The Politics Of Fishing

A topical and authoritative examination of the current crisis in the fishing industry, offering a political analysis of the reasons for the crisis and suggesting ways in which this might be overcome. The contributors include fishery officials and scientists as well as academics. The focus is mainly on the European fishing industry, with issues including political bargaining in the EU, the working of quota arrangements, the status of marine scientific knowledge and the industry's management structures in different countries.

The Global Atlas of Marine Fisheries is the first and only book to provide accurate, country-by-country fishery catch data. This groundbreaking information has been gathered from independent sources by the world's foremost fisheries experts. Edited by Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller of the Sea Around Us Project, the Atlas includes one-page reports on 273 countries and their territories, plus fourteen topical global chapters. Each national report describes the current state of the country's fishery; the policies, politics, and social factors affecting it; and potential solutions. The global chapters address cross-cutting issues, from the economics of fisheries to the impacts of mariculture. Extensive maps and graphics offer attractive and accessible visual representations.

Why has democracy failed to take root in Russia? After shedding the shackles of Soviet rule, some countries in the postcommunist region undertook lasting democratization. Yet Russia did not. Russia experienced dramatic political breakthroughs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but it subsequently failed to maintain progress toward democracy. In this book, M. Steven Fish offers an explanation for the direction of regime change in post-Soviet Russia. Relying on cross-national comparative analysis as well as on in-depth field research in Russia, Fish shows that Russia's failure to democratize has three causes: too much economic reliance on oil, too little economic liberalization, and too weak a national legislature. Fish's explanation challenges others that have attributed Russia's political travails to history, political culture, or to 'shock therapy' in economic policy. The book offers a theoretically original and empirically rigorous explanation for one of the most pressing political problems of our time.

Despite their importance in terms of employment and income generation, inshore fisheries have been a neglected area of study. The review of the common fisheries policy, especially in the light of the need to re-examine the derogation which reserves access to the inshore zone to coastal state vessels, provides an opportunity to redress the balance. With contributions from leading authorities on fisheries management, the book takes an in-depth look at seven European countries, examining the basis for the definition of inshore fisheries, evaluating their status, and describing the salient characteristics of their management. The national studies form the basis for cross-cultural analyses of the social organisation, cultural norms, economic objectives, and institutional structures of inshore fisheries in Europe. Finally, a number of key issues relating to the future of inshore fisheries management in a more integrated approach are examined. Overall the volume reaffirms the invaluable role played by inshore fisheries in the local and regional economies of Europe's complex coastline.

In analyzing the fisheries sector this book explores key issues relating to the EU polity as a whole, including the distribution of power, the representation of interests at national and transnational levels, the allocation of budgets and resources, and the EU's place as an actor on the global stage. In this way Lequesne uses the Common Fisheries Policy to provide a varied illustration of European policy in action. The scholarship is based on high quality primary research, carefully conducted and articulated. The result is a fascinating insight into the fisheries sector which reveals broader characteristics of the EU.

In an era when much of what passes for debate is merely moral posturing--traditional family values versus the cultural elite, free speech versus censorship--or reflexive name-calling--the terms "liberal" and "politically correct," are used with as much dismissive scorn by the right as "reactionary" and "fascist" are by the left--Stanley Fish would seem an unlikely lightning rod for controversy. A renowned scholar of Milton, head of the English Department of Duke University, Fish has emerged as a brilliantly original critic of the culture at large, praised and pilloried as a vigorous debunker of the pieties of both the left and right. His mission is not to win the cultural wars that preoccupy the nation's attention, but rather to redefine the terms of battle. In There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, Fish takes aim at the ideological gridlock paralyzing academic and political exchange in the nineties. In his witty, accessible dissections of the swirling controversies over multiculturalism, affirmative action, canon revision, hate speech, and legal reform, he neatly eviscerates both the conservatives' claim to possession of timeless, transcendent values (the timeless transcendence of which they themselves have conveniently identified), and the intellectual left's icons of equality, tolerance, and non-discrimination. He argues that while conservative ideologues and liberal stalwarts might disagree vehemently on what is essential to a culture, or to a curriculum, both mistakenly believe that what is essential can be identified apart from the accidental circumstances (of time and history) to which the essential is ritually opposed. In the book's first section, which includes the five essays written for Fish's celebrated debates with Dinesh D'Souza (the author and former Reagan White House policy analyst), Fish turns his attention to the neoconservative backlash. In his introduction, Fish writes, "Terms that come to us wearing the label 'apolitical'--'common values', 'fairness', 'merit', 'color blind', 'free speech', 'reason'--are in fact the ideologically charged constructions of a decidedly political agenda. I make the point not in order to level an accusation, but to remove the sting of accusation from the world 'politics' and redefine it as a synonym for what everyone inevitably does." Fish maintains that the debate over political correctness is an artificial one, because it is simply not possible for any party or individual to occupy a position above or beyond politics. Regarding the controversy over the revision of the college curriculum, Fish argues that the point is not to try to insist that inclusion of ethnic and gender studies is not a political decision, but "to point out that any alternative curriculum--say a diet of exclusively Western or European texts--would be no less politically invested." In Part Two, Fish follows the implications of his arguments to a surprising rejection of the optimistic claims of the intellectual left that awareness of the historical roots of our beliefs and biases can allow us, as individuals or as a society, to escape or transcend them. Specifically, he turns to the movement for reform of legal studies, and insists that a dream of a legal culture in which no one's values are slighted or declared peripheral can no more be realized than the dream of a concept of fairness that answers to everyone's notions of equality and jsutice, or a yardstick of merit that is true to everyone's notions of worth and substance. Similarly, he argues that attempts to politicize the study of literature are ultimately misguided, because recharacterizations of literary works have absolutely no impact on the mainstream of political life. He concludes his critique of the academy with "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos," an extraordinary look at some of the more puzzing, if not out-and-out masochistic, characteristics of a life in academia. Penetrating, fearless, and brilliantly argued, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech captures the essential Fish. It is must reading for anyone who cares about the outcome of America's cultural wars.