State Capacity,Bureaucratic Politicization,and Corruption in the Brazilian State

Responding to recent articles in Governance highlighting the need for improved measurement of bureaucratic characteristics, this article describes efforts to map Brazil's federal agencies on three dimensions—capacity, autonomy, and partisan dominance—derived from data on more than 326,000 civil servants. The article provides a “proof of concept” about the utility of agency‐level measures of these variables, demonstrating how they relate to an output common to all agencies: corruption. The article provides a first step in the direction of building a comparative research program that offers objective evaluation of bureaucracies within nation‐states, with the intent of better disentangling their impact on governance outcomes.     

Islands and a Carceral Environment: Maltese Policy in Terms of Irregular Migration

Although security has become a common framework for analyzing dispositifs that aim to control irregular migration, island spaces themselves are seldom considered as security dispositifs. The case of Malta, where detention is mandatory upon arrival, epitomizes what could be conceptualized as a “sentinel island” within the European Union. This article demonstrates how the interaction between political discourse, administrative practices, and migrants’ experiences contributes to turning the island into a form of total-institution setting. The empirical data is based on qualitative fieldwork that combines ethnographic observation, migrants’ individual narratives and semi-structured interviews conducted with European and national policy makers.     

Mobility in pastoral societies of Northern Mali: Perspectives on social and political rationales

Since the 1980s, the so-called “nomadic” populations in the regions of Northern Mali and Niger have embarked on an extensive process of settlement. Today they mostly live in villages or “settlement sites”. But, at the same time, individuals and small groups among these same populations have considerably enlarged their area of mobility and accelerated the rate and the value of the trade in which they engage. These two phenomena could, at first sight, appear contradictory. But the observation of empirical situations shows, rather, compatibilities, similarities even, between these two concomitant phenomena. Building on innovative debates conducted in geography and sociology, this article puts forward the hypothesis that the building of villages, as well as integration into military bases and barracks, proceeds from (social) rationales of mobility, just as much as transhumance, journeys, migration. Much more than a simple displacement in space, the notion of mobility could describe an “art of doing”, a way of being to others and to the world.     

论不完整意义上的亲属拒证权--评2012年《刑事诉讼法》第188条

2012年《刑事诉讼法》第188条增设的亲属出庭作证义务豁免权填补了我国现代亲属拒证权制度的空白，丰富了《刑事诉讼法》人权保障的内容，显现出容隐制度呈现出回归的端倪，彰显了我国与现代西方法律制度相融合的趋势。相较于中国古代的容隐制度和现代西方国家的亲属拒证权制度，亲属出庭作证义务豁免权只能被视为不完整意义上的亲属拒证权。无论是权利主体范围，还是权利内容，亲属出庭作证义务豁免权都有进一步完善发展的空间；并且该规定在实施中可能遭遇被误读、阻碍案件证明、流于形式以及侵犯被告人对质权的风险。对这些风险和问题应当予以充分认识、合理应对，以使司法实践准确落实这一规定，并为确立完整意义上的亲属拒证权奠定基础。     

From ambiguity to contestation: discourse(s) of non-traditional security in the ASEAN community

‘Non-traditional security’ (NTS) is prominently featured in the agenda of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and other ASEAN-led institutions in the Asia-Pacific. ‘NTS’ brings together a series transnational and non-military security threats that are considered common among regional states, urgent for them to attend to, and non-sensitive all at the same time. This a priori makes it a self-evident focus of attempts to bring regional security cooperation ‘to a higher plane’. However, this paper reveals that the uncontroversial character of NTS is overestimated, by shedding light on the co-existence of divergent – and potentially contradictory – interpretations of its meaning and implications in ASEAN and the wider region. In a context where ASEAN's relevance to the pursuit of regional security is increasingly being measured against its (in)ability to provide a coherent approach to security challenges that affect the region, the contested nature of NTS has important implications for the grouping's resilience in the twenty-first century.