Publication Type: Symposium Paper
Abstract: This article is drawn from a qualitative study of the role that school building leaders play in building parent and community involvement in their schools. The article focuses on four of the principals involved in the study who, with their students, staff, parents, and other community members, developed inclusive, meaningful, and transformative communities of involvement. The article delineates the contours of transformative communities of involvement within a discussion of five models of involvement. Subsequently, the beliefs that appeared to support the leaders work to develop and sustain such communities are examined along with a rich discussion of the role that trust played in their efforts and success.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Is “birthright” a salient political concept? If so, how might it help us consider political agency and social cohesion in increasingly diverse and mobile communities? Sheldon Wolin contends that birthright’s relevancy is the alternative to the social contract that it articulates. While Wolin’s understanding of birthright as political agency based on shared identity is provocative, it is incomplete. Wolin neglects its historical context as an exclusionary practice and provides a limited reading of Genesis’ Jacob and Esau. Birthright must be radically transformed to be an inclusive democratic practice that addresses how we create collective identity out of shifting heterogeneous communities and that affirms marginalized community members’ contributions. Emphasizing “birth” opens theoretical work with William Connolly, Hannah Arendt, and feminists of color around notions of inheritance and blessing. It also generates a new lens through which to read the book of Genesis. The story of Jacob and Esau is a narrative of movement, nationalization, conflict with people familiar and strange, and reconciliation despite past transgressions. It illuminates an agonistic, inter-corporeal politics that struggles over the problems of inheritance, collective identity, equality, and individual development and liberty. In particular, reworking birthright generates new insights into the political tension between racial and ethnic minorities and majorities. Birthright provides democratic political practices for today.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper presents research findings on the British Army case study from a two year ESRC funded project on land forces transformation in the US, Britain and France. In the post-Cold War period all three armies have been confronted with a number of challenges as they have sought to adapt and innovate in the face of the alteration of the political, social. strategic and military environment, as well of the increasingly introduction of new technologies, particularly information technologies, and societal changes. The British Army’s innovation efforts have been shaped by a perceived operational need to be more expeditionary in character and to develop new concepts consistent with the concepts of Network Enabled Operations and Effects Based Approach to Operations that have their origins with, respectively, US Navy and the US Air Force. A critical aspect of the British Army’s effort to respond to these issues is the Future Rapid Effects System, a radical rethinking of the organization of Army units designed to make one third of its combat capability more expeditionary while still sustaining combat lethality and survivability. This analysis examines for what has driven the British Army to rethink the character of its combat platforms and organizational structure, the factors which conditioned the alternative choices it perceived it had and the choices it ultimately took, and the relevant factors, such as organizational culture that have facilitated or inhibited innovation or change.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This study uses interviews with members of Congress to explore the increasing questions raised about the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation of women given the rising numbers of conservative women serving in office.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Traditionally law and development scholars and practitioners took their subject to be domestic legal systems. This focus seems intrinsic to arguments that improving law and justice institutions furthers countries’ economic development, for example. As the discourse around law and development has evolved into “rule of law” discourse, the focus of attention has remained firmly on state institutions as the means for the rule of law’s attainment. Recent scholarship relating to the changing nature of the state in connection with processes typically associated with globalization, however, challenges this paradigm on both substantive and procedural dimensions. Specifically, it calls into question traditional models of international law and posits instead some sort of emerging hybrid or synthetic legal order that is neither wholly national nor international. (Sassen 2006; Slaughter and Burke White 2006). As part of the process of transforming domestic law, a new regime of global administrative law has emerged. (Kingsbury et al. 2005). Through global administrative law mechanisms, international actors have influenced and even demanded changes to domestic law. These processes have become intertwined with state law adoption and implementation to a degree that belies reference to such matters as “implementation of international law”, as the now antiquated metaphor of states as “conveyor belts” for international norms conveys. At the same time, what are cited as the constitutive elements of any system built on rule of law—judicial, prosecutorial, policing institutions—increasingly come under oversight by global administrative institutions in terms of both substance and procedure.

This paper provides an overview of the changes affecting domestic legal systems as described in recent international affairs and legal scholarship and outlines the challenges for law and development as traditionally understood. It argues that the internationalization of domestic law has far-reaching implications for the understanding and practice of development assistance in the legal field. To highlight the nature of these changes, it considers the extent to which global administrative mechanisms are encroaching on areas traditionally the subject of development assistance in the legal and judicial fields.


Bibliographical references

Benedict Kingsbury, Nico Krisch, Richard Stewart, and Jonathan Weiner, Introduction to Global Administrative Law, in Symposium, The Emergence of Global Administrative Law, 68 L. & Contemp. Prob. 1 (2005).

Saskia Sassen, TERRITORY, AUTHORITY AND RIGHTS: FROM MEDIEVAL TO GLOBAL ASSEMBLAGES (2006).

Anne Marie Slaughter and William Burke White, The Future of International Law is Domestic (or, The European Way of Law), 47 Harv. Intl. L. J. 327 (2006).