One of the explicit goals of the 1996 welfare reform in the United States was to create conditions that would encourage marriage as a means of reducing poverty and welfare dependency. With the exception of a few notable studies that examine reliance on abusive partners and former partners, relatively little scholarly attention has been given to the contours of partnering after welfare reform.…
This article draws on interviews with foodiespeople with a passion for eating and learning about foodto explore questions of gender and foodie culture. The analysis suggests that while this culture is by no means gender-neutral, foodies are enacting gender in ways that warrant closer inspection. This article puts forward new empirical findings about gender and food and employs the concept o…
This research proposes and tests a new theoretical mechanism to account for a portion of the motherhood penalty in wages and related labor market outcomes. At least a portion of this penalty is attributable to discrimination based on the assumption that mothers are less competent and committed than other types of workers. But what happens when mothers definitively prove their competence and com…
This research investigates sociological ambivalence in negotiating care work in Japanese families. Women and their aging parents experience ambivalence based on conflicting norms of filial obligation, gender ideology, and cultural beliefs about the parentchild bond. Analysis of in-depth interview data showed ambivalence was based on (1) conflict between norms and cultural beliefs and (2) inter…
Despite the 1970s middle-class feminist dream that women could have it allfamilies characterized by equitable distributions of household labor and interesting careersthe decades since have told a different story. In the U.S. context of a neoliberal labor market and privatized systems of family care, mothers still struggle to negotiate the conflicting demands of family and employment, particul…
This article, which forms the introduction to a collection of studies, focuses on processes of state construction and deconstruction in contemporary Africa. Its objective is to better understand how local, national and transnational actors forge and remake the state through processes of negotiation, contestation and bricolage. Following a critique of the predominant state failure literature and…
This article proposes an explanation for the emergence of non-state governance in situations of apparent state collapse, based on an ethnographic study of the armed rebellion in Butembo (eastern Democratic Republic of Congo). The model of explanation is inspired by Charles Tilly's description of state making as organized crime, in which armed rebels and private economic agents enter an agreemen…
Why are people with same-sex partners more likely than married people to work for nonprofit organizations (NPOs)? Analysis of 2000 Census data suggests that smaller gaystraight pay disparities for men in the nonprofit sector, occupational choices, and ability to afford nonprofit employment explain some overrepresentation of partnered gay men but not of partnered lesbians. Even after controllin…
Memory politics continues to define the socio-political landscape of post-colonial Namibia. Interpretations of the country's recent political history are used to contest and legitimize current social and political relations. This article examines these issues as they appear in the negotiation of recognition and benefits between ex-combatants and state and ruling party actors. A dominant narrati…
When the Ethiopian state was reorganized as an ethnic federation in the 1990s, both ethnicity and governance experienced the impact of the change. Most importantly, ethnicity became the key instrument regarding entitlement, representation and state organization. For the larger ethnic groups, fitting into the new ethno-federal structure has been relatively straightforward. In contrast, ethnic fe…
This article compares two regional elite associations in Angola's southern Hula province the?Associao dos Naturais e Amigos de Kuvango, Jamba e Chipindo (Anakujachi Association of Natives and Friends of Kuvango, Jamba and Chipindo) and the?Associao Solidariedade Nyaneka-Humbi (SNH Nyaneka-Humbi Solidarity Association). It demonstrates how these associations have gained increasing pol…
In francophone West Africa, the term?fonctionnaire unambiguously identifies public servants as integral parts of the state apparatus. Yet during general strikes in Guinea in 2006/7 this self-evident association was called into question by the polarization of the public discourse which forced Guineans into associating either with the state or with the protesting people. Based on empirical data f…
This contribution examines the relationship between the ruling Frelimo party and the state it controls in post-socialist Mozambique. It argues that while democratic reforms may have altered state structures since the end of single-party socialism in 1992, power remains concentrated in Frelimo, which has actually increased its hold and become more deeply entrenched during the liberal period. The…
The transformation of statehood in the rebel-held northern half of Cte dIvoire builds on the reconfiguration of the social and political order. Though the state as an institution has almost ceased to exist, statehood as the practices that refer to it persists. This article examines the negotiations between the different non-state actors and how these interactions shape, through everyday pract…
This article investigates the negotiation of statehood in Somaliland, a non-recognized?de facto state which emerged from Somalia's conflict and state collapse. The negotiation process centres on the continuing transformation of a hybrid political order, involving formal as well as informal spheres, both in existing institutions (as rules of the game) and in the bodies or agents enforcing …
A focus on negotiating statehood offers an alternative set of lenses on evolving transitions and transformations in African statesociety relations to other more teleological perspectives. Notions of negotiation and the negotiability of authority structures allow recognition of the pliability of emerging state forms and may help in focusing on the dynamic processes through which statehood…
The Spanish Strategy for Coastal Sustainability (SCS) was an initiative aimed at implementing coastal interventions under the principles of Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) and improving the state of the coast at the Spanish national level. The SCS, promoted by the Spanish Ministry of the Environment, started as a broad national strategy in 2005 and was finally delivered as a coastal p…
The institutionalization of China-ASEAN non-traditional security cooperation is underappreciated, even though its significance should be apparent to Western analysts. Appreciating China-ASEAN non-traditional security cooperation leads to the realization that it has strategic significance, and that the broader China-ASEAN multilateral process is the most institutionally developed expression of E…
Integrated approaches to coastal management (known as integrated coastal zone managementICZM) have been adopted widely since the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). Decision-support for ICZM demands that policy align with practice such that stakeholders can access a range of time-series information across the entire catchment-coastal-marine continuum. Such …
Dangerous marine stingers (jellyfish) are an emotive issue in tropical Australia, where they are widely regarded as the number one marine health threat. However, numerous severe and fatal stings have been reported throughout the tropical and temperate seas of the world, indicating that marine stingers are a global health problem. Further, life-threatening jellyfish stings are more frequently re…