http://hdl.handle.net/1842/1687 2013-05-20T13:55:50Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6458 Title: EU Acquis, international law, and local implementation: trafficking in women and the sex trade in Cyprus Authors: Constantinou, Angelo Abstract: Despite its long pre-existence, the issue of human trafficking (especially for sexual purposes) has become the epicentre of attention since the closing of the past century. The globe-wide attempt of politicians, academics, practitioners, technocrats, activists, and journalists to define, advocate, measure, and ‘control’ people trafficking has brought to the fore particular (re)actions. One such example is the EU and international law that aim to facilitate the legal framework within which national administrations should embark upon to ‘better deal’ with human trafficking. While EU and international law can only go so far as to lay the theoretical basis that signatory states must follow for dealing with human trafficking, ultimately, planning and implementing public policy become the prerogative of the individual state. In light of this, the central contribution of this study is the exploration of the application of EU and international law in concern with human trafficking within the Cypriot context. In other words, how EU and international law on human trafficking are applied in day-to-day interactions between state employees, civil groups, and trafficked women. For this purpose, the study examines the interpretation and application of the local legislation by the criminal justice agencies as well as the local NGOs. Notably, such undertakings are informed by past and present geopolitical and socio-economic developments that have been taking place since the British colonisation of Cyprus. Research findings (based on ethnographic fieldwork and documentary study), demonstrate that EU’s attempt to enforce legislative cohesion, common policies, and harmonised practices over the issue of human trafficking across its Member States is yet to materialise. The case of Cyprus, and at times of other EU States, are used as a paradigm in which both, the EU acquis and international law fail to impose legal prescriptions on national authorities. To illustrate, the dimensions of prevention, detection, identification, prosecution, and adjudication of human trafficking, as well as trafficking victims’ protection, rehabilitation, and repatriation are explored in piecemeal and they all testify of systemic deviations from EU and international guidelines. Both Cypriot public services and local NGOs assigned to handle human trafficking are not in a position to bear the standards laid out by the EU and the CoE. Consequently, victims of trafficking are often predisposed to adverse conditions and as a result, they are often undertreated. Moreover, it is often the case that law on paper—both EU and Cypriot— and law in practice are diametrically different. 2012-06-29T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6448 Title: Stories from the Wall: the making and remaking of localism in rural Northumberland Authors: Blenkinsop, Heather Jayne Abstract: This thesis concerns the making and remaking of localism, by which the thesis refers to the experience of group identity expressed through commitment to community, in rural Northumberland. Specifically, the research investigates the process of becoming, or claiming to be, or being seen as, a local person, and of belonging to a community. It examines how the processes of making, verifying and ascribing such identity claims occur and in what situations and contexts. The research contributes to the sociology of local identity and ‘belonging’, using a broad ethnographic methodology focused around public events. Through participant observation and analysing some relevant documents, it examines how ‘incomers’ and ‘locals’ cooperate to organize and attend these events and how they provide a time/space through which solidarity or otherwise is performed and identities are related to the outside world. The thesis argues against binaries such as public and private, insider and outsider, local and incomer, and instead proposes that there are layers of belonging, gradations of relationship and many points of interconnection. Further, division and cooperation are different ways in which groups and individuals choose to connect, and both are forms of attachment and interrelationship existing along a continuum of belonging. A person can commit and connect over time through volunteering and acquiring local knowledge about the place. However, often it is those who are socially on the fringes, the incomers, who are most assiduous in performing what passes for local. History is important for understanding prevailing social conditions, and some current events were analysed in an historical context. Many commentators have drawn boundaries around their area of study. However this thesis argues that the boundaries, geographic and social, move depending upon context, time, situation and the social location of those involved, including the researcher. The conclusion brings together a set of interconnected findings, and presents the distinctive main arguments about belonging and the local in the thesis. First, birth is not an absolute criterion for belonging and incomers can become ‘local’ in the sense that they can move inwards into their own construction of place. Second, rather than focusing on boundaries alone, the centre of what is bounded is seen as being as important as the boundaries in assessing what it means to be local. Third, while looking into the historic past is a valuable tool in understanding prevailing social conditions, attention must also be paid to the evolving future and how such perceived changes impact on the social. Fourth, there are varied routes to belonging that allow a person to move from outside towards inside. However, the routes to belonging are complicated and cannot be patterned. Fifth, the boundaries are permeable and expand to the global and contract not only to the local, but to the isolated, following an annual rhythm. The result is research which contributes to the sociology of localism and ‘belonging’ in relation to community and self in contemporary Britain. 2012-06-29T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6389 Title: Natural guardians of the race: heredity, hygiene, alcohol, and degeneration in Scottish Psychiatry, c. 1860 – 1920 Authors: Wood, James Anthony Abstract: This thesis investigates the ways in which hereditary degeneration was discussed by Scottish psychiatrists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with particular reference to the anti-alcohol debate. I examine the theoretical writings of both clinical and forensic psychiatry to show how the theory of degeneration functioned as part of a new understanding of legal medicine and that psychiatric knowledge was always implicitly related to a broader conception of criminal capacity and the role of the modern state. While the argument is situated in the wider literature covering psychiatry and degeneration in Europe and America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I trace a rather singular story rooted in the institutional peculiarities of Scotland, showing how psychiatrists attempted to use the problem of alcoholic degeneration to mould their science into a branch of public health, propelling them into their preferred role as guardians of the race. This public health campaign facilitated the creation of new categories of psychiatric knowledge consisting of mental abnormalities that did not amount to absolute insanity, but that none the less had a bearing on how people thought about the mind, conduct, and criminal capacity. All the leading figures of Scottish psychiatry had a significant interest in alcohol as a cause of degeneration, and in their descriptions of the condition, the legal applications of the doctrine were never from view. One reason for this was undoubtedly the autonomous nature of the Scottish legal system which, when combined with the relatively small professional population of Scotland, greatly increased the rate of intellectual exchange between psychiatrists and lawyers while intensifying the political implications of associating with certain doctrines. Thus, a large part of my thesis will also be devoted to the legal interpretation of psychiatric claims, and in later part of the thesis I examine in depth the extent to which psychiatric knowledge claims were able to modify the laws of Scotland. Three substantive themes protrude from the documents consulted: Heredity, degeneration and alcohol, and medico-legal interaction. In analysing these themes, I engage with specific aspects of the social and institutional life of Scottish psychiatrists in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. 2012-06-29T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6372 Title: Shape of selves to come: from sexual difference to autonomy and reciprocity Authors: Nicholas, Lucy Katherine Abstract: While much research has established that gender has undesirable effects, and some has even concluded that subjective and social life would be preferable without it, there has been limited extension of these claims to the corollary of exploring how it might be eradicated and what could replace it. This thesis considers if and how this could be done. It provides a practicable elaboration of an alternative way of being to that of sex/gender difference by developing theory that argues that the eradication of sexual difference is possible and desirable, and presenting various practices that demonstrate this. Drawing on gender theory and feminist science, the durability of gender is traced back to its anterior spectre of an assumed stable and immutable sex, and specifically compulsory sexual difference. Also, drawing on philosophy and empirical sociological studies, it argues that this is not ontologically tied to the nature of sexual difference, but to socially and intersubjectively constituted and enacted factors, and therefore that social life without sexual difference is an ontological possibility and other ways of being and relating are possible. The normative argument that the existence of sexual difference is undesirable is made by appealing to an ideal of “autonomy,” which sexual difference serves to limit. Simone de Beauvoir’s ethical philosophy is drawn on to develop an ontological ethics that posits freedom or autonomy as a collective situated “doing” which sexual difference limits by presenting oppositional antagonism as universal. A more preferable (and practically possible) situated way of “doing” that maximises “autonomy” would be that of reciprocity. In elaborating the principle of reciprocity as a replacement for sexual difference and considering its practicability, it is evaluated in terms of the normative precepts that the thesis takes off from in order to consider its robustness and to avoid accidentally replicating the restriction on, or “violence” towards autonomy that it is intended to replace. Potential antinomies in realising such an ethic, specifically in “impure” real-world contexts are considered. Also, specific features to ensure and maintain reciprocity are developed, by treating the “androgyny” that I argue is inherent to reciprocity as a transcendence, and not combination or collapse, of the oppositional nature of sexual difference. These constitute a specific way of relating to others that is both specific to them individually and also encompasses the universal ethic of reciprocity. In making this ethic practicable, the thesis considers some possible means or strategies through which a reciprocal (in the specific sense developed) ethic could be fostered so that subjects could understand themselves and others without presumptions of sexual difference. It offers some illustrations of ways of perceiving and treating the self and others (and learning how to do so) that are reciprocal, drawing on real-world queer, anarchist and pedagogical practices that are compatible with the ontological, normative and practical precepts of the ethic of reciprocity. It also considers what the consequences for the eradication of sexual difference might be for “sexuality” and desire. My distinctive contribution to knowledge lies in taking critical, deconstructive theoretical work around gender that is often construed as abstract and impracticable, and attempting to render it socially relevant and utilisable, without undermining its antiuniversalising impulses. I have done this by teasing out the practical implications of such theoretical insights and by drawing on non-traditional sources of ideas / theory. Knitting divergent theories together in an original way, I have contributed to making such theories useful for social change by crafting what I argue is a thorough workable re-constructive ethic that is compatible with the impulses of deconstruction. 2012-06-29T00:00:00Z