Search results

This article aims to understand the political action of UNESCO's secretariat vis-a-vis the management of the interface between 'trade and culture,' as well as its room for manoeuvre faced with the promoters of the diversity of cultural expressions. While numerous studies on this issue assume that the UNESCO's secretariat is in favour of the process of building and implementing the Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, this article looks into the conditions that allow the secretariat to act. The analysis seeks to dismantle the common idea that UNESCO was at the forefront of the Convention and to illustrate why the organization has adopted a conservative attitude on this issue and has implemented a number of strategies that take into account UNESCO's specific institutional environment. Adapted from the source document.

This paper developed from a talk given in a panel entitled "Indigenous Marxism," as a part of the Historical Materialism conference held in late April of this year at New York University. Yet my goal in writing this is not a consideration of Marxism as it is adopted or deployed by indigenous people living under settler colonial regimes around the world -- rather, I would like to consider the idea of Marx as it appears to Indian peoples engaged in the struggle for decolonization and national liberation in the Americas. Adapted from the source document.

This talk examines the popular idea that "economic growth" can continue indefinitely in post-industrial capitalist economies through the shift of labor to "service" sectors, particularly finance and information-based activities, in the light of the classical-Marxian theory of value and the related categories of productive and unproductive labor. As the generally accepted classical theory of land rent exemplifies, many types of income in capitalist economies, including interest, financial fees, speculative trading profits, and intellectual property royalties, arise as parts of the surplus value generated by the exploitation of productive labor appropriated through the assertion of various property rights. The dramatic phenomena of highly profitable "business models" based on network externalities associated with the internet and other information-based technologies do not represent new modes of value production, but modes (in some cases not particularly new) of participation in the pool of surplus value. National income accounting conventions that impute a fictitious output as a counterpart to incomes generated in sectors such as finance, professional and business services, education and health, and government, where there are no market-based measures of output create a distorted and misleading picture of value production and growth in advanced capitalist economies. A clear understanding of the origin of value in the expenditure of productive labor and of surplus value in the exploitation of productive labor is essential to thinking through the problems of post-industrial capitalist growth, distribution, resource conservation, and environmental protection.

This article examines the unintended consequences of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act -- a political agreement among the 35 participating states in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). The primary objective of this article is to explain the unintended consequences of the CSCE security regime in terms of path emergence. 'Path emergence' is presented as a conceptual apparatus to explain the emergent properties exhibited within a complex adaptive system. The path emergence theory highlights four explanatory metaphors: morphogenetic fields, self-organized criticality, social resonance, and co-evolution. These metaphors serve as conceptual linchpins for the case analysis of the unintended consequences of the CSCE security regime. This article suggests that the CSCE embedded within it the properties of path emergence, which in turn contributed to the end of the Cold War in Europe. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright, the International Political Science Association.]

For 20 years, national governments have sought to slow the heating of the planet and the rise of the oceans by apportioning blame and attempting to spread the financial burden. The vehicle for their efforts, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), is a negotiating process aimed at getting countries to commit to reducing their emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, the main cause of global warming. But the UNFCCC has floundered because of disagreements between developed and developing countries; difficulties in credibly measuring, reporting, and verifying emissions reductions; and the power of vested interests in the energy sector. Above all, the UNFCCC has failed because it does not provide powerful enough directives for companies to develop and use technologies that could radically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The UNFCCC does not focus on specific internationally traded products that generate harmful emissions. Instead, countries with little power to enforce how products are made are expected to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions on a national basis, leading to quarrels among a wide range of stakeholders and industry sectors. The framework's reliance on emissions-trading schemes, meanwhile, offers countries and companies a cheap out, allowing them to forestall investments in clean technologies. Climate diplomacy urgently needs a new approach. The international community should shift its focus from setting targets that countries cannot meet to setting directives that multinational corporations have to follow. Relying on the threat of sanctions, the UN should compel the multinational corporations that dominate important sectors to define and adopt ambitious targets for driving down their greenhouse gas emissions. Third parties would evaluate the reductions throughout the corporations' supply and distribution channels. Individual countries contain multitudes of competing voices and interests, which complicate efforts to get them to change their behavior. But corporations are authoritative organizations that can channel extraordinary levels of human, technical, and fiscal resources toward specific problems and missions. Multinational corporations dominate markets, trade, investment, research and development, and the spread of technology. To fight climate change, the international community needs to harness this power. Adapted from the source document.

Would an independent Scotland, Catalonia or Flanders automatically be part of the European Union? There is no simple solution provided for this eventuality in the 1978 Vienna Convention, nor in prior international conventions, nor though strict application of European law, according to which each state would come under the standard accession procedure, and therefore would be subject to veto by other member states. The singular nature of the European Union and simple common sense call for a solution that is negotiated at every stage. (Politique étrangère (Paris) / SWP)