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This study looks at infrastructures as sites of contest between empire and settler-colonialists. It analyses the construction of Mandate Palestine's Haifa seaport and Lydda Airport as imperial projects and traces the techno-political networks that allowed Jewish settlers to build their own competing seaport and airport in Tel-Aviv during the anti-colonial Arab Revolt (1936–1939). It identifies a dialectical relationship between colonisers and empire: Jewish settlers welcomed Palestine's intended role as an arena of imperial development but soon developed their own stakes in securing access to sea and skies. The study contributes to the scant knowledge about infrastructures in colonial settings and specifically to the little-known role of British consultant engineers in facilitating them. All in all the article de-centres the Arab-Jewish conflict as a major historical focus and instead considers Palestine through the lens of the British empire's conception of the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen abundant literature, in law and the social sciences, addressing the significance of "soft law," "self-regulation," and 'private law-making" and analyzing the potential implications of "governance" in [...]

This article explores emerging discursive formations concerning the relationship of business and morality. It suggests that contemporary tendencies to economize public domains and methods of government also dialectically produce tendencies to moralize markets in general and business enterprises in particular. The article invokes the concept of 'responsibilization' as means of accounting for the epistemological and practical consequences of such processes. Looking at the underlying 'market rationality' of governance, and critically examining the notion of 'corporate social responsibility', it concludes that the moralization of markets further sustains, rather than undermining, neo-liberal governmentalities and neo-liberal visions of civil society, citizenship and responsible social action. Keywords: business ethics; capitalism; citizenship; corporate social responsibility; governance; neo-liberalism.

This is a case-study of an organized Israeli effort to disengage the issue of corporations in the Palestinian Occupied Territories from the global CSR framework of human rights. At the centre of the study are three international CSR conferences which took place in Israel, hosting players in the global industry of corporate risk-management indices. The study underscores the importance of studying the micro-politics of producing and implementing human rights norms across the globe; designating micro-politics as the sum of informal exchanges among players who share a common platform of expertise. We find that the Israeli conveners leveraged the CSR conferences to (1) promote a campaign against BDS among CSR players, (2) invoke BDS as a trope for dissociating the human rights framework of CSR from corporate activities in the OPT, and (3) frame the activities of corporations in the OPT in terms of labour opportunities and economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study sits at the intersection of census-making, colonialism, and the politics of statistical expertise. It considers the Palestine Census that the country's British rulers had undertaken in 1931. It focuses on British intentions to include questions that could have yielded data about the alleged emergence of an Arab 'landless class'. The validation of such a category would have justified British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. We trace the trajectory of 'landlessness' as a statistical category. We show that disparity in statistical expertise between Arab and Jewish experts, and a parity between Jewish and British experts, played a decisive role in shaping the census schedule. Consequently, Arab landlessness failed to become a valid statistical category. Our case highlights British census-making in India as a broad colonial model to be applied in other colonies and to be used as a scientific justification for Britain's various political agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Passengers seldom appear in historical accounts as having their own role in the development of civil aviation. This study identifies a particular class of air-travellers: colonial officers and their families, stationed throughout the British Empire, who in the late 1940s drove a shift to the air at a time of an acute crisis in shipping accommodations. The drive from sea to air relied on an administrative infrastructure which was created by the Crown Agents for the Colonies on the basis of their earlier agreements with shipping companies. The Crown Agents administered the passage of colonial officers and negotiated a rebate agreement with British Overseas Airways Corporation in 1949. The study concludes that the history of civil aviation and the shift from sea to air travel depended not only on technological improvements but also on passengers whose practices normalised air-travel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]