Ideas and Aspirations

This chapter explores how, behind the change in economic policymaking, lies a change in the ideas of the elite. And behind the change in ideas was a relentless scanning of experience outside Spain, especially in Europe. The chapter documents how the technocrats that held increasing power in 1960s Spain consistently sought out new ideas about policymaking from Europe and the United States. They were deliberate policy entrepreneurs. Like their Western European peers, the technocrats considered a responsibility of the state to seek to advance progress for a wide spectrum of society. To pursue this objective, they considered it critical to increase efficiency and put great faith in technological progress. The chapter concludes that what truly stands out of the technocrats is that they were able to implement their practical agenda over a sustained period. There had been previous technocratic efforts to emulate European practices, sometimes from reformers that reached even higher levels of government. A long-term horizon allowed policies to evolve without unnecessary volatility, striking a balance between policy innovation and policy continuity.

Pathways from Environmental Ethics to Pro-Environmental Behaviours? Insights from Psychology

Though largely a theoretical endeavour, environmental ethics also has a practical agenda to help humans achieve environmental sustainability. Environmental ethicists have extensively debated the grounds, contents and implications of our moral obligations to nonhuman nature, offering up different notions of an 'environmental ethic' with the presumption that, if humans adopt such an environmental ethic, they will then engage in less environmentally damaging behaviours. We assess this presumption, drawing on psychological research to discuss whether or under what conditions an environmental ethic might engender pro-environmental behaviour. We focus discussion on three lines of scholarship in the environmental ethics literature, on 1) intrinsic value, 2) care ethics, and 3) the land ethic. We conclude by commenting generally on both the limits and transformative potential of an environmental ethic in its larger sociocultural context.

Board-level employee representation in the Visegrád countries

This article addresses the complexity of trade-union approaches to board-level employee representation in the Visegrád countries, and the barriers it faces in particular national settings. Trade unionists in these countries accept the relevance of such employee representation in theory, but their practical agenda covers other issues which they perceive as more important as they struggle to survive at many levels of activity, and face growing existential uncertainty and risk. Unions also lack capacity to overcome obstacles such as reluctance on the part of the political class and managerial hostility to board-level representation; they cannot exert influence on major policy decisions at national level. They are operating in a more and more difficult environment, reflecting not merely a declining membership base, but also the recent economic crisis that failed to change the economic policy paradigm in the Visegrád countries: policies there still rely on a neoliberal approach and hence are not conducive to labour participation. What can still be seen as the predominant model is the traditional one of the market economy in which rights of ownership reign supreme.

Towards mass-grave protection guidelines

In the aftermath of conflict and gross human rights violations, victims have a right to know what happened to their loved ones. Such a right is compromised if mass graves are not adequately protected to preserve evidence, facilitate identification and repatriation of the dead and enable a full and effective investigation to be conducted. Despite guidelines for investigations of the missing, and legal obligations under international law, it is not expressly clear how these mass graves are best legally protected and by whom. This article asks why, to date, there are no unified mass-grave protection guidelines that could serve as a model for states, authorities or international bodies when faced with gross human rights violations or armed conflicts resulting in mass graves. The paper suggests a practical agenda for working towards a more comprehensive set of legal guidelines to protect mass graves.

Feeding Revolution: The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Food

This chapter examines the role of food in the symbolic politics and practical agenda of the Black Panther Party (BPP), founded in the late 1960s in Oakland, California. Situating hunger and the politics of food at the center of drives for racial justice, it argues that the BPP’s anti-hunger efforts and food-centered campaigns were driven by an implicit understanding of the power of food in battles over racialized definitions of personhood, a forum for both enforcing and resisting hegemonic authority. From this vantage, the Panthers and their allies in the East Bay community utilized the Party’s popular food programs, specifically its Free Breakfast for School Children Program, as staging grounds to prepare for a revolutionary overthrow of the socio-economic order. In addition to strengthening the physical bodies of African Americans to ensure their “survival pending revolution,” the food programs served a deeper organizing function by encouraging community members to come together to meet an immediate, practical need and, in doing so, to visualize themselves as part of a larger movement for change. The Panthers’ subsequent demands for consumer rights and calls for conscientious consumption (both as purchasers and eaters of food) highlighted the role of food politics in perpetuating racial injustice while demonstrating the capacity for food-related protest to challenge structures of hunger and patterns of widespread malnourishment.

History’s ‘So it seems’: Heidegger-ian Phenomenologies and History

This article entitled “History’s ‘So it seems’” explores the potential of phenomenology for the framing of histories which privilege partcipant perspectives. The theory agenda of the article adapts insights drawn from Heidegger’s ontological hermeneutic of Da-sein ‐ the human condition of being-there and being-aware (or not aware). The theory agenda also adapts Heidegger’s readings of Heraclitus. The practical agenda of the article illustrates this potential of Heidegger’s phenomenology for history by contrasting ‘so it once seemed’ senses of the Emperor Julian the Apostate’s Roman pagan self-hood. The contrasts are autobiographical (Julian’s Misopogon), contemporary biographical (Ammianus Marcellinus’s history), and long-lag biographical (Gore Vidal’s novel avowedly constrained by the sources).