Broader Negotiation Research Articles

Perceiving and problematizing ‘invisibility’ in English language education and criticality: a duoethnographic dialogue

ABSTRACT The dominant social, political and educational narrative of ‘homogeneous Japan’ has been both perpetuated and challenged inside Japan and abroad. Transdisciplinary scholarship and critical communal voices have highlighted Japan’s history as a site of diversity and complexity. the diverse ways people negotiate being, becoming and belonging as ‘Japanese’ and/or as members of Japanese society, and the marginalization individuals and groups have faced due to the homogeneity narrative. This article presents two researcher-practitioners employing duoethnographic inquiry to dialogue regarding how critical frameworks in applied linguistics and English language teaching (ELT) seek to account for identity negotiation, experience and (in)equity in Japanese society, and ELT therein. In sharing, probing, reflecting on and reimagining their stories dialogically, the authors discuss one key concern: in limiting their scope to addressing ‘essentialized and idealized nativeness in English’ dominant approaches to criticality have rendered individuals’ broader negotiations of identity and community membership, ‘invisible.’ The authors invite readers to engage with the dialogue herein, and reflect on what frames their own ‘seeing.’

Dissent as cybercrime: social media, security and development in Tanzania

ABSTRACT In the context of increasing interest in the relationship between digital communications and authoritarian politics, this paper considers the criminalisation of online dissent in Tanzania. Based on interviews with police officers, local government officials and mobile phone users, the paper explores contested framings and understandings of “cybercrime”. It argues that contemporary repression of online freedoms can be understood within longer histories of social and political ordering, whereby understandings and experiences of “security” and “development”, and the relationships they imply between government and citizens, are implicated in the delegitimisation of dissent. However, it also finds that social media use enables and amplifies articulation of opposition to repressive measures and may destabilise the politics of security and development that inform the policing of online spaces and politics more broadly. The paper thus contributes, firstly, to understanding the ambiguous and contingent relationships between information and communications technologies and politics in particular places. Secondly, by analysing debates about internet freedom it offers insights into broader negotiations over politics, security and development, which are in turn rendered more urgent by the disruptive impact of new modes of communication.

Turning points at the Round Table Talks

At the beginning of the 1990s the “winds of change” blew through Europe, leading to the fall of Communism and regime change in several Eastern-European countries. The domino effect started in Poland with the Round Table negotiations that ultimately led to democratization of the country. The context that allowed this historical event to occur has been studied, but the talks themselves have not been analyzed in detail. In this article, we undertake this task. Using several complementary analytical approaches – negotiation theory, turning points analysis and dynamical systems – we study the process of getting to an agreement, focusing on the seven key issues of the negotiations. We treat the Round Table Talks both as a unique case of negotiations, given its structure and the context in which it happened, as well as an event comparable to other negotiations and connecting to the broader negotiation literature. Results of our inquiries show the importance of procedures during the talks and highlight the role played by motivation in propelling the negotiating parties to an agreement. We discuss the implications of our findings for negotiation theory and for the broader context of the historical event.

Sexual violence in serial form: Breaking Bad habits on TV

Walter White’s (Bryan Cranston) attempts to isolate, degrade, exploit, frighten, and control his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) are tactics that are well-documented in studies focusing on abuse. Yet, despite the representation of both implicit and explicit forms of domestic abuse and sexual violence throughout Breaking Bad (2008–2013), there is an apparent disconnect between how this behaviour is perceived on screen and how it is ostensibly regarded in society. It is here, at the intersection of audience reception and sociological theory that I argue Breaking Bad represents abuse as part of a broader negotiation of masculinity, one that contributes to the ongoing marginalization of women’s voices in both visual media narratives and, by extension, society. In particular, I argue that despite the series’ long-form structure, the lack of emphasis placed on instances of coercive control by the writers and directors is partly responsible for contributing towards a culture of misogyny and victim-blaming fostered by fans towards Skyler evident in numerous online blog posts, fan forums, social media platforms, and Anna Gunn’s own treatise on the portrayal of her character in the New York Times.

Expertise and Heritage Ethics in the Middle East

By the time I completed fieldwork in Qatar in 2016, the Msheireb project that aimed to redevelop the heart of Doha was nearing completion of its first phase. The way this development project unfolded during this time was indicative of broader negotiations of Qatari cultural brokers with ideas of indigeneity and expertise: the project was rebranded from Dohaland, “The Heart of Doha,” to Msheireb (after the local wadi) in the first half of 2011, while the iconic Al Kahraba Street—the “spine” of the old city and the first street to be electrified in Qatar—was referred to in architectural notations as the “Champs-Élysées” of Doha. The politics of indigeneity of place-making in these negotiations reflected an unresolved unease with the cosmopolitan nature of expertise. This tension was related not necessarily to the ingenious remixing of traditional and modern concepts of cultural and environmental sustainability, but rather to the active erasure of foreign expertise. We see this, for example, in the active rebranding of the I. M. Pei's Museum (in reference to the Chinese American “starchitect” who designed it) in order to take its rightful “local” name, the Museum of Islamic Art. While these efforts would suggest an intention to localize expertise and build local capacity as part of national objectives, I argue in this essay that this mastering in fact obscures local expertise by dissociating it from the cosmopolitan context in which knowledge production is negotiated in Qatar.

Dante’s Cato: <em>Libertà</em> and the Dialectic of Empires in the <em>Purgatorio</em>

Author(s): Adler, Gillian | Abstract: This paper reads Dante’s call for imperial renovatio in the earliest moments of the Purgatorio. Dante’s project allegorizes the search for an ideal temporal empire through the transfiguration of the wayward soul, and uses Cato, the historical figure guarding Purgatory’s terraces, to articulate the sense of urgency with which the empire must be purified of injustice. This paper contends that Cato, a symbol of the political and moral freedom crucial to Dante’s theory of an ideal imperium, is a function of the Commedia’s broader negotiation with contradictory Virgilian and Augustinian historiographical paradigms. Deeply invested in European reform, Dante condemns a past of imperial failure while anticipating spiritual-political redemption. Medieval forms of governance within the Monarchia inform my reading of liberta in Dante’s middle canticle.

Land tenure in hydropower development: A review

Land tenure issues such as tenure forms and its allocation and land acquisition procedure are not extensively considered in hydropower development. As a result hydropower projects are not sustainable. The main aim of the study is to find the role of land tenure in hydropower development. Desk study is carried out and is followed by the scientific literature review. The study reveals that the concession with broader negotiations and agreements is carried out for interfering the land rights for the construction of hydropower project in Norway because of which the Aurland hydropower project got successful. The capability and economical willingness to include land and environmental issues from the start of the project to operation stage made the development successful while concession is practiced in China without broader negotiations and public participation as in Nu river project. Therefore, a Chinese hydropower concession is controversial. Many of the proposed dam is situated in UNESCO world heritage site and in the conservation area. Nu river project affects number of distinct ethnic groups who maintain their religious and cultural tradition. Resettlement is not possible on this ethnic group because of integration into population of various customs, languages and agricultural tradition. In case of Nepal in general, concessions is not practiced during hydropower development. Transparency in information dissemination, decision making, involvement of key stakeholders on key issues and time bound solution can hardly be found during hydropower development. Mostly, land is expropriated for the development of the hydropower project. The study finds that Land tenure has very important role in hydropower development. Therefore, it should be extensively considered for sustainable development of the hydropower projects. Kathmandu University Journal of Science, Engineering and Technology Vol. 8, No. II, December, 2012, 101-108 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/kuset.v8i2.7332

The Death of Doha? Forensics of Democratic Governance, Distributive Justice, and Development in the WTO

The Development Agenda of the 2001 Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization in Doha represents an attempt to achieve greater distributive justice amongst WTO Members by enhancing the prospects for development through trade among poorer countries. Development and democratic governance (as between states) intertwine here: because developing countries represent the majority of WTO Members, more democratic and broader participation by developing countries also entails a policy emphasis on redistribution. Efforts to pursue the Doha Declaration’s Work Programme have proceeded slowly and with great difficulty: the 2003 Ministerial Conference in Cancun ended abruptly, and subsequent efforts to revive negotiations in the 2005 Ministerial and subsequent gatherings stumbled badly. As a consequence, over the years since its adoption, commentators have tolled the death knell for the Doha Development Agenda.As this chapter shows, many of the problems confronting the Doha Agenda can be described as institutional – collective action problems that undermine the benefits of coordination of state behavior potentially available from international institutions. The chapter argues that underlying and perhaps exacerbating these coordination difficulties lay deep normative contradictions. These contradictions were perhaps easier to overlook with a smaller set of key players of earlier trade rounds; in the broader negotiations following Doha, they are much harder to ignore.With these difficulties facing attempts at democratic governance in the WTO, perhaps it would be easier to eschew the time-consuming, logistically complicated scenario of negotiations in favor of some kind of substantive principle that could be more easily implemented from a top-down perspective – i.e. a constitutionalism of development. The Framework Agreement on Special and Differential Treatment proposed by some developing countries, for example, has featured in the Doha negotiations as one such project.This chapter also expresses skepticism about this project, however, addressing various kinds of uncertainties about Special and Differential Treatment (SD). First, the incorporation of SD into WTO decisions in the dispute settlement system may not produce the outcomes developing country governments would anticipate. Second, even if an interpretation of SD in conformity with the developing-country governments’ traditional position could be assured, this would not necessarily adhere to their benefit. SD, it turns out, may be no more infallible as an approach to trade policy than a neoclassical imperative to liberalize. Finally, the chapter turns to recent contributions from moral philosophy regarding the potential structure of distributive justice in the WTO, which are noteworthy interventions, but which yet ultimately cannot avoid the conundrums of trade and development that will require ultimately overt decisionmaking on behalf of redistribution. Reviewing the causes and implications of these myriad flaws and shortcomings, the chapter concludes nevertheless that efforts to reach negotiated agreements in the Doha round represent a crucial step forward. The challenges and obstacles confronting those efforts should be confronted directly, and indeed can only be resolved by doing so.

“Qui a peur du lycée musulman?” Media representations of a Muslim school in France

The present article analyses a corpus of 151 journalistic texts reporting the controversies around the operation of a Muslim school in France during 2006–2007, at the eve of the presidential elections. The aim is to explore how journalistic representations of a Muslim school operate in relation to dominant textured images of France as a political community. Journalistic texts are analysed in terms of their “representational choices” and the discursive strategies through which they choreograph the “pan-semiotic” categories of language that make sense of this institution, as a school. The analyses show how journalistic texts enact competing discursive constructions of a political community, and how they deploy lexicogrammatical, metaphoric and metonymic elements of language to choreograph the scriptural space in relation to which the school is made sense of. The corpus bears testimony of the media's “definitional power” over semiotic categories, and how these are deployed in the broader negotiation of struggles over constituencies in the field of power politics.

Patterns and Principles of Fiscal Federalism in Belgium

The territorial financial arrangements in Belgium reflect the bipolar and centrifugal logic of Belgian federalism. The structure of the Belgian federation is a political reflection of a territorialized language conflict, in part overlaid by inter-regional economic disparities. Discussions about territorial finance are always part of broader negotiations between a richer, Flemish north and a less wealthy, Francophone south about the way in which the two can remain in a common state. While tracing the evolution of Belgium's fiscal federalism before 2001, the contribution focuses on a new settlement achieved in major negotiations in 2001. This settlement established a more stable financial underpinning for Belgium's linguistic Communities (Flemish, Francophone, German) while allowing its economic Regions (Flanders, Wallonia, Brussels) greater fiscal autonomy. It is doubtful, though, that even this latest set of negotiations will provide an enduring basis for Belgian territorial finance.

Market Power and the Taxation of Domestic and International Tourism

Tourism services around the world are subject to general and specific taxes. There is evidence that tourism is relatively heavily taxed and that rates of taxation are increasing, although the implicit taxation of aviation is lessening. Leaving aside issues of international rent extraction, or the passing of taxes on to foreign visitors, there do not seem to be strong reasons for taxing tourism differently from other goods and services, although specific levies to correct for related unpriced services or externalities may be called for. There has been a growth in specific tourism taxes, many of which are earmarked for spending on tourism-related projects or promotion. While this may appear efficient, it can lead to the squandering of revenues through the funding of inefficient projects. This is especially the case when different jurisdictions fund promotion to attract the same group of tourists. International tourism poses specific problems that make it difficult to tax it on a comparable basis to other goods and services. However, the most serious problem arises from the market power that countries possess over their tourism services; countries can, and do, impose taxes on tourism services and pass them on to foreign tourists. The scope for doing this is substantial and it is individually rational for countries to tax tourism services. However, this constitutes a barrier to trade in tourism services, and what is rational for an individual country is inefficient for the world as a whole. Excessive taxation of international tourism will be the result, and this taxation will be very difficult to negotiate away. Since this market power is unevenly distributed across countries, and there is some gain from tourism taxation, even after the taxation of their own travellers is taken into account, it would not be feasible to obtain agreement to reduce or eliminate such taxation if negotiations are confined to tourism and aviation issues. Agreement is more likely if there are broader negotiations, but even these may well not be enough. In the absence of side payments to bribe countries not to use their market power, the globally efficient solution of low tourism taxes is unlikely to come about. Ultimately, tourism growth is likely to suffer relative to other sectors in the global economy.