Beyond Dutch Borders

"Despite widespread scepticism in receiving societies, migrants often remain loyal to their former homeland and stay active in the politics there. "Beyond Dutch borders" is about such ties. Combining extensive fieldwork with quantitative data, this book compares how transnational political involvement among guest workers from Turkey and post-colonial migrants from Surinam living in the Netherlands has evolved over the past half-century. It looks at Turks seeking to improve their position in Dutch society, Kurds lobbying for equal rights in Turkey and Surinamese hoping to boost development in their country of origin. Sending-state governments, political parties and organisations are shown to be key shapers of transnational migrant politics both in opposition to, and support of, homeland ruling elites. Meanwhile, it becomes clear that migrants' border-crossing loyalties and engagement have not dented their political integration in the receiving societies - quite the opposite. Certainly in this respect, the sceptics have been wrong."

Despite international conventions and human rights declarations, millions of people have suffered and continue to suffer torture, slavery, or violent deaths, with no remedy or recourse. They have fallen, in essence, “below the law,” outside of law’s protection. Often violated by their own governments, sometimes with support from transnational corporations, or nations benefiting from human rights violations, how can these victims find justice? Lawyers Beyond Borders reveals the inner workings of the advances and retreats in the quest for redress and restoration of human rights for those whom international legal-political systems have failed. The process of justice begins in the US, with a handful of human rights lawyers steeped in the American tradition of advancing civil rights through civil litigation. As the civil rights movement gained traction and an ample supply of lawyers, this small cadre turned their attention toward advancing international human rights, via the US legal system. They sought to build another piece of the rights revolution, this time for survivors of egregious human rights violations in faraway lands. These cases were among the most unlikely to be slated for victory: The abuses occurred abroad; the victims are aliens, usually with few, if any, resources; the perpetrators are politically powerful, resourced, and well connected, often members of governments, militaries, or multinational corporations. The legal and political systems’ structures are mostly stacked against these survivors, many who bear the scars of trauma and terror. Lawyers Beyond Borders is about agency. It is about how, in the face of powerful interests and seemingly insurmountable obstacles—political, psychological, economic, geographical, and physical—a small group of lawyers and survivors navigated a terrain of daunting barriers to begin building, case-by-case, new pathways to justice for those who otherwise would have none.

This report examines the Netherland’s new Metropolitan Region of Rotterdam-The Hague (MRDH), drawing on lessons from governance reforms in other OECD countries and identifying how the MRDH experience could benefit policy makers beyond Dutch borders.

This book presents an integrated assessment of regulatory reform in the Netherlands in areas such as the macroeconomic context, the quality of the public sector, competition policy and enforcement, and integration of market openness, and in sectors such as electricity and telecommunications.

This volume discusses several facets of English in today's multilingual Europe. It emphasizes the interdependence between cultures, languages and situations that influence its use. This interdependence is particularly relevant to European settings where English is being learned as a second language. Such learning situations constitute the core focus of the book. The volume is unique in bringing together empirical studies examining factors that promote the learning of English in Europe. Rather than assuming that English is a threat to linguistic diversity and cultural independence, these studies discuss psycholinguistic factors such as the input, and sociolinguistic factors such as the type of English that is targeted in learning. The contributing authors are well-established specialists who have worked on multilingualism, English as a Lingua Franca and second language acquisition. The book will be of interest to applied linguists, sociolinguists and teachers of English as a foreign language.

In this book Ulbe Bosma explores the experience of immigrants in the Netherlands over sixty years and three generations. Looking at migrants from all countries, Bosma teases out how their ethnic identities are informed by Dutch culture, and how these immigrant identities evolve over time.“Fascinating, comprehensive, and historically grounded, this essential volume reveals how the colonial past continues to shape multicultural Dutch society. . . . It is an important counterpart to work on France, Britain, and Portugal.”—Andrea Smith, Lafayette College

As more than one million displaced Kosovars crossed borders into Albania and other former Yugoslav republics of Macedonia and Montenegro, the E.U. member states reacted with confusion and lack of unity.While political attention focused on the bombing campaign, public attention - stimulated by media images - was focused on the misery and suffering of fellow Europeans. The book describes and analyzes the vacillations of seven E.U. member states (Germany, Netherlands, U.K., Sweden, Austria, Italy and France) concerning the management of this European refugee crisis.

Migration has become a top priority for politicians and policy makers around the world, but most writing on the topic covers only half the issue, wrongly assuming that migration policy equals immigration policy where, in reality, the majority of states care more deeply about emigration and the transnational involvements of emigrants and their descendants in the diaspora. Liberal democratic states have long considered emigration controls off-limits, for fear that they violate individual freedom of exit at the same time as interfering in the domestic affairs of other states. But these norms are changing fast: in the past 25 years, more than half of all United Nations member states have established some form of government department devoted to their people living0in other countries. What explains the rise of these 'diaspora institutions', and how does it relate to the political geographies of decolonisation, regional integration, and global governance since World War II? 0This book addresses these questions, based on quantitative data covering all UN members from 1936-2015, and fieldwork with high-level policy makers across 60 states. The book shows how, in many world regions, the unregulated spread of diaspora institutions is unleashing a wave of 'human geopolitics': a kind of geopolitics involving claims over people rather than territory. It argues for the development of principles to guide the future development of state-diaspora relations in an era of unprecedented global interdependence.