Mark Dawson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3634841 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mark Dawson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mark |
| FAMILY NAME | Dawson |
| SIGNATURE | DAWSON M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hertie School |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3383-4637 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 95 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Alive and kicking or barely alive? The asymmetry thesis in the twenty-first century EU
Revisiting the asymmetry thesis
The 'asymmetry thesis', articulated by Fritz Scharpf, holds that EU governance is characterised by an asymmetry between positive and negative integration. The EU has well-developed capacities for negative integration but only limited capacities for positive integration. The present paper challenges the orthodoxy that this thesis has become in EU law and political science scholarship. It argues that the asymmetry thesis no longer accurately depict…
Unpacking Legal Accountability
Although the term “legal accountability” increasingly appears in scholarly discourse surrounding the European Central Bank (ECB), it is under-theorised. This article explores three different dimensions of legal accountability, which are often confused. Accountability to law refers to accountability to legal rules and standards. Accountability through law refers to achieving routes of administrative and political accountability through legal insti…
Defining Collaborative Online International Learning (Coil) and Distinguishing it from Virtual Exchange
Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) is often framed as an example of a broader practice known as Virtual Exchange (VE). The term Virtual Exchange has increasingly been used as an attempt to unify a fragmented field of Higher Education practice and is often used interchangeably with the term COIL. However, the design of COIL, with its strong focus on collaborative and intercultural learning, is often very different to other VE initi…
Towards a legally plausible theory of judicialization in the European Union
This article examines the development of judicialization literature in the EU arguing that – in spite of the obvious advantages of interdisciplinary collaboration – scholarship on judicialization in law and political science is drafting apart in the 21st Century. While early political science research on the European Courts found theoretical inspiration in legal research, law and political science have increasingly diverging epistemological and m…
Accountability in the EU's para‐regulatory state
This article revisits Majone's famous argument about accountability in the regulatory state in reference to the European Union's (EU) Economic and Monetary Union. We show that the EU has entered the stage of a “para‐regulatory state” marked by increasing EU regulation in areas linked to core state powers. Despite the redistributive and politicized nature of these policy areas, the EU's “para‐regulatory state” has continued to rely on its regulato…
Churchgoers and the Fair Trade Town
In this article I analyse the Fair Trade Town project in terms of both social and spiritual capital. In bringing together diverse sections of communities, the work that churchgoers carry out in promotion of Fair Trade can serve as an example of the generation of social capital. However, the concept of social capital fails to capture the role of core Christian concepts, such as justice and the love of neighbour, in the practice of Fair Trade. Spir…
What Does it Mean to Say that the Court of Justice is not a Human Rights Institution? A Critical Appraisal
What role does the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) and EU law play in elaborating the rights and principles embodied by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)? Over the last 20 years, human (or ‘fundamental’) rights have become a constant part of the way the CJEU interprets and applies EU law. In a period where fundamental rights and values are increasingly under threat both globally and in Europe, judicial institutions remain an impo…
Procedural vs substantive accountability in EMU governance
This article introduces a new normative framework for analysing accountability in the European Union's Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The framework is anchored in four normative 'goods' that accountability is supposed to ensure: openness, non-arbitrariness, effectiveness, and publicness. All of these can be achieved in a procedural or substantive way, depending on whether actors are held accountable for the quality of their decision-making pr…
Fundamental Rights as Constraints to and Triggers for Differentiated Integration
When looking for possible constraints on Differentiated Integration, the fundamental values of the European Union (EU) seem an obvious starting point. Both the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the values articulated in Art. 2 TEU are cross‐cutting across EU states. However, while fundamental values have acted as centralising devices in other federal settings, in an EU context marked by extensive value disagreement, they may also act as pathways …
Parallax
Coping with Exit, Evasion, and Subversion in EU Law
In identifying challenges for the EU and EU law in the 2020s, a whole host of topics and questions present themselves. Like any legal order, EU law has to keep pace with its surrounding environment, developing knowledge and tools to deal with new regulatory challenges. What, however, if the EU order's biggest future challenge is also its original one? As I will argue in this short Article, that challenge is fundamentally one of relevance, that is…
Parallax
Fundamental Rights in European Union Policy-making
This article investigates how the European Union’s political process affects the level of rights protection afforded by European Union (EU) law. It does so in two steps, firstly by analysing how institutional politics plays an important role in the evolution of the EU fundamental rights framework and secondly by demonstrating empirically how legislative interaction affects the level of protection provided by three important EU legislative acts. A…
Presidential Tenure and Constitutional Provisions
Constitutions around Africa have been repeatedly tested on the issue of presidential term limits. We explore the four most recent cases of African presidents facing the end of their constitutionally mandated limit, all of which developed in Central Africa. Burundi, Rwanda, the Republic of Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo all adopted constitutions limiting presidential tenure to two terms; yet, in 2015, when these limits were approachin…
Church Action for Fair Trade as Public Theology
Church action for Fair Trade in the United Kingdom serves as an example of an activity, inspired and guided by theology, which has grown to involve the active participation of large numbers of churchgoers. Public recognition of Fair Trade is high, embracing a wide, secular society. The expansion of Fair Trade has come at a price, however, with the increasing involvement of large commercial organisations threatening diminution of the original theo…
New governance and the displacement of Social Europe
Has the European Semester led to a displacement of Social Europe, or to the development of social policy through fiscal processes and actors? – Potential for Semester to increase soft law’s binding effects or ‘socialise’ EU policy-making – Positive effects severely limited by the Semester’s overall goals: fiscal stabilisation and the creation of increasingly uniform economic policies – Dilemma for Social Europe: how can an autonomous EU social po…
The UNGPs in the European Union
The article examines the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) in the European Union via National Action Plans (NAPs). We argue that some of the shortcomings currently observed in the implementation process could effectively be addressed through the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) – a governance instrument already used by the European Union (EU) in other policy domains. The article sketches out the pol…
The Legal and Political Accountability Structure of ‘Post‐Crisis’ EU Economic Governance
How should decision‐making under EU economic governance be understood following the euro‐crisis? This article argues, contra existing depictions, that the post‐crisis EU has increasingly adopted methods of decision‐making in the economic field which marry the decision‐making structure of inter‐governmentalism with the supervisory and implementation framework of the Community Method. While this ‘post‐crisis’ method has arisen for clear reasons – t…
Constitutional Balance in the EU after the E uro‐Crisis
This article analyses how the European Union's response to the euro‐crisis has altered the constitutional balance upon which its stability is based. It argues that the stability and legitimacy of any political system requires the structural incorporation of individual and political self‐determination. In the context of the EU , this requirement is met through the idea of constitutional balance, with ‘substantive’, ‘institutional’ and ‘spatial’ di…
Cixous, Derrida, Psychoanalysis
Helene Cixous and Jacques Derrida are two of the most innovative and unsettling thinkers to emerge from the traumas and transformations of the first half of the twentieth century. Despite the great, and manifest, differences between their respective bodies of work (hers that of a ‘poet’; his that of a ‘philosopher’), these bodies speak to each other, recall and echo each other, in ways that cannot be accounted for by shared biographical traits (t…
Slumbering Kisses, Shameless Entanglements
This essay focuses on the profound relationship between psychoanalysis and deconstruction. It reads Jacques Derrida's suggestion that an “effect of deferral” both drives and disrupts the entire Freudian corpus. It suggests, in turn, that Freud's engagements with this “effect of deferral” are, like the navel of the dream, knots in the Freudian text, entanglements which speak of what will nevertheless remain unspeakable. My reading goes via the “Pr…
Legacies of the Future
Of Force and the Future — Hélène Cixous's Poematic ‘might’
This essay reads Hélène Cixous's Le jour où je n’étais pas là as both an experience of, and experiment in, the writing of a certain poematic ‘might’. Following Jacques Derrida's reading of Cixous's work in H. C. pour la vie, c'est à dire ..., it suggests that such a ‘might’ allows us to hear and understand what nevertheless remains to be heard and understood. It argues, then, that at both a performative and narrative level, reading Cixous's text …
Under The Pretence of the Shell
The Legal and Political Accountability Structure of ‘Post‐Crisis’ EU Economic Governance
How should decision‐making under EU economic governance be understood following the euro‐crisis? This article argues, contra existing depictions, that the post‐crisis EU has increasingly adopted methods of decision‐making in the economic field which marry the decision‐making structure of inter‐governmentalism with the supervisory and implementation framework of the Community Method. While this ‘post‐crisis’ method has arisen for clear reasons – t…
Constitutional Balance in the EU after the E uro‐Crisis
This article analyses how the European Union's response to the euro‐crisis has altered the constitutional balance upon which its stability is based. It argues that the stability and legitimacy of any political system requires the structural incorporation of individual and political self‐determination. In the context of the EU , this requirement is met through the idea of constitutional balance, with ‘substantive’, ‘institutional’ and ‘spatial’ di…
Revisiting the asymmetry thesis
The 'asymmetry thesis', articulated by Fritz Scharpf, holds that EU governance is characterised by an asymmetry between positive and negative integration. The EU has well-developed capacities for negative integration but only limited capacities for positive integration. The present paper challenges the orthodoxy that this thesis has become in EU law and political science scholarship. It argues that the asymmetry thesis no longer accurately depict…
Procedural vs substantive accountability in EMU governance
This article introduces a new normative framework for analysing accountability in the European Union's Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The framework is anchored in four normative 'goods' that accountability is supposed to ensure: openness, non-arbitrariness, effectiveness, and publicness. All of these can be achieved in a procedural or substantive way, depending on whether actors are held accountable for the quality of their decision-making pr…
The UNGPs in the European Union
The article examines the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) in the European Union via National Action Plans (NAPs). We argue that some of the shortcomings currently observed in the implementation process could effectively be addressed through the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) – a governance instrument already used by the European Union (EU) in other policy domains. The article sketches out the pol…
Accountability in the EU's para‐regulatory state
This article revisits Majone's famous argument about accountability in the regulatory state in reference to the European Union's (EU) Economic and Monetary Union. We show that the EU has entered the stage of a “para‐regulatory state” marked by increasing EU regulation in areas linked to core state powers. Despite the redistributive and politicized nature of these policy areas, the EU's “para‐regulatory state” has continued to rely on its regulato…
Presidential Tenure and Constitutional Provisions
Constitutions around Africa have been repeatedly tested on the issue of presidential term limits. We explore the four most recent cases of African presidents facing the end of their constitutionally mandated limit, all of which developed in Central Africa. Burundi, Rwanda, the Republic of Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo all adopted constitutions limiting presidential tenure to two terms; yet, in 2015, when these limits were approachin…
Fundamental Rights as Constraints to and Triggers for Differentiated Integration
When looking for possible constraints on Differentiated Integration, the fundamental values of the European Union (EU) seem an obvious starting point. Both the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the values articulated in Art. 2 TEU are cross‐cutting across EU states. However, while fundamental values have acted as centralising devices in other federal settings, in an EU context marked by extensive value disagreement, they may also act as pathways …
Alive and kicking or barely alive? The asymmetry thesis in the twenty-first century EU
Defining Collaborative Online International Learning (Coil) and Distinguishing it from Virtual Exchange
Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) is often framed as an example of a broader practice known as Virtual Exchange (VE). The term Virtual Exchange has increasingly been used as an attempt to unify a fragmented field of Higher Education practice and is often used interchangeably with the term COIL. However, the design of COIL, with its strong focus on collaborative and intercultural learning, is often very different to other VE initi…
Churchgoers and the Fair Trade Town
In this article I analyse the Fair Trade Town project in terms of both social and spiritual capital. In bringing together diverse sections of communities, the work that churchgoers carry out in promotion of Fair Trade can serve as an example of the generation of social capital. However, the concept of social capital fails to capture the role of core Christian concepts, such as justice and the love of neighbour, in the practice of Fair Trade. Spir…
Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook
Under The Pretence of the Shell
In place of another here the first word is
Of Force and the Future — Hélène Cixous's Poematic ‘might’
This essay reads Hélène Cixous's Le jour où je n’étais pas là as both an experience of, and experiment in, the writing of a certain poematic ‘might’. Following Jacques Derrida's reading of Cixous's work in H. C. pour la vie, c'est à dire ..., it suggests that such a ‘might’ allows us to hear and understand what nevertheless remains to be heard and understood. It argues, then, that at both a performative and narrative level, reading Cixous's text …
Legacies of the Future
Constitutional Balance in the EU after the E uro‐Crisis
This article analyses how the European Union's response to the euro‐crisis has altered the constitutional balance upon which its stability is based. It argues that the stability and legitimacy of any political system requires the structural incorporation of individual and political self‐determination. In the context of the EU , this requirement is met through the idea of constitutional balance, with ‘substantive’, ‘institutional’ and ‘spatial’ di…
Cixous, Derrida, Psychoanalysis
Helene Cixous and Jacques Derrida are two of the most innovative and unsettling thinkers to emerge from the traumas and transformations of the first half of the twentieth century. Despite the great, and manifest, differences between their respective bodies of work (hers that of a ‘poet’; his that of a ‘philosopher’), these bodies speak to each other, recall and echo each other, in ways that cannot be accounted for by shared biographical traits (t…
Slumbering Kisses, Shameless Entanglements
This essay focuses on the profound relationship between psychoanalysis and deconstruction. It reads Jacques Derrida's suggestion that an “effect of deferral” both drives and disrupts the entire Freudian corpus. It suggests, in turn, that Freud's engagements with this “effect of deferral” are, like the navel of the dream, knots in the Freudian text, entanglements which speak of what will nevertheless remain unspeakable. My reading goes via the “Pr…
The Legal and Political Accountability Structure of ‘Post‐Crisis’ EU Economic Governance
How should decision‐making under EU economic governance be understood following the euro‐crisis? This article argues, contra existing depictions, that the post‐crisis EU has increasingly adopted methods of decision‐making in the economic field which marry the decision‐making structure of inter‐governmentalism with the supervisory and implementation framework of the Community Method. While this ‘post‐crisis’ method has arisen for clear reasons – t…
New governance and the displacement of Social Europe
Has the European Semester led to a displacement of Social Europe, or to the development of social policy through fiscal processes and actors? – Potential for Semester to increase soft law’s binding effects or ‘socialise’ EU policy-making – Positive effects severely limited by the Semester’s overall goals: fiscal stabilisation and the creation of increasingly uniform economic policies – Dilemma for Social Europe: how can an autonomous EU social po…
The UNGPs in the European Union
The article examines the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) in the European Union via National Action Plans (NAPs). We argue that some of the shortcomings currently observed in the implementation process could effectively be addressed through the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) – a governance instrument already used by the European Union (EU) in other policy domains. The article sketches out the pol…
Church Action for Fair Trade as Public Theology
Church action for Fair Trade in the United Kingdom serves as an example of an activity, inspired and guided by theology, which has grown to involve the active participation of large numbers of churchgoers. Public recognition of Fair Trade is high, embracing a wide, secular society. The expansion of Fair Trade has come at a price, however, with the increasing involvement of large commercial organisations threatening diminution of the original theo…
Parallax
Coping with Exit, Evasion, and Subversion in EU Law
In identifying challenges for the EU and EU law in the 2020s, a whole host of topics and questions present themselves. Like any legal order, EU law has to keep pace with its surrounding environment, developing knowledge and tools to deal with new regulatory challenges. What, however, if the EU order's biggest future challenge is also its original one? As I will argue in this short Article, that challenge is fundamentally one of relevance, that is…
Parallax
Fundamental Rights in European Union Policy-making
This article investigates how the European Union’s political process affects the level of rights protection afforded by European Union (EU) law. It does so in two steps, firstly by analysing how institutional politics plays an important role in the evolution of the EU fundamental rights framework and secondly by demonstrating empirically how legislative interaction affects the level of protection provided by three important EU legislative acts. A…
Presidential Tenure and Constitutional Provisions
Constitutions around Africa have been repeatedly tested on the issue of presidential term limits. We explore the four most recent cases of African presidents facing the end of their constitutionally mandated limit, all of which developed in Central Africa. Burundi, Rwanda, the Republic of Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo all adopted constitutions limiting presidential tenure to two terms; yet, in 2015, when these limits were approachin…
What Does it Mean to Say that the Court of Justice is not a Human Rights Institution? A Critical Appraisal
What role does the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) and EU law play in elaborating the rights and principles embodied by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)? Over the last 20 years, human (or ‘fundamental’) rights have become a constant part of the way the CJEU interprets and applies EU law. In a period where fundamental rights and values are increasingly under threat both globally and in Europe, judicial institutions remain an impo…
Procedural vs substantive accountability in EMU governance
This article introduces a new normative framework for analysing accountability in the European Union's Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The framework is anchored in four normative 'goods' that accountability is supposed to ensure: openness, non-arbitrariness, effectiveness, and publicness. All of these can be achieved in a procedural or substantive way, depending on whether actors are held accountable for the quality of their decision-making pr…
Fundamental Rights as Constraints to and Triggers for Differentiated Integration
When looking for possible constraints on Differentiated Integration, the fundamental values of the European Union (EU) seem an obvious starting point. Both the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the values articulated in Art. 2 TEU are cross‐cutting across EU states. However, while fundamental values have acted as centralising devices in other federal settings, in an EU context marked by extensive value disagreement, they may also act as pathways …
Churchgoers and the Fair Trade Town
In this article I analyse the Fair Trade Town project in terms of both social and spiritual capital. In bringing together diverse sections of communities, the work that churchgoers carry out in promotion of Fair Trade can serve as an example of the generation of social capital. However, the concept of social capital fails to capture the role of core Christian concepts, such as justice and the love of neighbour, in the practice of Fair Trade. Spir…
Towards a legally plausible theory of judicialization in the European Union
This article examines the development of judicialization literature in the EU arguing that – in spite of the obvious advantages of interdisciplinary collaboration – scholarship on judicialization in law and political science is drafting apart in the 21st Century. While early political science research on the European Courts found theoretical inspiration in legal research, law and political science have increasingly diverging epistemological and m…
Accountability in the EU's para‐regulatory state
This article revisits Majone's famous argument about accountability in the regulatory state in reference to the European Union's (EU) Economic and Monetary Union. We show that the EU has entered the stage of a “para‐regulatory state” marked by increasing EU regulation in areas linked to core state powers. Despite the redistributive and politicized nature of these policy areas, the EU's “para‐regulatory state” has continued to rely on its regulato…
Unpacking Legal Accountability
Although the term “legal accountability” increasingly appears in scholarly discourse surrounding the European Central Bank (ECB), it is under-theorised. This article explores three different dimensions of legal accountability, which are often confused. Accountability to law refers to accountability to legal rules and standards. Accountability through law refers to achieving routes of administrative and political accountability through legal insti…
Defining Collaborative Online International Learning (Coil) and Distinguishing it from Virtual Exchange
Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) is often framed as an example of a broader practice known as Virtual Exchange (VE). The term Virtual Exchange has increasingly been used as an attempt to unify a fragmented field of Higher Education practice and is often used interchangeably with the term COIL. However, the design of COIL, with its strong focus on collaborative and intercultural learning, is often very different to other VE initi…
Political science (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Economics (13 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Law and economics (10 works) · European union (9 works) · European Union Policy and Governance (9 works) · Politics (8 works) · European and International Law Studies (7 works)