In this Issue
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512111408383 |
| Date | 01 March 2011 |
| Published date | 01 March 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
International Political Science Review
32(2) 123–124
© The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/0192512111408383
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In this Issue
The articles in this issue speak to international governance, language politics, media, policy and
electoral campaigning. Some of them tell a particular political science story; others look for causal
explanations: the central themes in Theodore Lowi’s reflective article on the potential of political
science in the world.
In ‘Human Trafficking: The Unintended Effects of United Nations Intervention’, Charles
Anthony Smith and Heather M. Smith study the increase in sex trafficking that accompanies the
participation of UN-mandated forces in crisis zones. Situated in the study of international rela-
tions, it also draws on the global human rights literature to discuss this feature of the UN pres-
ence in Kosovo, Haiti and Sierra Leone. The article points out that UN intervention, generally
intended as protective action, often has the unintended consequence of contributing to serious
human rights transgressions. It suggests that in seeking to reduce and eliminate the involvement
of UN personnel in sex trafficking, a more systematic monitoring of trafficking patterns in con-
flict regions is required.
Tristan James Mabry’s article, ‘Language and Conflict’, is based on the premise that language
is a valuable proxy for culture in the study of ethnic conflict. In this article, he critically examines
the evaluative measures developed by David Laitin and James Fearon to quantify language differ-
ences among conflict groups based on distance from ancestral language. Employing a sociolinguis-
tic matrix to analyse language politics, he seeks to demonstrate the analytical deficiency of the
rational choice approach of Laitin and others to the subject. He argues that it is the social and politi-
cal status of languages that matters in a conflict context, and not language ancestry.
Politicians’ use of the media is the focus of Toril Aalberg and Jesper Strömbäch’s ‘Media-
driven Men and Media-critical Women? An Empirical Study of Gender and MPs Relationship
with the Media in Norway and Sweden’. In this comparative study, they explore three hypotheses:
that male MPs have a more familiar relationship with the media compared to female MPs, that
female MPs are more critical of the relationship between politics and the media, and that different
approaches to gender equality in the two countries may influence how female and male MPs
relate to the media. Based on a survey of the entire universe of MPs in both countries, they found
that male MPs have more contact with journalists than their female peers, and that this is more
pronounced in Norway than in Sweden. The authors conclude that gender differences in media
relationships may suggest gender differences in political power and influence – a matter of con-
cern for gender equality.
The importance of groups’ capacity for policy formulation and implementation is the starting
point of Darren Halpin, Carsten Daugbjerg and Yonatan Schvartzman’s study ‘Interest Group
Capacities and Infant Industry Development: State-sponsored Growth in Organic Farming’. The
key question in this article is whether, and how, groups develop the capacities necessary to contrib-
ute to policy-making. Taking policy on organic farming as a case, the article examines how
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