Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
International mobility has been reshaping the economies and societies of countries over the course of human history. In Europe, during recent years, media and policy-makers have been focused on immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East who cross the Mediterranean Sea to look for opportunities in Europe. However, another important but much less noticed mobility phenomenon has been on the rise.
Growing wealth and power of non-Western actors have been fuelling the debate on the future of global politics for the last decade. The West’s internal difficulties, such as the Eurozone crisis, Brexit, and the wave of populism, have weakened its determination to defend the status quo, and increased the importance of regional-level international politics. China and Russia stand out as the most vocal critics of Western domination
Janet Wolff is a renowned art historian and writer. A combination of memoir, family history, and cultural criticism, Janet Wolff’s Austerity Baby is more than just your typical memoir; touching on themes of exile, displacement, and mortality – all of which remain relevant today. In this interview, Wolff recounts her inspiration, process, and family discoveries during her writing and research.
The phrase “take control” served as a mantra for the Vote Leave campaign in the United Kingdom’s referendum of 2016 about its membership of the European Union. The country was held to the same constraints and obligations as the EU’s other twenty-seven members. the United Kingdom, as the campaigners declared, could not manage its own borders, organise its own trade, define and regulate the rights of its own citizens, and, above all, determine its own laws.
In our ‘time of change’ – which in the United Kingdom largely revolves around Brexit but takes different forms elsewhere – it is important for environmental lawyers to think about history. How, though, are we to do so, given that history is the most underdeveloped area of socio-legal environmental law, with very little literature to guide the way?
It has become commonplace for Government departments at all levels to ask people for their views. It seems as if no new policy or legislative plan can be launched without an extensive period of consultation with all those who may be affected. The UK government’s website page for ‘Consultations’ lists 494 consultations published already this year out of a total of 3,796 since the decade began.
On 26 July, 2017, President Trump tweeted his plan to ban transgender individuals from serving in the military. Besides the “tremendous medical costs” that he cited (which is actually less than a thousandth of 1% of the Defense Department’s annual budget), Trump referenced the idea of “disruption.” When I read the tweet, a thought crossed my mind: What exactly is being disrupted?
‘Love versus hate’ has become a standard frame for describing today’s primary political divide. In the face of the world-wide rise of right-wing movements and governments, and especially since the demonstration of fascist and white supremacist groups in Charlottesville, it is generally taken for granted that hatred is the prime motivation for the most horrible and destructive political forces.
Commentators argue that a globalisation cleavage is appearing in western Europe, with the issues of migration and European integration core bones of contention. We argue that at a deeper level it is not just globalisation or the EU that drives this contestation. The new political divide is also rooted in demographic changes, it is a manifestation of the rise of a more structural, educational cleavage.
Once upon a time, it could be believed that each advance in communications technology brought with it the probability, if not the certainty, of increased global harmony. The more that messages could be sent and received, the more the peoples of the world would understand each other. Innovators have not been slow to advance comprehensive claims for their achievements. Marconi, for example, selected 1912 as a year in which to suggest that radio, in apparently making war ridiculous, made it impossible.
Congratulations to the Queen’s University Belfast team represented by Darren Finnegan and Conor Lockhart, who were crowned champions of the OUP and BPP National Mooting Competition 2016-2017, which took place at BPP Law School, Holborn on 22 June 2017. We send our thanks to all the participants who took part this year, together with the mooting co-ordinators and academics who train and coach their students.
Against the grain of much twentieth-century research on the nature and function of pain in humans, which tended to focus on injury and the bodily mechanics of pain signalling, recent neuroscientific research has opened a new front in the study of social and emotional pain.
Emmanuel Macron has completely upended French politics. Just over a year after founding a new centrist political party, En Marche (“On the move”), the former investment banker and Minister of Economy and Finance was elected president of France on 7 May by an overwhelming majority.
Since the end of the Second World War, the European project has met with difficulties and even crises. Its momentum has, however, been strong enough to fend off these turbulent undercurrents, and it has developed incrementally in the decades since. Supported by its two pillars, The Council of Europe and the European Union, it is a Europe built on law, and the project is progressively taking on the contours of a new legal system.
Theresa May’s desperate search for an ally after a calamitous 2017 General Election saw the Democratic Unionist Party come under scrutiny like never before. The DUP is a party which has moved from its fundamentalist Protestant Paisleyite past – but not at a pace always noticeable to outsiders. The DUP is comfortable in its own skin. So, who are the DUP’s members and what do they think?
In 2006, the political scientist Lieven De Winter pronounced “overdose of success” as the cause of death of the Belgian autonomist party, the Volksunie (People’s Union). The trajectory of the United Kingdom Independence Party bears some striking resemblances.