The European Union as a Security Actor in the Sahel

In the past decade, the EU has significantly stepped up its profile as a security actor in the Sahel. Drawing on historical institutionalism, we conceptualise path-dependencies and lock-in effects as elements of a “foreign policy entrapment” spiral to analyse the EU’s policies towards the Sahel. Specifically, we seek to explain the EU’s increasingly widened and deepened engagement in the region. Hence, this article traces the evolution of the EU’s Sahel policy both in discourse and implementation. We identify a predominant security narrative as well as a regionalisation narrative and show that EU action has followed these narratives. Based on this analysis, we argue that the evolution of the EU’s Sahel policy can be understood as a case of “foreign policy entrapment”. Initial decisions on the overall direction of EU foreign policy have created strong path-dependencies and lock-in effects that make it difficult for EU policy-makers to change the policy course.

Missing the Forest for the Trees: Marketing Systems Approach to Pharmaceutical Industry Marketing Practices

The overall aim of this study is to examine firm strategic choices that trigger negative externalities culminating in market failure, system crisis, and public harm. A conceptual framework of marketing system crisis rooted in conflict of interests (COI) theory is used to make the following arguments: (1) marketing strategies emulated by the industry actors at micro level set lock in through path dependencies, (2) such path dependencies may be associated with negative externalities in the form of reduced quality of life of downstream stakeholders in adjacent systems, (3) back lash by system actors precipitates market failure inviting regulatory oversight in the form of fines that tarnish trust and firm reputation, (4) with implications for system crisis and public welfare. A systematic analysis of court documents pertaining to pharmaceutical industry settlements bolstered by sales data from the company reports and Medicaid reimbursement data indicate that, for the case examined, diverse marketing practices are systematically developed with the strategic intent to insert external incentives that influence physician judgment and trigger market failure through negative externalities. Implications for marketing for a better world, systems health, pharmaceutical marketing, and suggestions for incorporating COI principles into theories of marketing for a better world conclude the paper.

Rebuilding a Cluster While Protecting Knowledge within Low-Medium-Tech Supplier SMEs: A Spanish and French Comparison

Most of SMEs are engaged in open innovation practices, but they do not benefit from open innovation or from patenting in the same way as larger firms do. At the same time SMEs, as territorialized suppliers, play a crucial role within evolving regional specialization. In this context the purpose of our study is to examine how low and medium technology supplier SMEs learn and organize themselves at a territorial level to address the challenge of IP protection in an open innovation paradigm. We used a qualitative method with a longitudinal multi-case study involving 27 companies with a historical lance to compare the territorial dynamics of knowledge protection within clustered supplier SMEs in two European regions. The results show they protect their knowledge by learning how to design, in a direct relationship with clients, customized complex technological products to develop a new organizational matrix of multidisciplinary knowledge that reveals itself difficult to imitate within the clusters. They also cope with other supplier firms across sectors even if they show societal path dependencies in the way to build cooperation. This dynamic has given birth to changing structural relationships among regionally clustered SMEs and between them and large firms.

Industry Dynamics and Path Dependencies

Industry dynamics are about stability and change on the field level of analysis. This chapter uses the lens of path dependence to study the emergent field of renewable energy. On this level of analysis, path dependence theory has to address not only technological but also organizational and institutional dynamics that intricately interact. More specifically, by means of such a multi-dimensional lens, this chapter will look at the increasing generation of electric energy through wind power to illustrate different industry dynamics in four countries. The United Kingdom and Japan will illustrate the persistence of an established path in generating electric energy through fossil fuels and nuclear, while the German and, more tenuously, Chinese cases serve as examples for path-breaking change and the conditions making the emergence of renewables, and in particular wind energy, possible.

Transcending path dependencies: Why the study of post-socialist cities needs to capitalise on the discussion on urbanisation in the South (and vice versa)

Recently, the theoretical relevance and utility of the regionalised notion of post-socialist cities have been questioned. The ensuing debate has resulted in several positions, including suggestions to drop the term entirely or to create a distinctive narrative based on the concept of a Global East, in order to position the knowledge as equal vis-a-vis discourses originating from Western power centres. This article responds to this call through efforts to transcend the dominant frames of research on post-socialist cities. However, I argue that the first step in overcoming the subaltern positioning of local knowledge is to refocus attention on previously marginalised urban phenomena, and to link the post-socialist research agenda to existing empowering discourses. The importance of creating linkages with the research originating from the South, and the potential for such joint engagements to contribute to global theory-making are discussed in the context of the study of urban informality.

Hidden Continuities?: The Avatars of “Judicial Lustration” in Post-Communist Romania

This Article grapples with the instrumentalization of the past in Romania, in the specific context of “judicial lustration” measures. It argues that decommunization and lustration policies, which could not be pursued in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of state socialism in 1989, were weaponized much later and used in order to advance other purposes. In 2006, an expedited judicial vetting procedure, in the context of the EU-driven fight against corruption, was repurposed by the center-right as a lustration instrument. In the same year, the dismantling of an intelligence service created after 1991 in the Justice Ministry (SIPA) to monitor ‘vulnerabilities’ in the justice system has set in motion a long series of failed attempts to bring closure to the question regarding the service’s archives, fomenting continuities of suspicion until today. More recently, in 2018, a form of ‘mock-judicial lustration’ has been used by the political left to deflect or at least delegitimize repressive anti-corruption policies. The new “lustration procedure” implicitly equated the recent cooperation between prosecutors and intelligence officers, in the context of the fight against corruption, with past practices of collusion between the members of the judiciary and the communist Securitate. These three episodes of ‘dealing with the past’ are reviewed in order to showcase path-dependencies. Such path-dependencies are not linked only with carryovers from or throwbacks to the communist past. Rather, pre- and post-communist deficiencies of modernization, combined more recently with gaps in post-accession monitoring by the EU Commission, create continuities of peripheral instrumentalism. Various narratives, such as decommunization, the fight against graft, judicial reform and the rule of law are used to legitimize short-term consequentialism, evincing a resilient, structural resistance to legislative and legal normativity.

“Down Beside where the Waters Flow": Reclaiming Rivers for American Studies (Introduction)

Over the past three decades, rivers have become a fascinating and popular subject of scholarly interest, not only in the field of environmental history, where river histories have developed into a distinct subgenre, but also in the emerging field of environmental humanities. In this scholarship, rivers have often been reconceptualized as socio-natural sites where human and non-human actors interact with the natural world, generating complex legacies, path dependencies, and feedback loops. Furthermore, rivers have been described as hybrid “organic machines,” whose energy has been utilized by humans in many different ways, including the harvesting of both hydropower and salmon. Indeed, as several environmental historians have noted, in many regions of the world, watercourses have been transformed by technology to such an extent that they increasingly resemble enviro-technical assemblages rather than natural waterways. Rivers have also been discussed through the lens of “eco-biography,” a term coined by Mark Cioc in his influential monograph on the Rhine River, a book informed by “the notion that a river is a biological entity—that it has a ‘life’ and ‘a personality’ and therefore a ‘biography’.” Quite surprisingly, despite this “river turn” (to use Evenden's phrase), rivers have played a marginal role in recent American Studies scholarship. To address this gap, this issue of RIAS brings together scholars from different disciplines, countries, and continents to analyze a wide variety of river experiences, histories, and representations across the American hemisphere and beyond. Hence the title of this volume, Rivers of the Americas, should be seen as both an allusion to the Rivers of America book series (a popular series of sixty-five volumes, each on a particular US river, published between 1937 and 1974) and as a reminder of the still untapped potential of hemispheric, transnational, and comparative modes of critical engagement with rivers in American Studies.

Education and “Categorical Inequalities’’: Manifestation of Segregation in Six Country Contexts in Europe

This article deals with the educational arrangements and the multiple inequalities that they reproduce from a comparative perspective. Drawing on a qualitative study conducted in six countries (Austria, Hungary, Netherlands, Portugal, Turkey, and the UK) as part of a multinational research project concerning justice in Europe, the article explores the mechanisms through which education sustains and reproduces “categorical inequalities.” Although equal access to education is granted by constitutional laws as well as by incorporation of international treaties in the national legal frameworks, it is commonly the educational arrangements that identify the features of access to good quality education in a given context. Dealing with different country cases that have their path dependencies in the arrangements of education, the article provides insights on understanding how different features of segregation in education operate as mechanisms of exclusion for students from a disadvantaged background. Hence, the disadvantages manifest themselves concerning socio‐economic status, ethnicity, race, and minority background. By focusing on the country‐based debates around school segregation, which goes together with the segregated character of urban settings and school choice patterns, the article shows how the institutional context with or without residency‐based registration rules and different types of schools with different resources perpetuate multiple inequalities. In a context where educational arrangements operate as a mechanism of sustaining categorical inequalities, identity‐based differences, combined with economic disadvantages lead to a situation where students from vulnerable and minority groups face multiple forms of exclusion.