Projects
The American State: An Analytical Narrative History, Professor Desmond S King
What role does the American State play in the development and content of US government and politics? The US has conventionally been described as different to other countries in that its Central State is smaller and less important. I challenge this view. Second, this challenge is made by providing an account of the main ways in which the American State has developed since the middle of the twentieth century to deal with the demands for democratization (principally the extension of civil rights to groups historically denied them) and for national security (principally the need to defend the US abroad and at home). This account will demonstrate that the US in fact has a strong and centralized State not massively dissimilar from other industrial democracies. Thirdly, the research will result in a set of qualitative and quantitative indicators about what the American State does through its public policies, particularly in using national regulations to set standards for policy implementation. The study should demonstrate how these standard setting activities fluctuate within each policy area: for instance, education policy has historically been local but is now quite centralized through a regime of testing; conversely welfare policy was the subject of increasing central standards from the 1950s until 1996 since when responsibility for standards has reverted to the states.
Setting the Boundaries of Political Tolerance in Western Europe, Dr Giovanni Capoccia
(formerly 'Between Militancy and Accommodation: Reactions to Extremism
in European Democracies')
This project studies how Western European democracies react to what
they perceive as extremist dissent. Among the core questions to be investigated
are what are the main dimension of cross-country variation in strategies
of reaction to extremism, and what explains such variation—questions
that have received relatively limited attention in comparative politics
scholarship. The project analyzes political repression in sixteen Western
European countries in their democratic spells since 1920, and complements
this analysis with an in-depth investigation of more recent developments
in Germany, France and Spain, where the issue of how to deal with extremist
groups and parties has been on the national political agenda in recent
years.
The project was initially sponsored by a British Academy small grant
(June - Sept 2003) and the University of Oxford's Research Development
Fund.
EU Framework 6 project ‘MIRICO’: Human and Minority Rights in the Life-Cycle of Ethnic Conflicts, Dr Gwendolyn Sasse
Gwendolyn Sasse is a partner in this major EU Framework 6 project.
During the series of wars and ethnic conflicts with serious human rights violations and ethnic cleansing in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the international community reacted through crisis management. Nevertheless, the EU is still faced with unresolved problems, and the question of how to deal with the problem of accommodating ethnic and territorial claims in order to prevent spill-over effects in forms of new conflicts and refugees in the region itself and into the EU. The overall objective of the project is to analyse which status human and minority rights did and do have in all phases of ethnic conflicts, and, finally, in the phase of reconstruction and reconciliation. As a parallel process the development of the EU foreign policy and its shift from reactive crisis management to regional stabilisation and association with the prospect of full EU-membership will be analysed.