University of Oxford | MA Europaeum

This research paper aims to contribute to the currently limited academic understanding of the factors that keep unauthorized workers from unionizing. To that end, it studies the case of unauthorized Palestinian workers from the West Bank... more

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- by Casper Gelderblom
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- 4
  Trade unionism, Israel/Palestine, Unionization, Migrant workers

Globalization has in many ways led to the dis-embedding of markets from their social setting. The European Works Council (EWC), which represents European employees of multinational companies on a transnational level, is viewed by... more

Globalization has in many ways led to the dis-embedding of markets from their social setting. The European Works Council (EWC), which represents European employees of multinational companies on a transnational level, is viewed by practitioners and scholars of labor organization as a promising example of institutionalized transnational employee representation. The literature on the EWC outlines roughly two conflicting scenarios of the development of the European Works Council: an ‘extensive’ scenario in which the EWC enjoys broad procedural and thematic competences, and a ‘limited’ scenario in which the EWC’s procedural and thematic competences remain narrow. Scholars of the EWC have identified a considerable number of factors impacting the evolution of the EWC in the direction of either scenario, of which the views of employee representatives is one. Various determinants of these views have been identified, but the impact of representatives’ representational mandate type on their views on the EWC has so far largely been overlooked. The present study aims to contribute to filling this gap in the EWC literature. To this end, a mixed methodology was used with a quantitative analysis of questionnaire responses from 114 EWC representatives through the performance of MANOVA and significance tests, and a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with 12 of these respondents. The results showed that while representatives of all mandate types support an expansion of EWC competences, works council-appointed representatives are less likely to support the more far-reaching elements of the ‘extensive’ scenario of EWC development than their directly elected and union-appointed counterparts. In addition, the qualitative analysis suggested that mandate type may interact with industrial relations culture to shape representatives’ views. While these findings require further research to be confirmed with certainty, the implication of the study’s preliminary evidence is that mandate type does matter for representatives’ views on the EWC and that, consequently, the realization of the ‘extensive’ scenario of EWC development is more likely if EWCs are dominated by union-appointed and directly elected representatives than if they are dominated by works council-appointed representatives.

In political debates and academic literature, the French and Haitian Revolutions have often been presented as separate or even conflicting historical events. The emerging global historiography of the Age of Revolution increasingly... more

In political debates and academic literature, the French and Haitian Revolutions have often been presented as separate or even conflicting historical events. The emerging global historiography of the Age of Revolution increasingly brings to light the many links that connect these revolutions and render their dichotomization illegitimate. This thesis simultaneously draws on and contributes to this historiographical development by experimenting the methodological approach of Atlantic intellectual history from below. Focusing on the perspectives of the French sans-culottes and the insurgent slaves of Saint Domingue (colonial Haiti), it explores how these revolutionary groups’ exposure to a transatlantic flux of ideas and developments impacted their views on the slavery system between 1789 and 1794. The thesis reconstructs these views through a myriad of primary sources reflective of public opinion, such as French revolutionary newspapers and eyewitness accounts of the insurgent slave armies’ internal debates. In line with Homi Bhabha’s theoretical proposition that concepts have no ‘primordial fixity’ and can therefore be ‘translated and read anew’ in different ideological environments, it finds that the introduction of news and ideas from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean generated abolitionist popular mentalités among both the sans-culottes and the insurgent slaves. While the former came to conceive of themselves as slaves rebelling against their aristocratic masters and thus developed a view of Saint-Domingue’s slaves as natural allies, the latter fused French revolutionary rights-based discourse with originally West-African political culture to produce a syncretic political vision which rendered abolition imaginable and, therefore, attainable. The convergence of these distinct, yet ultimately commensurable, popular mentalités facilitated the general emancipation of Saint-Domingue’s enslaved population by the French colonial authorities in August 1793, followed by the formal abolition of slavery by the French National Convention in February 1794. The interwoven abolitionist history of the sans-culottes and the insurgent slaves presented by the thesis brings to the fore the commonalities, rather than the conflicts that characterized the connected French and Haitian Revolutions: it offers a mode of telling that might be hopeful and helpful in our own times.

Capitalism, as both its supporters and detractors have long known, tends to be restructured when a crisis hits. Since the 2008 crisis, new digital technologies have given rise to new organizational forms and modes of exploitation that... more

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- by Casper Gelderblom
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- 5
  Political Economy, Media Studies, Public Policy, Gig Economy

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- by Youssef Cherif and +2
  Youssef Cherif
  Eleonora Tafuro Ambrosetti
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After decades of intense interest and rivalry with the USA, the end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the USSR officially marked a period of significant retreat of Russia from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). However, with... more

Russia has returned to the Middle East. While few can argue against this fact, different international actors assess Moscow’s role in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region differently. This chapter looks specifically at one... more

Russia has returned to the Middle East. While few can argue against this fact, different international actors assess Moscow’s role in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region differently. This chapter looks specifically at one international actor, as it aims to unpack the perceptions of the European Union (EU) regarding Russia’s presence, actions and strategy (or lack thereof) in the area. Following the Ukrainian crisis, relations between Russia and the EU have worsened, and room for cooperation has considerably shrunk. The MENA region also saw increasing frictions between Russia and the EU, mainly in the framework of the Syrian conflict. However, it also offers important possibilities for collaboration – again, chiefly in Syria. In order to highlight the fiercest divergences and the most promising cooperation avenues, we examine the following question: how does the EU perceive Russia’s role in the MENA area? We focus on EU perceptions around two aspects of Russia’s engagement in the region. First, we tackle Russian military engagement – thus focusing on the Syrian context, where the Russian intervention in late September 2015 changed the destiny of the conflict in favour of the Damascus regime. Second, we analyse the Kremlin’s diplomatic agenda in various regional contexts, ranging from the Astana peace talks on Syria to the Libyan scenario.
Does the EU perceive Russia’s actions in these domains as compatible with EU goals and interests? Answering this question may be challenging. “Perception” is an abstract and controversial concept in International Relations (IR) literature: operationalising and assessing perceptions is a demanding task. While in this chapter we cannot engage in the long-standing debate on the cognitive processes governing foreign policy decision-making, we do acknowledge that studying how EU officials construct reality through discourse is crucially important. Therefore, we propose a two-step assessment to analyse the discourse and images used by relevant EU officials. First, we selected a number of written texts, including transcriptions of official speeches, foreign policy documents, press releases and so on to show how Russia’s actions in the broad MENA region are perceived at the EU official level. Second, we conducted semi-structured interviews with selected EU and national officials in order to go beyond the official view and gain insights into how the EU discourse comes into being, the key actors shaping it and major factors that might impact its evolution.

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- by Chiara Lovotti and +1
  Eleonora Tafuro Ambrosetti
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- 4
  European Security and Defence Policy, Russian Foreign Policy, European Union, Middle East

Since September 2015, the strenuous battle that Moscow engaged in in defense of President Bashar al-Assad has reverted the destiny of the country in Assad’s favor; without Russia’s military and political support to Damascus, the situation... more

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- by Chiara Lovotti
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- 6
  Russian Studies, Middle East Studies, Russian Foreign Policy, Syria

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