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Purpose: In this chapter, I explore how American Sign Language/English interpreters came to enact an ally role with members of the American deaf community during the 1988 Deaf President Now (DPN) protest. The DPN protest, led by students at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, was a historic moment in the deaf community's struggle for civil rights (Christiansen & Barnartt, 1995). During the events that unfolded over the week-long rebellion, students engaged in a variety of claims-making activities (Lindekilde, 2013), such as participating in media interviews and organizing rallies. To share their message with the world, the deaf protesters developed alliances with American Sign Language/English interpreters, who mediated a wide variety of protest-related activities.

Method: The data I analyze in this chapter come from (1) archival review and (2) semistructured interviews I conducted with DPN stakeholders, including interpreters and protesters.

Findings: Through these data, I explore how the protesters and interpreters came to develop shared understandings and expectations of allyship, including the roles that interpreters enacted in the protest.

Implication/Value: I frame this discussion within the context of a variety of metaphors that have been used to describe the role of signed language interpreters (Roy, 1993, 2002) and the concept of role-space (Llewellyn-Jones & Lee, 2014) to demonstrate the process of interpreters becoming allies in contentious political settings.

This chapter argues that the concept of metagovernance offers an alternative to multi-level governance (MLG) for understanding how policy is delivered through complex networks. Whereas MLG portrays the state as a diminished entity, metagovernance argues for a strong, capable state that can govern through the deployment of policy tools. The chapter identifies and evaluates how policy tools are selected to realise the strategic objectives of government.

A critical case methodology is employed. Nuclear power is held to be a most difficult test for the British government’s ability to metagovern. The empirical data was collected from in-depth qualitative interviews conducted between August 2008 and July 2013.

The chapter shows that the British government’s metagovernance efforts are informed by the risks that would-be developer face. The British government is shown to have some ability to practice metagovernance but the complexities of nuclear power and the existence of a MLG structure create risks that government cannot overcome. It is also observed that in nuclear power programmes, the risks of construction cost overruns and electricity price fluctuations have the greatest impact on the calculations of would-be developers.

The findings offer insight into the limits of government capacity in the face of networks and claims of continued state power. The chapter links together the literature on risk and the emergent literature on metagovernance. It is shown that institutional risks in the form of political opportunism are ever present and cannot be easily overcome.

Government are often called upon oversee difficult projects that are delivered by commercial actors. The findings indicate how governments might approach the task and point to a need for greater sensitivity to the nature of the project itself.

The empirical results show that to moderate risk, government has tended to adopt very technocratic policies that limit wider democratic consultation in favour of working directly with commercial actors.

The chapter presents a detailed analysis of government decision-making in a highly controversial area of public policy – nuclear power.

The explanatory power of Multi-Level Governance (MLG) has been and is being questioned. Two main criticisms have been raised: first, that MLG is ultimately descriptive, not explanatory; second, that MLG is a case of concept stretching, that it is ultimately an umbrella notion rather than a theory. This chapter outlines what ripostes may be provided to such critiques and argues that the progress of the study of MLG and its usage in political science and public policy and management may lie to an important extent in fostering the dialogue with other streams of research (thus filling the gap of some ‘missing linkages’ in the extant MLG literature), like network governance; policy learning; the analysis of policy tools and the tools of government in complex systems; models in strategic management like stakeholder analysis and others.

This volume is a collective contribution by authors from different disciplinary backgrounds who all address, from different angles and by using a variety of research methods, the key question of how to bring into the MLG research agenda a range of disciplines and applied fields of inquiry that have so far only limitedly been used in the MLG stream of research and literature more systematically.

It arises from the volume that theoretical frames like network governance; policy learning; policy tools analysis; stakeholder analysis and others have important potential to further the MLG research agenda. A number of contributions address the transformation of MLG in the European Union (EU), the polity where MLG arrangements where first detected and labelled as such (Marks, 1993). Others apply MLG frames to other institutional settings, including non-democratic regimes.

This volume is a collective attempt to suggest ‘cross-fertilisations’ from other disciplines or applied fields that may lead to unleash more of the potential and promises of the MLG agenda. It is hoped that this work lays some of the foundations for building bridges between the MLG literature and disciplines and theoretical frames that may be effectively brought into the MLG research agenda.

MLG has long gone beyond the academic debate, to become an analytical lens employed by EU and other institutions across the globe. MLG informs the practice of policy-making. By addressing some key gaps in the extant literature and furnishing perspectives to link MLG to disciplines that may provide theories and models to further its analytical potential, this volume aims at contributing to improving the practice of MLG.

The volume is – to our knowledge – the first systematic attempt to bring into the MLG literature a whole range of theories and models that may provide ways forward to the understanding and usage of MLG.

In order to mark the beginning of the fifteenth century, a group of prominent Muslim theologians and jurists assembled to draft a document that systematically laid out the rights and duties of all human beings according to the dictates of Islam. The year of Christ was 1981, and the occasion was formally the International Islamic Conference, held that year in Paris. The document that these jurist produced seems at first an odd one, titled The Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights (Universal Islamic Declaration, 1988). Odd as the document so pointedly invokes the famed 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Universal Declaration, 1999). But perhaps such an invocation is not odd at all, for the document is first of all a symptom of and a response to two massive contemporary facts. The first is the ubiquity of human rights talk. It is certainly proof of the success of this discourse as a normative and normalizing force that no-one can speak of universality or ethics or even the most drab topic in international relations without paying homage, only sometimes qualified, to the idea that all humans have rights. The second fact to which the Islamic declaration responds is the suspicion if not outright insistence that the religion of Islam in unsuited to this new order of civilization. Amongst the jurists themselves there is a sense that clarification is needed of the relation of Islam to the global (to say nothing of globalizing) discourse of human rights. This much is readily conceded by the drafters, who felt impelled by the forces of the contemporary world scene to formulate the Islamic position in relation to human rights (Weeramantry, 1988, p. 122).Not surprisingly, such a position involves dethroning the sovereign subject (entirely different from its deconstruction) and proclaiming victory once again for God and his absolute sovereignty, even as it involves extending a governmental interest in the life of the individual, from the conditions of his cultural life (article 14) to the legislation of his leisure time (article17). However, in contrast to the Universal Declaration that never once mentions God or Creator, the Islamic Declaration insists that only God to be “the creator the sustainer, the sovereign the sole guide of mankind and the Source of all Law” (Universal Islamic Declaration, 1988, p. 176). A hasty reading would take this as a response not just to the Universal Declaration, which here is named and renamed, but the entire western tradition of rights and secular power after the death of God. This, however, would be a mistake, for it would overlook both the distinctly modern project of power that the Islamic Declaration articulates, and the peculiar construction of the U.N Declaration itself, the way it refers to and refracts the idiom of the famous eighteenth century revolutionary documents – the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Thus in the Universal Declaration the repetition of the American phrase, “endowed by their creator,” becomes simply “endowed with reason and conscience,” with no one doing the endowing. In short, the omission of God from the Universal Declaration is an over determined decision and not one of a casual or inevitable secularism.

By applying Erving Goffman’s concept of role embracement (1961), I analyze the role of a hardcore music fan, online and offline. I collected ethnographic data from discussion boards, an online questionnaire, interviews, emails, private messaging, and field observation to provide support for the usefulness of Goffman’s concept to illuminate aspects of online and offline role performances. “Attachment,” “demonstration,” and “engagement” are the three elements of role embracement that illustrate aspects of the hardcore fan’s passion for the Rolling Stones, expressed both on the Internet and in everyday face-to-face situations. The study shows that Goffman’s ideas about a person’s commitment to a role and the handling of potential stigma (1963) in relation to it can help researchers understand how fans or those belonging to a special interest community enact their roles in the ever-growing seamlessness of the offline/online spheres.