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15111. The Decolonization of Chechnya: Reviving the UN Trusteeship Council

Author:
Julie M. Tremper
Publication Date:
05-2004
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Public and International Affairs (JPIA)
Institution:
School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), Princeton University
Abstract:
The Russian-Chechen conflict represents an urgent problem for the international community. Domestic and regional efforts have failed to secure a satisfactory or lasting resolution to it, and terrorist activity, gross human rights violations, the proliferation of Wahhabism, and regional security concerns have led to the internationalization of the Chechen question. There are several potential statehood or non-statehood approaches to the resolution of the conflict. Given the history of hostility between Russia and Chechnya and the character of the current international environment, the best approach would be to revive the UN Trusteeship Council and give it responsibility for overseeing a transition leading to Chechen independence. This revival and application of UN trusteeship would require a redefinition of the trust system in a post-colonial context. In the case of Chechnya, the need for peace and stability should supersede the international community’s usual aversion to the creation of a new nation-state.
Topic:
United Nations, Conflict, Decolonization, and International Community
Political Geography:
Russia, Eurasia, and Chechnya

15112. Litigation as a Tool for Development: The Environment, Human Rights, and the Case of Texaco in Ecuador.

Author:
Elizabeth C. Black
Publication Date:
05-2004
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Public and International Affairs (JPIA)
Institution:
School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), Princeton University
Abstract:
As the process of globalization continues into the twenty-first century, ensuring that transnational corporations are held accountable for their work abroad will be one of the greatest challenges faced by development specialists. In the current context, litigation in U.S. courts is an increasingly important tool in assuring that the people of underdeveloped nations do not suffer from the exploitation, pollution, and cultural degradation that has marked such countries’ “progress” in the past. This paper examines the case of María Aguinda et al. v. Texaco Inc., in which a group of indigenous Ecuadorans have sued the U.S.-based petroleum giant in response to environmental and human health damages resulting from its work in Ecuador in the 1970s and 1980s, in order to provide an example of one way in which litigation can foster development. In the context of the Aguinda case, this paper presents several specific recommendations for developing the legal means by which corporations can be held accountable on an international level beyond the U.S. court system.
Topic:
Development, Environment, Globalization, Human Rights, Business, Accountability, Corporations, and Litigation
Political Geography:
South America, North America, Ecuador, and United States of America

15113. Corporate Crime in a Globalized Economy: An Examination of the Corporate Legal Conundrum and Positive Prospects for Peace

Author:
Paul Richardson
Publication Date:
05-2004
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Public and International Affairs (JPIA)
Institution:
School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), Princeton University
Abstract:
“This is it. They are going to arrest us all and execute us. All for Shell.” Ken Saro-Wiwa, a leader of the Nigerian Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSAP), made this statement two weeks before his arrest in May 1994. Jailed for exposing the company’s role in directing and arming the Nigerian military, Saro-Wiwa’s efforts paved the way for similar campaigns throughout the world, in places as diverse as India, China, Colombia, Chad and Sudan. As the number of such cases has increased over the past decade, so too has the public’s scrutiny. What are the legal and ethical obligations of corporations operating in a conflict zone? How effective is existing international law in ensuring that companies are held accountable for extraterritorial human rights violations? Taking into account existing efforts to address corporate accountability on a global scale, this paper concludes that neither national legislation nor voluntary corporate codes of conduct provide an adequate means to ensure the protection of human rights. Instead, an international system must be created—one with sufficient oversight and monitoring powers to ensure that corporations adopt conflict-sensitive policies that contribute to peace and security
Topic:
Crime, Globalization, International Law, Economy, Peace, and Corporations
Political Geography:
Global Focus

15114. L'Éléction présidentielle et les élections législatives françaises de 2002

Author:
Pierre Martin
Publication Date:
03-2003
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
The 2002 presidential and parliamentary elections were marked by stunning outcomes, like the defeat of socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin in the first round of the presidential election and the reelection of incumbing President Jacques Chirac, who garnered more than 80 percent of the votes and defeated the far right candidate, Jean- Marie Le Pen. The presidential election was also marked by a weakening of the communist party, which collected less than 5 percent of the votes, and an exceptional rise of the far right. The number of abstentions was also on the rise. As for the parliamentary elections, they represented a blunt defeat for the left and reinstated the moderate right in power, unified as UMP behind its leader Jacques Chirac. Still, even such major electoral moves were not able to destroy the roots of the party system and electoral order instated after the 1981-1984 years.

15115. France's Double-Talk on Globalization

Author:
Sophie Meunier
Publication Date:
03-2003
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
France has become a worldwide champion of anti-globalization. French intellectuals have long denounced the cultural and economic shortcomings of US-led globalization, while French politicians, on the Left as on the Right, load their speeches with rhetoric critical of a phenomenon that gets a lot less attention in other European countries and in the United States. Yet, at the same time, France is a country whose economy and society have adapted well to this much-criticized globalization. Why this double-speak? Why this disjuncture between words and actions? This article explores this paradox, analyzes the role that France's double discourse on globalization has played in producing the surprising outcome of the 2002 elections, and reflects on the options open to the main political parties today.
Topic:
Economics
Political Geography:
United States, Europe, and France

15116. Creating a Tourist's Paradise: The Marshall Plan and France, 1948 to 1952 [Dossier: Promoting American Tourism in Postwar France]

Author:
Brian A. McKenzie
Publication Date:
03-2003
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
This article examines the promotion of American tourism to France during the Marshall Plan. The paper assesses the cultural and economic goals of the tourism program. Economic aid provided by the United States was essential for the post-war reconstruction of the French tourism industry. Furthermore, transatlantic air carriers adopted new guidelines for tourist class airfares at the urging of U.S. officials. The paper also examines marketing strategies and the creation of tourism infrastructures that facilitated transatlantic tourism. Representatives from the French tourism industry visited the United States to study American hotels and they agreed to adopt practices and rebuild French hotels in ways that would be congenial to American tourists. The paper demonstrates that French and American officials and tourism professionals Americanized the French tourism industry during the Marshall Plan.
Topic:
Economics
Political Geography:
United States, America, and France

15117. Rudeness and Modernity: The Reception of American Tourists in Early Fifth-Republic France [Dossier: Promoting American Tourism in Postwar France]

Author:
Christopher Endy
Publication Date:
03-2003
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
In the late 1950s and 1960s, many French politicians, journalists, and travel industry leaders argued that the French had lost their manners. Although some foreigners, most notably Americans, spoke of rude French hosts, this negative stereotype was largely a French construction. Defenders of artisanal tradition reinforced the idea of French rudeness to highlight the dangers of postwar modernization, while technocratic commentators used the stereotype to criticize artisanal practices. Responding to this perceived crisis in hospitality, Charles de Gaulle's Fifth Republic expanded its involvement in mass tourism, launching "amicability" campaigns and boosting investment in high-rise hotels. The discourse of French rudeness helps explain the evolution of France's travel industry and illuminates cultural dimensions to postwar modernization and Franco-American relations.
Political Geography:
America and France

15118. The Pacte Civile de Solidarité and the History of Sexuality [Dossier: The PaCS in Historical Perspective]

Author:
Robert A. Nye
Publication Date:
03-2003
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
It is useful to think about the debate and passage of the recent legislation on the PACS in terms of the long run of the history of sexuality in France. Owing in part to a perceived demographic crisis, the French have expressed a strong bias in favor of reproductive sexuality. This has meant that sexual discourse has discouraged non-procreative sexuality, including same sex sexuality, and favored heterosexual relationships, which have been regarded as the only legitimate foundation for family life. Despite the decriminalization of homosexuality, this historic bias continues to shape public debate about marriage and the family, as the recent debate over the PACS reveals.
Topic:
History
Political Geography:
France

15119. Comment on Robert Nye's "The Pacte Civile de Solidarité and the History of Sexuality" [Dossier: The PaCS in Historical Perspective]

Author:
Joan W. Scott
Publication Date:
03-2003
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Robert Nye's elegant essay rightly puts the PaCS, and the debates about it into a historical context of French natalism. At least since the late nineteenth century, reproduction has been the raison d'être of the married couple and the state has often made fertility synonymous with patriotism. From this has followed all manner of representations, many of them contradictory. Although it surely was the case, as Nys shows, that marriage was eroticized and marital love idealized, it was also the case that reproduction and sexual satisfaction were considered separate domains.
Topic:
History
Political Geography:
France

15120. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop's Democracy in America [Forum: Translating Tocqueville]

Publication Date:
03-2003
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
The new Mansfield and Winthrop translation of Tocqueville's classic text, notable for the lengthy introduction the translators provide as well as their determined effort to create the most literal word-for-word translation that has ever been published of the work, draws the critical eye of four Tocqueville specialists. Focusing on the introduction, Seymour Drescher points out that the translators' decision to regard the Democracy of 1935 and the one of 1840 as a single work, a decision made against the grain of recent scholarship, leads them into misunderstandings of how Tocqueville came to view the strengths and weaknesses of American democracy by the 1840s. Arthur Goldhammer, at work on his own translation of Democracy, goes beyond the longstanding debates over literal versus interpretive translation to point out a large number of errors in rendering French expressions into English. Melvin Richter explores a number of instances where the pursuit of literalness leads to distortions, and then focuses on the consequences translating l'état social as "social state" rather than "state of society." Cheryl Welch examines how the decision to translate inquiet as "restive" rather than "restless" or "anxious," as she would have preferred, leads the translators to underestimate how much Tocqueville's views of religion and women were informed by his own anxieties about moral disorder in a democratic society. Mansfield and Winthrop respond to their critics with a detailed discussion of several of their most controversial word choices and with a defense of their strategy of literal translation.
Political Geography:
America