This volume compares how the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) have responded to sustainable development norms espoused by transnational environmental advocacy network (TEANs). It examines the process and extent of environmental change within three institutions of the WBG and proposes a holistic and a dynamic account of international organisation (IO) change that recognises the mutual constitution of IOs and international norms promoted by non-state actors. This chapter argues that while lending patterns fluctuate, how the WBG promotes and practises development depends upon what they understand ‘development’ to mean.

This chapter presents an overview of public policy-making in Northern Ireland under direct rule. It discusses the degree of convergence and divergence in policy and legislation with Great Britain and examines the major influences on policy and the nature of policy networks. The local contribution to policy debates under direct rule was not so significant. Northern Ireland had a rather limited policy-making capacity and the policy community can be seen as limited to the Civil Service and senior professionals and administrators who were often strongly influenced by decisions in Britain.

Throughout ‘Grace and Innocence’, Cixous explores the relationship between effort and grace, and alerts her principal speculation that, what matters is not knowledge as such, but our way of living knowledge: ‘One has to know how not to possess what one knows’. To the extent that the problem of self-sacrifice is what marks the rejection of agapic love in much of feminist theology, the text has argued throughout that Cixous's conception of divine Promethean love addresses this issue at the level of the structure of subjectivity itself. The very notion of self-sacrifice, the study suggests, is dependent firstly upon a notion of self that is indebted largely to the Enlightenment, hence masculine ideals about what a subject is in the first place. Cixous acknowledges that, in a patriarchal world, one continues to be interpolated into the discourses of subjectivity which privilege notions such as individuality and autonomy, and which assume the subject to be a self-subsisting phenomenon. If the masculine subject is constituted against the threat of difference, Cixous inscribes in feminine flesh the possibility that this is not the only possible relation to difference. In a feminine relation to difference, one finds the possibility of living a dispossessed, rather than sacrificial, relation to self, in which otherness becomes the occasion of a generous, excessive, abundant birth into life and love.

This chapter shows that, whilst all parties are unquestionably pro-European, this masks a growth of scepticism about what Europe can do for Bavarians, and where its limits should be drawn. Demands for a ‘Europe of the Regions’ were motivated by the fear that European integration was encroaching on Länder competences. In response, the Christian Social Union proposed that regional rights must be protected in Europe, and used this argument to lobby for a Committee of the Regions. However, the weakness of this body, and the expansion of European competences into ever-wider areas, forced the CSU to adopt a different strategy: to protect the ‘hard shell’ of the member state, which also meant protecting the Länder. Meanwhile, opposition parties sought to counter the CSU's strategy by arguing that a regionalised Europe should mean strengthening the local level against Bavarian state centralisation.

This chapter describes how the government of Adrian Năstase succeeded in convincing the European Union (EU) that it was committed to fulfilling many of the economic criteria for entry, and explores the strategy which the Party of Romanian Social Democracy (PDSR) employed in order to boost its credibility in Brussels. The EU was a hugely important external power with temporary sovereignty over the development of Romanian policy in major respects, but the PDSR hoped that adept footwork in the bullring of EU negotiations would similarly disorientate a potentially disruptive opponent. The EU itself impeded the chances of Romanian politics growing more representative by some of the decisions that it took. The Partidul Social Democrat (PSD) (Social Democratic Party) hoped that the EU and leading Council members would accept economic reform in the context of a state still subject to strong one-party influence.

By the beginning of July 1848, despite the creation of the Irish League, deep divisions remained in the Repeal movement. John 'Connell's lacklustre performance and John Mitchel's transportation had left William Smith O'Brien the leader of a fractured, but increasingly desperate, movement. Moreover, his influence extended beyond Ireland, with support in the United States that mostly supported an armed insurrection. To what extent would O'Brien, a reluctant leader of the Irish Confederation, be able to control the disparate forces that had been unleashed in the previous three months? At this stage, the British government intervened to precipitate a rising for which the Irish people were unprepared and about which its leaders were undecided. But the Repealers had to deal with an enemy that wielded more power than the British government. The precautions being made by the British government in the previous three months now found an important ally in the shape of the Catholic Church.

This chapter examines A Chancer, whose protagonist is a habitual gambler with a tendency to leave social situations, noting that this novel is considered as Kelman's puritanical text and is at the extreme end of the spectrum of Kelman's realist project in its goal to present an unrestricted ‘facticity’. It explains why Kelman chooses to allow extended access to Tammas' mind only during gambling episodes. The chapter also considers the protagonist's departure from Glasgow, which was not previously presented in The Busconductor Hines.

This chapter reports the degree to which European Union (EU)-sponsored anti-corruption efforts made any difference to the scale of the chronic problem that dominated public life in Romania from 1989 until after it joined the EU. The EU was acutely concerned to discover the extent of corruption in Romania and the determination of figures high up in the political system to allow it to remain unimpeded. Anti-corruption rhetoric was merely a device to scare off or punish rivals. The anti-corruption legislation obliged public officials to fill out income and asset declarations in the belief that ‘the most serious forms of corruption in Romania are associated with organized crime’. The EU failed to acquire its own methodology for benchmarking corruption, which would have made it easier to commit recalcitrant governments to specific undertakings.

It is well known that Neo's first scene in The Matrix contains the only on-screen appearance of the trilogy's key text: Simulacra and Simulation. Neo opens the volume to reveal the first page of 'On Nihilism', which has been transposed to midway through the book and reversed to appear on the left rather than the right hand side. Across the volume, Jean Baudrillard's key concepts of the hyperreal and the code are repeatedly defined in terms of their destructive effect; both combine to mark the end of reality, truth, chance and choice. The final essay picks up on these arguments to offer a moment in which Baudrillard styles himself as a prophet of the postmodern apocalypse. The Matrix Trilogy takes up Baudrillard's account of the two stages of nihilism: the destruction of appearances and the destruction of meaning, in its presentation of two key characters.

This chapter investigates the militarisation of radical nationalism during the 1970s in order to understand women's roles in Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA). It suggests that the process of militarisation brought with it an intensification of gender divisions, in particular between male armed activists and female supporters, whose roles tended to be associated with collaboration and defending the ‘homefront’. The chapter contends that the political importance of women as mothers lay in their relationship to their sons and their support for the radical nationalist cause, including ETA violence.

Sociology, like music, is a fragmented field. Just as people attach themselves to ‘old’ and ‘new’ musicological work, so there are old and new sociologies, with the latter tending to reject ‘structural’ explanations in favour of approaches which understand patterns of social organisation as the outcome of collaborative interactional practices. This chapter suggests some of the ways in which the agenda of the sociology of music may differ from that of musicology, but yet make a distinctive contribution to the understanding of musical practices in their cultural contexts.