By Benjamin Rooij

Over the last decades, some non-OECD countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, Colombia, Mexico, India and China have been rapidly industrializing. While this has had positive effects on economic growth, it has also caused pollution with severe effects . In response to the new pollution threat, most of the industrializing economies have installed pollution prevention and control regulations, and implementing institutions. In practice, however, the regulations often fail to achieve the desired results. This Research and P

olicy Note explains why the regulation of pollution in these countries is so difficult.

Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2008.

By Benjamin van Rooij and Ineke van de Meerie

Reforms to improve poor people’s access to justice and to promote their legal empowerment comprise the latest trend in legal development cooperation. This volume answers a number of basic questions about this new trend, such as access to justice and legal empowerment entail and its importance; the obstacles the poor and marginalised face in seeking justice and empowerment through the legal system; and the reforms proposed by these approaches to legal development co-operation. Furthermore, it outlines important considerations for policy-makers concerning access to justice and legal empowerment reforms.

Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2008. 

By Patrice D. Rankine

Racial reckoning was a recurrent theme throughout the summer of 2020, a response to George Floyd’s murder and the unprecedented impact of COVID on marginalized groups. Theater and Crisis proposes a literary and theatrical study of how Floyd's killing could possibly happen in the aftermath of the Civil Rights era, and in the supposedly post-racial era following the election of Barack Obama. In the days and months following Floyd's death, there were nightly protests in streets across the United States and broader world. At the same time, theater performances were forced to shift online to video conferencing platforms and to find new ways to engage audiences. In each case, groups made shared meaning through storytelling and narrative, a liberatory process of myth-making and reverence that author Patrice D. Rankine calls “epiphanic encoding.”

Rather than approaching the problem of racial reckoning through history, where periodization and progress are dominant narratives, Theater and Crisis argues that myth and memory allow for better theorization about recurring events from the past, their haunting, and what these apparent ghosts ask of us. Building on the study of myth as active, processual storytelling, Rankine acknowledges that it grounds and orients groups toward significant events. Theater and Crisis aligns narratives about Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, and George Floyd, among others, with ancient, mythic figures such as Christ, Dionysus, Oedipus, and Moses. As living and verbal visitations, these stories performed on stage encode the past through their epiphanies in the present, urging audiences toward shared meaning. 

Rankine traces the cyclical hauntings of race through the refiguring of mythic stories across the past 75 years in the plays of James Baldwin, Ntozake Shange, Antoinette Nwandu, and many more, and in response to flashpoints in US racial history, such as the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, the wars on drugs and crime, and the continued violence against and disenfranchisement of Black people into the twenty-first century. Theater and Crisis explores the appearance of myth on the American stage and showcases the ongoing response by the theatrical establishment to transform the stage into a space for racial reckoning. This timely book is essential reading for scholars of theater studies, classics, and American studies.
 

Ann Arbor, MI: Lever Press, 2024. 322p.

By Inka Stock

 This book is concerned with the effects of migration policy making in Europe on migrants in the Global South and links insights on immobility to social theories of time to examine the human consequences of current migration dynamics from the perspectives of migrants themselves. Based on in-depth ethnographic research, this is an invaluable learning resource that aims to challenge current international migration politics and policy-making 

Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2019.  202p. 

By Steve Hallock

From the cardinal Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that desegregated

U.S. public education to the demonstrations, marches, and violence of the civil rights movement, A History of the American Civil Rights Movement Through Newspaper Coverage: The Race Agenda, Volume 1 traces the crusade for justice through the lens of major newspaper coverage to reveal the combating sectional press attitudes of the era. The book details attempts, blatant and subtle, to frame the major events of the movement in themes that have resonated from before, during, and since the Civil War. States’ rights versus constitutional guarantees of freedom and equality, nullification versus federal authority, and regional social and cultural mores that buttressed the prejudices and political arguments of segregation and desegregation across the nation are some of the issues covered. This analysis of the press coverage of events and issues of that tumultuous period of U.S. history—by newspapers in the North, South, Midwest, and West—exposes perspectives and press routines that remain ingrained and thus relevant today, when journalistic treatment of political debate, ranging from traditional newspapers and broadcast platforms to those of cable, social media, and the Internet, continues to set an often volatile and oppositional political agenda.

Lausanne, SWIT: Peter Lang, 2018.

By Ann Oakley

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Barbara Wootton was one of the extraordinary public figures of the twentieth century. She was an outstanding social scientist, an architect of the welfare state, an iconoclast who challenged conventional wisdoms and the first woman to sit on the Woolsack in the House of Lords. Ann Oakley has written a fascinating and highly readable account of the life and work of this singular woman, but the book goes much further. It is an engaged account of the making of British social policy at a critical period seen through the lens of the life and work of a pivotal figure. Oakley tells a story about the intersections of the public and the private and about the way her subject's life unfolded within, was shaped by, and helped to shape a particular social and intellectual context.

London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. 

Edited by Marie McAuliffe and Khalid Koser

"A Long Way to Go: Irregular Migration Patterns, Processes, Drivers and Decision-making presents the findings of a unique migration research program harnessing work of some of the leading international and Australian migration researchers on the challenging and complex topic of irregular maritime migration. The book brings together selected findings of the research program, and in doing so it contributes to the ongoing academic and policy discourses by providing findings from rigorous quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods research to support a better understanding of the dynamics of irregular migration and their potential policy implications. Stemming from the 2012 Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers report, the Irregular Migration Research Program commissioned 26 international research projects involving 17 academic principal researchers, along with private sector specialist researchers, international organisations and policy think tanks. The centrepiece of the research program was a multi-year collaborative partnership between the Department of Immigration and Border Protection and The Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy. Under this partnership, empirical research on international irregular migration was commissioned from migration researchers in Australia, Indonesia, Iran, the Netherlands, Sri Lanka and Switzerland. "

Canberra: ANU Press, 2017. 

By Miriam Ganzfried

Amnesty International's (AI) focus on civil and political rights has marked their work with a gender bias from the outset. In the first comprehensive look at AI's work on women's rights, Miriam Ganzfried illustrates the development of their activities regarding women's rights issues over twenty years. Through interviews with staff members and activists and unprecedented access to archive material from the Swiss and the German AI sections, she shows how women activists strategized to make AI increase its work on women's rights. Additionally, the book demonstrates that, despite the leadership's commitment to the Stop Violence Against Women campaign, internal resistance hampered the integration of women's rights into the organization's overall work.

Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2021.

By Cristina Teleki

Due Process and Fair Trial in EU Competition Law: The Impact of Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights is a book by Cristina Teleki that explores the relationship between Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and Articles 101 and 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. The book argues that due process and fair trial should be central to competition law, and that these principles should protect independent decision-making and judicial review, and prevent competition authorities from becoming too powerful. The book also examines how the EU competition law enforcement procedure meets the requirements of Article 6(1) of the ECHR

Leiden: Brill/Nijhoff, 2021. 

Edited by Christina Horvath and Richard S. White

he murder of George Floyd in 2020, the renewed international take up of the cry Black Lives Matter and the subsequent toppling of a statue commemorating slave-merchant-turned-philanthropist Edward Colston in Bristol provoked urgent questions on memorialisation, white privilege, social justice and repair. Debates on how legacies of colonialism and empire in Britain should be addressed spilled out of the scholarly world into the public discourse. In the immediate wake of the statue toppling this book offers a unique, distinctive and timely contribution to those debates: a series of voices and experiences are offered as critical commentaries and accounts of recent interventions on an official heritage narrative. It sets out to break the ‘dead silence’, by bringing together diverse perspectives from academics, artists, activists, heritage professionals and tourist guides. The book offers fresh insights, referencing work attending to the impacts and legacies of colonisation primarily in Bath and Bristol, augmented with comparative contributions from Lancaster and Mexico offering significant and pertinent resonances. A range of strategies are explored towards enabling silenced voices to be heard and engage in conversations about how the past is represented, including Co-Creation, new agonistic museum practices, innovative creative and somatic approaches.

Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024. 424p

Edited by Irma Kinga Allen , et al.

The edited volume Political ecologies of the far right engages with the alarming convergence of far-right thinking and the ecological crisis in contemporary society. Growing out of the first international conference on political ecologies of the far right, the volume gathers crucial insights from authorities in the field as well as promising early career researchers. With cases ranging from ethnographical accounts of fossil fuel populist protest, historical analysis of the evangelical support for fossil fuels to interrogations of the settler colonial identities and material conditions defended by far-right actors around the world, the book provides scholars, students and activists with ways to understand and counter these developments.

Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2024. 275p.

Edited by Cathy McIlwaine, et al.

This book aims to understand the ‘painful truths’ of gendered violence in the city and how women challenge it through resistance and creative practices. Drawing on an extensive body of collaborative research with women in the favelas of Maré in Rio de Janeiro and among Brazilian migrants in London, it conceives gendered urban violence as multidimensional, multiscalar and deeply embedded within structural and intersectional power relations. The book develops a ‘translocational gendered urban violence framework’ that foregrounds transnational connections across symbolic and literal borders. The framework emphasises the need to move beyond individual interpretations of gendered violence in cities towards one that acknowledges structural, symbolic and infrastructural violence. It also incorporates the need for an embodied approach that can be captured through engagement with the arts and arts-based methods as well as resistance practices. The book outlines a ‘translocational feminist tracing methodological framework’ that captures transnational dialogue and knowledge production, drawing on a feminist epistemological approach based on collaboration, co-design and engagement beyond the academy. In centring the painful truths of gendered urban violence as revealed by women, the book contributes to a range of debates that include acknowledging such violence as direct and indirect ranging from the body to the global, as well as the need to recognise urban violence as deeply gendered in intersectional ways. Finally, it suggests that creative engagements and arts-based approaches are crucial for understanding and resisting gendered urban violence and in generating empathetic transformation.

Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2024. 289p.

By Judith Hahn

This "Open Access" book investigates the legal reality of the church through a sociological lens and from the perspective of canon law studies, the discipline which researches the law and the legal structure of the Catholic Church. It introduces readers from various backgrounds to the sociology of canon law, which is both a legal and a theological field of study, and is the first step towards introducing a new subdiscipline of the sociology of canon law. As a theoretical approach to mapping out this field, it asks what theology and canon law may learn from sociology; it discusses the understanding of “law” in religious contexts; studies the preconditions of legal validity and effectiveness; and based on these findings it asks in what sense it is possible to speak of canon “law”. By studying a religious order as its struggles to find a balance between continuity and change, this book also contributes to the debates on religious law in modernity and the challenges it faces from secular states and plural societies. This book is of interest to researchers and students of the sociology of law, legal studies, law and religion, the sociology of religion, theology, and religious studies. 

Cham: Springer Nature, 2022. 235p.

Edited by Juliet Pietsch and Marshall Clark

This volume brings together a group of scholars from a wide range of disciplines to address crucial questions of migration flows and integration in Europe, Southeast Asia, and Australia. Comparative analysis of the three regions and their differing approaches and outcomes yields important insights for each region, as well as provokes new questions and suggests future avenues of study.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015.

By Benjamin Rooij

Over the last decades, some non-OECD countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, Colombia, Mexico, India and China have been rapidly industrializing. While this has had positive effects on economic growth, it has also caused pollution with severe effects . In response to the new pollution threat, most of the industrializing economies have installed pollution prevention and control regulations, and implementing institutions. In practice, however, the regulations often fail to achieve the desired results. This Research and P

olicy Note explains why the regulation of pollution in these countries is so difficult.

Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2008.

By Benjamin van Rooij and Ineke van de Meerie

Reforms to improve poor people’s access to justice and to promote their legal empowerment comprise the latest trend in legal development cooperation. This volume answers a number of basic questions about this new trend, such as access to justice and legal empowerment entail and its importance; the obstacles the poor and marginalised face in seeking justice and empowerment through the legal system; and the reforms proposed by these approaches to legal development co-operation. Furthermore, it outlines important considerations for policy-makers concerning access to justice and legal empowerment reforms.

Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2008. 

Edited by Marissa Sonnis-Bell, David Elijah Bell and Michelle Ryan  

To contend with others is to contend with ourselves. The way we “other” others, by identifying and reinforcing social distance, is more a product of who we are and who we want to be than it is about “others.” Strangers, Aliens, Foreignersquestions such consolidation and polarization of identities in representations ranging from migrants and refugees, to terrorist labels, to constructions of the local. Inclusive and exclusive identities are observed through often arbitrary yet strategically ambiguous lines of class, religion, race, ethnicity, nationality, social status, and geography. However, despite any arbitrariness in definition, there are very real consequences for the emotional, physical, and psychological well-being of those constructed as “the other”, as well as legal governance implications involving human rights and wider socio political ethics. From practical, professional, and political-philosophical points of view, this collection examines what it means to be, or to construct, the Strangers, Aliens, Foreigners. Contributors are David Elijah Bell, Adina Camenisch, Hanna Jagtenberg, Seraina Müller, Lana Pavić, Michelle Ryan, Marissa Sonnis-Bell and Tomasso Trilló.

Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2018, 110p.

By Inka Stock

 This book is concerned with the effects of migration policy making in Europe on migrants in the Global South and links insights on immobility to social theories of time to examine the human consequences of current migration dynamics from the perspectives of migrants themselves. Based on in-depth ethnographic research, this is an invaluable learning resource that aims to challenge current international migration politics and policy-making 

Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2019.  202p. 

By Walter Kemp and Ruggero Scaturro

  The Danube is Europe’s second longest river, flowing through 10 countries between Germany and Ukraine, from the Black Forest to the Black Sea. Throughout history, it has been the belt of Mitteleuropa, linking the countries of western, central and eastern Europe. The Danube took on new strategic importance after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Danube ports in Romania, Moldova and Ukraine became a lifeline for the trans-shipment of key exports such as grain and fertilizers. Major investment in the infrastructure of ports (such as cranes and warehouses) was made during this period to support increased trade flows. However, experience shows that a rapid increase in licit activity without corresponding improvements in security can increase the risks of illicit activity. Nevertheless, the Danube’s vulnerability to organized crime has received little attention from policymakers or researchers. This may be for good reason: evidence of the risk is scarce. The last organized crime threat assessment (carried out by Europol) dates from 2011. There have been few seizures of contraband along the Danube in the past decade and, although a 2022 Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) report on trafficking through ports in south-eastern Europe1 flagged isolated cases of organized crime on the Danube, these fell outside the scope of that study. Is the current lack of reported criminal activity an indication of a low-risk inland waterway, or is it a reflection of limited attention and resources? After all, as the saying goes, ‘you do not find what you do not seek’. The GI-TOC, which has been monitoring the impact of the war in Ukraine on illicit economies, is well positioned to investigate this question. In September 2023, the United Kingdom commissioned this study to examine the vulnerability of the Danube to trafficking. One of the main findings of this report is a concerning lack of law enforcement cooperation among the Danube riparian states even though most of them are co-members or partners of the European Union. This study found little evidence of trafficking on the river, due in part to a lack of data on seizures, which points to a potential security gap. However, it did discover several vulnerabilities that create a permissive environment for different kinds of illicit activity on some sections of the river. Furthermore, the increased relevance of Danube ports – particularly in Romania, Moldova and Ukraine – because of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine creates new opportunities and relevance for the river but also new challenges, including a heightened risk of organized crime. As a result, part of this report is devoted to assessing the potential risk of organized crime in the tri-border region along the lower Danube. The report concludes with a number of recommendations to reduce vulnerabilities to illicit flows of fuel, cigarettes, smuggling of migrants and other forms of organized crime along the river, and to improve cooperation between law enforcement bodies in different countries.

Geneva, SWIT: The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2024.2024. 40p  

By The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime

  Organized crime has become a threat to international peace and security . It harms so many fundamental aspects of our lives – from governance to the environment and from health and safety to our online activities . As demonstrated by the Global Organized Crime Index 2023, more than 80 per cent of the world’s population live in countries with high levels of criminality, and the problem is getting worse, as the figure below shows. Indeed, over the past few decades the geographical reach, diversity of markets and impact of illicit economies have increased dramatically . Organized crime is manifesting itself in places and ways never seen before . And the omens for the future are menacing.

Currently, there is no global strategy against organized crime. To reduce the harm to our communities and future generations, this needs to change.

Organized crime should not be looked at as an isolated phenomenon. It intersects with global megatrends as well as violent conflict and terrorism. It thrives in a blurry ‘mezzosphere’ – that often ignored zone at the intersection between the criminal underworld and the upperworlds of business and politics.

Since organized crime operates within an ecosystem, it is important to use systems thinking to analyze it and to identify pressure points to disrupt it. It is vital to change the conditions in which illicit economies operate, rather than just pursue criminal actors. Therefore, in addition to changing market forces and drying up the pool of potential offenders it is important to change attitudes and behaviours.

This report builds on the successes – and failures – of past interventions aimed at countering organized crime and reducing its negative impacts on communities and states. Much that is in the report may not be new to some readers, but what is new is the intersections it seeks to highlight in the responses to organized crime. Additionally, the report seeks to open up the debate, so that voices of other stakeholders – civil society, law enforcement, local communities and the private sector – are also included to work together to counter and strengthen resilience to organized crime.    

Geneva, SWIT: The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2024. 102p.