"We must now go back to our history": continuity and change in Mamone, Northern Province

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Forging the links between historical research and the policy process, 18-19 September 1999.This paper considers how current law and administration can deal with local and traditional authorities. It describes how the traditional authority of Mamone, in Limpopo, has seen considerable change over the years and. how external forces and internal dynamics affect the traditional authority. The problem of trying to impose one system on very diverse traditional authorities is also raised

Decoupling and teaming up: the rise and proliferation of transnational municipal networks in the field of migration

Cities claim an ever-larger role in migration governance, often by means of progressive policies that “decouple” the local from the national. The literature on this “local turn” has generally failed to recognize how this decoupling increasingly takes place within the context of Transnational Municipal Networks (TMNs). On the basis of a database of the 20 most important TMNs in refugee and migrant welcome and integration in Europe and additional empirical research, this article identifies and analyzes their main characteristics, composition, and activities in a multiscalar context, thus contributing to a better understanding of migration governance. It argues that these networks, by means of a wide variety of activities, serve a practical but also a symbolic and jurisgenerative purpose. These implicit and explicit objectives of city networking also account for the proliferation of TMNs witnessed across Europe since 2015. In “teaming up,” European cities not only share practical experiences but also develop narratives about migration that counter national, more restrictive discourses and contribute to the global legal framework, as was the case with the Global Compact on Refugees and Migrants. It is this practical, symbolic, and jurisgenerative role of TMNs, in times of increasingly restrictive national policies, that makes these networks key actors in contesting but also improving global migration governance

Small Places: The Homecoming of Human Rights in The Netherlands

Human rights as Eleanor Roosevelt famously said, begin in small places: 'Unless they have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere'. In this inaugural lecture on the sociology of human rights, Barbara Oomen sets out a model for understanding how human rights acquire meaning in such places. Next to the laws involved, like the constitutional dispensation of a given country, it is important to look at legal culture and legal consciousness and the actors involved. She applies this model to come to an understanding of the paradox of human rights in the Netherlands. Whilst human rights play a key role in Dutch foreign policies, they are hardly ever invoked as a frame for analyzing and addressing domestic problems, like polarization, domestic violence or access to health care. This human rights exportism can be understood by not only looking at the legal framework - which is characterized by a marked openness towards human rights - but also at the lack of knowledge of rights, the culture of consensualism, the fear of juridification of disputes and at the many actors involved in policy implementation in the Netherlands. This analysis also leads to a research agenda for understanding processes of 'home-coming' of human rights in a place like the Netherlands, with attention for the role of human rights cities, human rights education and processes of rights resistance

Transnational city networks and their contributions to norm-generation in international law: the case of migration

Local governments and transnational city networks (‘TCNs’) have been increasingly engaging with norm-generation in the traditionally state-centric international law and migration governance. We identified two modes of this engagement: participation in mainstream state-centric processes, and norm-generation within their own networks. Through four examples, his article identifies four functions of this jurisgenerative activity. The external function is bringing local interests and expertise to influence international normative developments. The internal function is regulating local governments' behaviour towards their own citizens, creating and upholding standards. Through a horizontal function, local governments recruit peers and rally around normative documents that offer a compact, crystallised expression of their interests. The integrating function enables local governments to combine fragmented issues of international law in unified, practical toolkits for their own use. All throughout, TCNs challenge state-centric international law and their traditional exclusion from it by demonstrating competence and fluency in international norm-generation relating to migration

Of Bastions and Bulwarks: A Multi-Scalar Understanding of Local Bordering Practices in Europe

In recent years, local authorities in Europe have increasingly developed bordering practices that hinder or further migrant rights, such as the freedom of movement. They bypass national borders by facilitating refugee resettlement, they claim local space to welcome or shun certain migrants, and they develop or break down local impediments to migrant mobility. These local practices, we argue, can best be understood from a multiscalar perspective, which considers processes of placemaking as reproductive of power dynamics. Applying such a perspective to local bordering practices in Greece, Turkey, the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany, we point out the importance of the multitude of the actors involved; legal pluralism; and the contextual role of social, economic, and spatial factors. This offers a theoretical foothold for understanding the power dynamics at play when local authorities become bastions or bulwarks, in which some migrants are welcomed, and others are not

Aspects determining the risk of pesticides to wild bees: risk profiles for focal crops on three continents.

In order to conduct a proper risk assessment of pesticides to bees, information is needed in three areas: (i) the toxicity of the pesticide; (ii) the probability of bee exposure to that pesticide; and (iii) the population dynamics of the bee species in question. Information was collected on such factors affecting pesticide risk to (primarily wild) bees in several crops in Brazil, Kenya and The Netherlands. These data were used to construct ?risk profiles? of pesticide use for bees in the studied cropping systems. Data gaps were identified and potential risks of pesticides to bees were compared between the crops. Initially, risk profiling aims to better identify gaps in our present knowledge. In the longer term, the established risk profiles may provide structured inputs into risk assessment models for wild and managed bees, and lead to recommendations for specific risk mitigation measures.Edição dos Proceedings of the 11 International Symposium Hazards of Pesticides to Bees, Wageningen, nov. 2011