Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Soft law or New Modes of Governance (NMGs) has piqued scholars from a range of fields, not least from law. The reason for this agitation is clear. The longer and more effectively NMGs are applied within the EU, the more likely they raise the question of the demarcation between legal and non-legal. Yet the lawyers are only just halfway in the study of this matter. Governance is more than rule-drafting or establishing pre-requisites for policy-making; it is necessarily followed by rule-application or the operation of a given practice. Then what follows? – Disputes and the question of legal remedies.

One can argue against straightforwardness, but not against the fact that there is remarkably little literature on soft law and its actual application vis-à-vis the availability of legal remedies. The arrangements that link public and private in creating and possibly implementing soft law have added a momentum to this notion. Here is under study An Taisce-case from the ECJ wherein no notion was made of an effective legal remedy. Rather the outcome seemed to be (and as is later witnessed in other cases) favouring effective and factual participating in NMGs as substitution to effective legal protection. The problem is worsened by the suspense of competence matters in this area. It is suggested here that the rapid proliferation of NMG mechanisms should be balanced by a more liberal and innovative application of requirements for legal protection. Only this way can NMGs be successfully promoted. Failing that, they will be met with increasing suspicion by actors.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: I examine the ways in which the remotely operated space vehicles, the rovers, on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers mission were culturally constituted as collaborators through discourse and work practice. During the mission, scientists and engineers anthropomorphized the rovers with human characteristics of kinship, agency, emotion, and appendages. I consider this relationship of rovers as collaborators rather than tools and its implications through ethnographic evidence of the simulations and actual operations of the mission.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This essay analyzes the Vietnam-era war photojournalism of photographer Larry Burrows, identifying the impact and reception of his work in prominent weekly news magazines such as Life. The visual rhetoric of war transformed dramatically during the Vietnam war, and this essay attempts to assess the impact of photojournalism in spurring this transformation. Cara Finnegan’s notion of the “image vernacular” of a given historical period is employed in order to identify the different ways that wars were pictured from World War II to Vietnam, identifying the rise of a critical use of photographs to spur opposition to government war propaganda. In defense of this claim, the essay interprets important photo-essays as they reflected and influenced public understanding, and argues that the inventional resources of the photographer as visual narrator provoked popular reflection on the traumatic dimension of war. By challenging previous visual narratives of war and by offering ambivalent images of life on the ground, the photo-essays of Larry Burrows engaged in a visual rhetoric that encouraged identification with suffering Vietnamese civilians, challenged heteronormative modes of framing heroic sacrifice, and contributed a climate in which popular opinion shifted against the war.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The common assumption that runs through most contemporary Western approaches to fostering peace and stability between combatants in war-torn regions is that peace is a bottom-up process. Peace is achieved, most Western governments and people assume, by creating common interests and identities between the populations and key societal interest groups in the combatant societies, and then forging political institutions that allow society to restrain aggressive leaders. In other words, the path to peace consists of creating cooperative institutions, fostering economic interdependence and encouraging democratization. The paradigmatic postwar transition of Western Europe from a region of conflict to a region of stability, however, indicates that a top-down, statist logic drove the initial stabilization of the crucial Franco-German rivalry, often over the objections of society. Societal attitudes evolved only after regional security cooperation commenced. Similarly, two key Middle Eastern peace settlements, the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979 and the 1994 Israeli-Jordanian treaty, were also top-down settlements negotiated by leaders who were far more conciliatory than their societies. Thus, while bottom-up approaches may be very useful strategies for sustaining peace in the post-conflict period, peacemaking properly begins with realist strategies to begin state-level cooperation, rather than liberal or constructivist strategies to foster societal convergence.

Publication Type: Paper (prepared oral presentation)
Abstract: Victim beliefs play an important role in violent intergroup conflicts around the world, and pose a clear risk to peace by inciting revenge and legitimizing harmdoing against other groups (e.g., Rouhana & Bar-Tal, 1998; Eidelson & Eidelson, 2003). However, very little research to date has examined the important possibility that victim consciousness may in fact diminish rather than fuel cycles of violence (see Staub, 2003, 2005; Vollhardt & Staub, 2008). I propose that this constructive effect can result from an inclusive form of victim consciousness that acknowledges similarities in the experiences of different groups targeted by ethnopolitical violence. Thus, whereas exclusive victim consciousness may predict revenge and hostility toward the perpetrator group and other victim groups, inclusive victim consciousness is expected to increase prosocial attitudes and behavior towards other groups that endured group-based violence. Two studies are presented that provide preliminary evidence for a proposed model of group-based victim consciousness and examine processes as well as facilitating conditions that can contribute to inclusive victim consciousness. In Study 1, the initial development of a measure of individual differences in victim consciousness (among a diverse sample of groups that experienced ethnopolitical violence in the past) is presented, and the variables that affect the personal salience and construal of ingroup victimization are assessed. In a quasi-experimental study among Vietnamese-Americans, Study 2 tests a potential way of achieving a more inclusive construal of ingroup victimization through a focus on perceived similarities with other victimized groups’ experiences.