The making of knowledge and information into property, through intellectual property rights (IPRs) has commonly been justified using a set of cosmopolitan norms. These norms of justification have been extensively deployed within the structures of global governance for IPRs. However, the political community that underpins such norms in national jurisdictions is lacking at the global level. Many of the political problems now recognized with the globalized protection of IPRs stem from this tension between cosmopolitan legalism and the contemporary ‘thin’ global community.

Set in the context of the larger literature on regionalist parties and specifically on the Italian Northern League, this paper examines and explains why the party moved from Euro-positivism to Euroscepticism. Drawing on concepts raised in the larger comparative politics literature, five explanations of this U-turn towards Europe are evaluated. It is argued that, despite the strength of explanations that focus on the desires of party supporters, the role of public opinion, the potential influence of economic investors or the role of EU-level institutions in shaping party preferences, a more cogent explanation focuses on domestic-level developments. The conclusions will underscore the general implications of this research for the study of parties, particularly regionalist ones in the EU, highlighting that a party's changing stance towards supranational integrationist polices can be best understood as a consequence of its experience in a political system's electoral system.

In this article attention is focused on the features of the emerging Romanian banking system, its failures, and their determinants. These failures were either politically driven or simply a result of the weak regulatory capacity of the state (as the owner of the banks) and lax monitoring from the central bank, as the central authority entrusted with the responsibility to maintain a well-functioning banking system. The reluctance of various governments, regardless of their political orientation, to apply sanctions against banks that are in trouble until the last possible moment encourage excessive risk-taking when banks first encounter financial difficultics, and asset-stripping when the insiders realize that a bank's continued viability is in jeopardy. Based on a number of case studies, the article argues that, in post-1989 Romania, insider trading, self-loans and blunt theft appeared more as systemic features rather than isolated incidents.

The objective of this paper is to reconstruct both the Kursk incident and especially the reaction to it by Russian military and political authorities with the aim of gauging the extent of continuity and change of Soviet-era practices in three key areas of contemporary Russia's public institutional life: (1) the organizational behaviour and institutional culture of the Russian military; (2) the behaviour of Russia's executive political leadership, i.e. President Vladimir Putin; and (3) the media of mass communication. Reaction to such crises, the author argues, can shed much light on the actual behavioural patterns and operating assumptions of relevant institutions and leaders. The method employed is essentially a detailed forensic reconstruction of the incident and its aftermath from three angles: the reactions of the military authorities; the reactions of Putin; and the reactions of the mass media (and of the authorities to the mass media).

The individual is nonsense, the individual is zero.

Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1921

Human life still costs nothing here.

Leonid Radzikhovskii, 2000

This article is one of a series commissioned by Government and Opposition exploring identity politics in several national and international contexts. Though ostensibly a civic republic, Ireland has been shaped by a certain conception of Irish culture. Cultural claims are typically political but have the potential to allow community interests to override concern for individual well-being. The construction of the Irish state focused on the maintenance of an idea of being Irish rather than on the welfare of people throughout Ireland, both North and South. As a result, a conservative formulation of Irish identity was locked into the state's structures.