Search Results

This chapter explores the impact of pension reform in Sweden. It begins with a description of the background of the reform and its elements, including the funded-component and its organisation. The different forms of integration with international financial markets generated by the changes in the funding of the public system, and the public-private interplay in pension provision are discussed. The future of nation-based welfare state from a Swedish perspective is then presented.

This chapter explores the intersections between place and identity. The quote in the title is from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork in Kentucky, during which a politician indicated that no one identified as queer in his district because he represented a rural region of the state. This led the author to consider further the logic through which queer identity is associated with urban identity, and what that means for rural queer youth. She offers the concept of “boundary publics” to discuss the ways in which ephemeral experiences of belonging are created within more validated and recognized public spheres. She gives examples of how rural Kentucky queer young people, for example, create spaces for belonging within shared social networks and available public spaces, such as parks, churches, and Walmart.

Reflections on the movement towards a ‘publicization of private law’ are often presented as narratives of encroachment of a public law mentality into private law. Conversely, discussion on the movement towards the ‘privatization of public law’ is also presented as a narrative of encroachment running in the opposite direction. This chapter shows how these narratives rest on an oversimplified account of the relationship between, on the one hand, the underlying normativity of the public and the private domains of social action and, on the other, the normativity of public and private law. A more complex (and less naïve) understanding of that relationship would allow for a better understanding of both movements. As the argument goes, some of the central underlying normative assumptions of law (in general) do not overlap significantly with the broader normative assumptions embedded in the distinction between a public and a private domain of social action (as it is often assumed). Once those different normative assumptions are laid bare it is possible to re-imagine the ‘publicization of private law’ as a narrative of fulfilment, rather than a narrative of encroachment.

The introduction sets out the key arguments of the book and explains and identifies the gaps in the existing scholarship on the issue of homosexuality in the USSR. It also highlights the flaws in the existing scholarship on the issue and provides a brief overview of the sources which the book draws on. Finally, it provides brief information on the Stalin-era (anti) sodomy law.

This chapter argues that the scope of history of international law ought to be expanded beyond its received sense. If the interest lies in ‘power’, then it is not a surprise why international lawyers might worry about the state of their field. For history to grasp this worry, it should illuminate the process through which some things come to be understood as belonging to ‘international law’ while others are relegated to ‘domestic’ or ‘private’ law, to ‘political economy’ or indeed to ‘international politics’. A study of international law’s relations to international power would need to include an examination of the way such categories, professional fields, and intellectual distinctions are made and remade so as to determine what may seem possible to achieve and what is beyond professional argument and contestation.