Measuring market integration in fragile states
A consistent problem in understanding the politics and economics of fragile states is the lack of good data. Yet micro-data on commodity prices and exchange rates in different markets are often available. Movement and co-movement of prices in different parts of a country can measure the degree of market integration, as well as state capacity …
GIR Seminar Series | Catching Capital: Changing Corporate Strategy as a Response to the Tax Justice Movement
The most recent campaign for tax justice is now entering its tenth year. The tax justice campaign, invigorated by the Global Financial Crisis, successfully took the issue of corporate tax avoidance out of the realm of economists and tax professionals, into the mainstream political agenda. As a result, governments have been forced to act. In …
GIR Seminar Series | The Costs of Pride: Survey Results from LGBTQI Activists in the U.S., U.K., South Africa, and Australia
This article reports on “emotional taxation” and “emotional burden” in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) activist population in the United States (N=355), United Kingdom (N=230), South Africa (N=228), and Australia (N=208). Comparative analysis of 1,019 survey responses demonstrates a number of consistent trends across these four contexts. First, levels of emotional …
GIR Seminar Series | Constructing India as a ‘Similar Enough Other’
This paper investigates how senior Bush administration officials publicly constructed a strategic narrative to legitimize the proposal for a US-India Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement in 2005-2006 as they sought Congressional approval for the same. Adopting a critical constructivist approach, I argue that the Bush administration’s proposed nuclear deal with India came into direct confrontation with, …
GIR Seminar Series | Australia and Japan’s triple hedge: managing alignment in the age of economic and strategic disconnect
The nature and purpose of the Australia-Japan ‘special strategic partnership’ have been subjects of intense debate among scholars and analysts in both countries. This paper goes beyond an analysis of its structure and functions to examine it as a coherent example of secondary power cooperation in the face of a turbulent era of power transition …
GIR Seminar Series | Uncertainty and Insecurity in the Fifth Domain of Warfare
The premise of this talk is that cyber weapons differ qualitatively from kinetic ones in their properties, opportunities and constraints in a way that is comparable to the qualitative difference between conventional and nuclear weapons. Their qualitative difference raises a series of unresolved policy challenges at the domestic, bilateral, and international levels and poses risks …
GIR Seminar Series | Putting the ‘Political’ into Political Participation
Wood and Flinders attempt to re-center political participation around the idea of “nexus politics.” In this paper I first argue that they mis-specify new forms of political participation which have emerged by: (1) failing to take Henrik Bang’s work seriously; (2) focusing exclusively on motivation/intention, so that an action is “political,” only if the person …
GIR Seminar Series | Popular Perceptions of Electoral Integrity: Comparing the Effects of National Conditions
Public attitudes towards electoral integrity matter because fraudulent elections can, for instance, undermine government support or trigger violent uprisings. This global meta-analysis seeks to identify which national-level factors have the strongest effects on public attitudes towards elections. The article first develops and introduces an index of electoral integrity based on public surveys aggregated from multiple …
Letting Citizens Speak: Ireland’s Referendums and Constitutional Mini-publics
Ireland has been a trailblazer in the use of deliberative mini-publics to discuss important topics of constitutional reform. The Constitutional Convention of 2012-14 and the Citizens’ Assembly of 2016-18 (whose membership comprised random selections of regular citizens) were established by the Irish government and tasked with considering a series of constitutional reform proposals. Successful referendums …