Search Results

This chapter argues that Salvadoran migration is most certainly transnational. However, its main focus is on if and how gender relations have been transformed in northern La Union. The discussion pinpoints different discourses, practices, and processes that influence gender relations. It also argues that transnational influences are a major but not single agent for change. The chapter shows that multiple agents and agencies at the regional, local, and transnational levels affect gender relations. There are times when these work together, and there are other times when they work against each other. The chapter ends by addressing the attitudes of boys and girls in northern La Union with regards to migration, and considers how these have been shaped by transnational processes.

This chapter sets out the two principal claims of the book. First, it supports the analysis of international law through a process-based account, specifically one tied to the notion of globalization. Acknowledging the multiple actors and jurisdictional influences on the development of WTO law in particular necessitates a means to clarify the complex interplay involved. Rejecting the use of empiricist approaches to examining law, the chapter turns to the second claim, that to understand the development of WTO law as a complex process requires the use of a pluralist causal account. The chapter concludes by reframing three common lenses for the analysis of law into causal influences, introducing the three causal categories which are the focus of Chapter 3.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how separatism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries poses a paradox. On the one hand, the world is ostensibly coming together through globalization. On the other, the territorial integrity of nations appears fragile in most regions. The chapter explains that the book argues that countries torn by separatist movements since the Cold War cannot be adequately understood without an appreciation of organized crime. Far from passive by-products or trivial catalysts, mafias can play a decisive, autonomous role in shaping state-separatist relations, promoting or hindering secession, and fueling war. Transnational processes — of mafia expansion, chronic smuggling, and patrimonial governance — critically shape national processes of ethnic mobilization, border reconfiguration, and state collapse. Through a comparative historical analysis of the role of organized crime in West Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, the book examines understudied dynamics of territorial consolidation in torn states. By nourishing, infiltrating, and even co-opting governments and separatist movements, mafias have the power to mold the basic political units of the world.

This introduction chapter develops the overall framework for the following chapters. First, it demonstrates that there is a need to take a closer look at the development of key concepts in social policy language such as ‘welfare state’, ‘social security’, ‘welfare society’. The terms, metaphors, and concepts we use when studying social policy are far from innocent and are closely tied to political struggles and transnational processes. Therefore, from a comparative and international perspective, studying terminology and concept formation is an important part of both political and policy analysis. Second, the chapter discusses different approaches to the study of social policy concepts and language, including conceptual history, discourse analysis, and the role of ideas literature. Third, this introductory chapter outlines the structure and the content of the volume as a whole.

How to resist President Donald Trump’s assault on international law? This introduction sketches the tripartite plan of this book. First, it discusses a counterstrategy of resistance based on transnational legal process. Second, it illustrates that counterstrategy with respect to immigration and refugees, and human rights; the Paris Climate Change Agreement, the Iran Nuclear Deal, and trade diplomacy; with countries of concern such as North Korea, Russia, and Ukraine; and with respect to America’s wars: Al Qaeda, Islamic State, Afghanistan, and Syria. Third, it reviews what broader issues are at stake in the looming battle between maintaining the post-World War II framework of Kantian global governance versus shifting to an Orwellian system of authoritarian spheres of influence.