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This article argues that the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa reinscribed the neglect that has surrounded this disease. The argument develops theoretical tools for understanding how neglect is produced in global health. Arguing that neglect is connected with the production of harm and vulnerability, it stresses the importance of emotions in issue-prioritisation in global health. Focusing on the dynamics of abjection, the article shows how the 2014 Ebola outbreak was framed as a (racialised) African problem and obfuscated by a political and media spectacle. The result was the preference for short-term crisis-management responses that detracted from long-term structural solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing privatization of military and stability operations has received considerable scholarly attention. Existing scholarship, however, has largely focused on the privatization of state foreign policy, overlooking the empirical analysis of international organizations' use of commercial actors in the conduct of crisis management operations. The present study fills this gap by investigating the role of commercial contractors in supporting European Common Security and Defence civilian and military missions. By doing so, the article intends to advance the empirical knowledge of the privatization of foreign policy activities and the scope, determinants and future prospects of EU reliance on commercial actors for CSDP crisis management operations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the evolution of the European Council in the post-Lisbon period. Having a standing president is a major innovation: the European Council is no longer subject to national grandstanding, occasional weak leadership and uneven presidential performance. The new arrangement provides continuity and consistency. Herman Van Rompuy became the first elected president in an exceptionally challenging policy environment, with the European Council emerging as a quasi-permanent forum for crisis management. Fissures erupted between the eurozone members and non-members; between and among the big and small member states; and between the United Kingdom and the rest. A preliminary assessment suggests that the standing European Council presidency and Van Rompuy’s incumbency have been highly beneficial for the EU, which fared better than it otherwise would have under the pre-Lisbon rotating presidency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article begins to map out a novel approach to analysing contemporary contexts of public crisis, relationships between them and possibilities that these scenes hold out for politics. The article illustrates and analyses a small selection of examples of these kinds of contemporary scenes and calls for greater attention to be given to the conditions and consequences of different forms and practices of public and political mediation. In offering a three-fold typology to delineate differences between ‘abject’, ‘audience’ and ‘agentic’ publics the article begins to draw out how political and public futures may be seen as being bound up with how the potentialities, capacities and qualities that publics are imagined to have and resourced to perform. Public action and future publics are therefore analysed here in relation to different versions of contemporary crisis and the political concerns and publics these crises work to articulate, foreground and imaginatively and practically support. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Commentators and policy-makers stress the need to learn the lessons of EU civilian crisis management. Yet despite numerous case studies on mission performance, we know little about the EU's overall capacity for such learning. The first part of this article outlines a theoretical framework for analyzing organizational learning in the context of peace operations. It recommends focusing on administrative reform and conceptual development in Brussels, and lists various factors that are expected to facilitate or inhibit organizational learning cycles. On this basis, the second part presents a historical survey of the EU's learning efforts in civilian crisis management. Despite a dynamic expansion of mission tasks as well as corresponding review processes, organizational learning has remained haphazard and limited to capacity expansion or mission support requirements. Only since 2009 did the EU invest in more formalized lessons-learning processes, which led to more systematic information gathering and more in-depth conceptual discussions. So far, however, these initiatives could not overcome political constraints to more ambitious reforms of EU peace operations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

By creating the European Gendarmerie Force (EGF), some European Union (EU) member states have devised a ‘structured solution’ to provide international civilian police capabilities. In this article, we undertake a critical examination of the EGF by first arguing that the EGF has been widely misrepresented, notably with regard to its general purpose and specific relationship to the EU. Next, we examine a range of security problems used to justify the EGF, arguing that its potential role in handling certain tasks has not been very carefully considered. Finally, we suggest that a major rationale behind the EGF was the shared desire among its members to draw attention to a policing model that is not universally appreciated, and to promote this model by offering its ‘third-type’ capabilities while keeping the EGF outside of EU institutional constraints. In the conclusion, we identify some crucial questions related to the EGF–EU relations, notably in terms of non-optimisation of EU resources and possible incoherence in EU/Common Security and Defence Policy efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The relatively new concept of “strategic culture,” though under discussion for a generation, has been underdeveloped. This article defines the concept clearly, critiques several other scholars' definitions, and traces the powerful influence of geography upon the phenomenon. It identifies two coalitions of subcultures in America which respectively tend toward isolationism and interventionism. These coalitions compete with each other for dominance, alternately winning or losing depending on the degree of success of the national security elite in rallying normally isolationist subcultures around efforts to cope with international crises which the elite, for geostrategic reasons, has either provoked or misrepresented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the global economy, workers are increasingly expected to cultivate an unprecedented repertoire of abilities in an immaterial world of work. This signifies a limited shift in capitalist expansion in the post-Fordist world in relation to workers' employability therein. A model of worker subjectivity was introduced into Western management and psychology discourse surrounding employability in the 1960s and 1970s. In a developed, post-industrial global economy, management has begun to view workers less as cogs in the wheel or less as rational and predictable entities than as dynamic individuals with the capacity for symbolic reasoning, intelligence, independently generated ideas, and even the desire to work for the sake of self-fulfilment! The Fordist workplace was expected to become a distant memory and organisations were to become “learning organisations” rather than the hierarchical, Dickensian workfloors of the manufacturing age. Nevertheless, rather than offering freedom from the iron cage of capitalism, workers face a contemporary form of coercion that substitutes political representation with a set of expectations and limitations intended, ironically, to result in workplace emancipation. Emphasis on employability of individuals through workers' creation of self-woven safety nets demonstrates an elite-led project to reduce government responsibility for employment welfare. In order to make this claim, the article looks at the case of education policy in South Korea after the economic crisis of 1997. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]