Global Warming Poses the Gravest of Ecological Risks, and presents numerous hurdles to international environmental agreement. A major initiative to pre-empt this threat is the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. In this article, I argue that this treaty constitutes an ineffective attempt to curb global warming, and should be replaced by an alternative set of domestic and international policies.

This article examines how Hollywood blockbuster movies made since the 1970s have commonly presented a distorted and conventional narrative of American history, in respect both to domestic incidents and to engagements abroad. Equally distorting is the image of America as a highly homogeneous society projected through popular television shows. These patterns are investigated in the following way. First, the article presents an overview of how early Hollywood movies dealt with the country's immigrant and racial diversity. Secondly, the effect of mobilization in both the Second World War and the cold war in inducing a narrow sense of national identity in movies is examined. Thirdly, these two sections provide a prelude to the analysis of historical distortion and ideology in selected major Hollywood blockbusters.

This article considers the origins of the local government reform agenda of the 1997 to 2001 Labour government. The analysis identifies a wide range of factors including recurring themes in the debate about local government, market mechanisms, Labour Party politics, the traditions of the British state, the constitutional reform agenda and the international context. This study also develops the notion of shifting constraints to explain this process and the agenda of the current Labour administration.

The article explores the evolution of labour politics during the transition from authoritarian to electoral rule in South Korea and Taiwan during the last decade and a half. It argues that labour politics is a crucial aspect of democratic consolidation because it facilitates the reproduction of contingent mass consent to the new regime. To this end, organized labour must be re-positioned as a political and economic actor, something that requires institutional and structural reform away from the authoritarian experience. Based on analysis of the pattern of political insertion and the legal framework governing the interaction between organized labour, business and the state before and after the electoral transition, as well as data on strikes, union density and membership, the essay concludes that substantive change in the labour politics partial regime is minor in both countries and that in fact, democratic consolidation remains an unachieved goal in each.

Democratization studies has tended to understand democracy a pro-Western political regime build around liberal norms and government. This approach provides clarity, but cannot explain the varied political experiences and outcomes within contemporary processes of ‘democratization’. At the same time, it fails to capture the range of meanings invested in the term ‘democracy’. Starting from the premise that democracy's appeal rests on its emancipatory potential, this article proposes reconceptualzing what is meant by democratization, drawing in ideas from identity politics and citizenship studies while, at the same time, placing the impetus for democratization in the framework of global transformation.