This article explores how US legal expansions narrow justice possibilities. Drawing from Joan Scott's work on experience, echo and reverberation, the article puts forth a method for reading the convergence of historical absences within legal subjectivity. In particular, it traces the denial of one Nigerian woman's US political asylum claim within the context of US handlings of Nigerian human rights cases focused on petroleum violence alongside the expansion of political asylum to include gender and sexual violence. The article accounts for (...) the production of gender within a larger context of colonial state violence and questions how gender becomes a viable legal category through a variety of violent histories that implicate the US. By reframing questions of feminist justice within the site of law, the article argues for a deeper engagement with discontinuous narratives, which read against our common sense understandings, as a first step in divesting in US legal privilege. (shrink)

Global energy studies have produced a flurry of empirical analyses. However, the amount of theoretical reflection on the topic remains comparatively low. This article takes two specific limitations of the literature as its starting point: First, the often-unclear relationship between states and markets in global energy governance, and, second, the concept of energy as a material and external structure. With the aim of providing more nuanced perspectives on these issues, the article turns to the work of Niklas Luhmann and Bruno (...) Latour. Luhmann’s ideas of functional differentiation and structural coupling provide a new look at the interaction of states and markets. Latour’s symmetric anthropology allows us to rethink energy as a hybrid that is in the midst of instead of outside society. While these thinkers provide interesting ways forward for global energy studies, they also appear to be utterly incompatible. Instead of accepting this incompatibility, however, the article uses the tension between Luhmann and Latour’s work as a productive resource for further reflection on global energy governance. It develops a ‘Luhtourian’ approach, arguing that hybrid, issue-specific governance systems can emerge whenever a resistant hybrid instigates the emergence of symbolically generalized governance objects. (shrink)

Peace is more likely where there is trade and commerce between nation-states. However, many nations are "failed states" or "failing states," in large part because of civil wars. Yet, "business" may have a role to play here, too; as private military security companies (PMSCs) proliferate, governments and international organizations seem increasingly disposed to contract for their services, in some cases for combat roles as well as non-combat support roles in various conflict zones. This has raised questions about the ethics of (...) using private companies for public purposes, especially where (as now) private companies have operated outside of legal accountability. This article suggests ways in which such accountability can be put in place, such that PMSCs can actually serve the cause of securing local and regional stability as a first step toward establishing a much safer environment for people and for business. (shrink)

While tourism's positive contributions to societies have long been debated, commerce based tourism activities can strengthen peaceful societies by adhering to sustainable tourism principles. This study utilizes content analysis to examine 136 tourism practices from four major awards programs for their contributions to sustainability and peace. Specific practices which illuminate each of these contributions are highlighted. The findings reveal the most common initiatives focus on environmental quality, economic development, and community nourishment efforts, with substantially less focus on initiatives to engage (...) citizen diplomacy and increase transparency. The use of awards programs to further sustainable tourism is discussed, and suggestions for future research in this important area of study are shared. (shrink)

This article explores whether political corporate social responsibility may be better understood through its inclusion into the realm of high politics instead of its current characterization as belonging to low politics. The key argument is that the growing role of private companies in the provision of security is too widespread and its implications are too important to be ignored by the PCSR literature. By extending the scope of its inquiry into high politics, the insights from PCSR research could enrich the (...) debates in several other social sciences that also study political roles of private companies. An interdisciplinary dialog about the numerous inroads of private companies into high politics could help the PCSR scholars in their quest to reach beyond an instrumental view of corporate politics. (shrink)

Why do so many people remain so passive in the face of today’s massive, looming economic, political, and ecological crises, such as climate change? Despite some notable rhetorical and regulatory examples, attempts to stem climate change have, as a rule, not come to frame the activities of most citizens. The inability to confront the imperative of social transformation today is a complex, manifold problem. At root, it has to do with fundamental systemic features of a global social system that we (...) all contribute to reproducing in our everyday lives. While these features do not preclude political engagement, innovation, and action, they do undermine the bases of movements towards truly systemic transformation. This article focuses on one such feature, reification, as a social-structural foundation of passivity that impedes the social innovations required to tackle the climate crisis. (shrink)