapter provides an analytical framework aimed at measuring citizen participation in public accountability processes beyond the fundamental mechanism of parliamentary elections. The framework juxtaposes and adapts ideas from Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation and Bovens’s notion of public accountability as containing important elements of learning. The resulting five levels of citizen participation in public accountability are based on increasing degrees of citizen participation, from non-participatory “education” (the lowest level) through involvement, advice, collaboration, and joint ownership (the highest level). As the levels are ascended, accountability-elements evolve from citizens’ passive reception of information to enabling citizens to pose questions, pass judgments, define and apply consequences and, finally, to engage in agenda- setting to ensure effectiveness and responsiveness. Some dilemmas and tensions arising from incorporating citizens into accountability measures at different levels are discussed.

This chapter argues that, although accountability is a term well understood in constitutional law, it is not a central term of art within the discipline. It explores the public law origins of the term first in the limited sense of financial accountability to parliamentary bodies and, more generally, as machinery for holding public actors responsible for their actions, such as the doctrine of ministerial responsibility in common law constitutions. The chapter explores concepts that parallel or provide for accountability within constitutional law, notably the rule of law principle; separation of powers; judicial independence and constitutionalism. It looks at the spread of these ideas in the modern world, from Europe, where they are culturally embedded, to societies unfamiliar with them. Finally, the implications for accountability of the arrival of transnational courts and human rights regimes are briefly considered.

Democracy, rule of the people, is comprised of complex webs of accountabilities between people and those who use power to govern on their behalf. Democratic accountability is comprised of justifications for these uses of power, combined with distributions of empowerments in such a way that those affected can sanction its use. Key problems for democracies include forming principals and agents among whom accountability relations might hold, designing institutions that limit costs of accountability mechanisms so they can be used by citizens, and developing forms of accountability that match the increasing scale and complexity of political issues and organizations.

This chapter first presents the major characteristics of multi-level governance and gives examples thereof from the European and the transnational level. It then identifies a number of properties of multi-level governance networks that can cause prejudice to their democratic “anchorage”: the widespread cooperative logic of interactions within networks, the weak visibility of networks due to their frequent lack of formalization, their loose coupling with the representative circuit, the lack of public accountability of some network actors (e.g., private interests), and the prevalence of “interdependence” accountability among network members. The chapter concludes that, in multi-level governance, there is a risk of the exercise of political power being divorced from democratic accountability and that accountable multi-level governance should not be equated with democratic government.

This chapter links the rise of public accountability to the wave of New Public Management (NPM) reforms. It argues that the relationship between increased managerial accountability and performance is contested and it is becoming increasingly clear that we have to operate with a multi-dimensional accountability concept going beyond hierarchical accountability. The chapter discusses tensions and dilemmas in the relationship between NPM and accountability, the volatile relationship between accountability and performance, and the ambiguities and appropriateness of accountability under NPM. It also addresses accountability in relation to post-NPM reforms and challenges for future research.

Principal-agent theory encapsulates a tradition of rational choice modeling in which some actor(s)—the principal(s)—uses whatever actions are available to provide incentives for some other actor(s)—the agent(s)—to make decisions that the principal most prefers. Because principal-agent theory focuses on the responsiveness of the agent’s decisions to the principal’s goals, and how this responsiveness is mediated by actions available to each actor as well as institutional settings in which they interact, it is a natural framework to study accountability in political institutions. This essay gives a basic overview of principal-agent theory and briefly reviews its application in two domains of political science: bureaucratic accountability to higher-level political actors, and electoral accountability of representatives to constituents. The essay emphasizes that principal-agent theory is in fact a highly flexible family of models, rather than an overarching set of assumptions and results.