Feminist Research in Transitional Justice Studies: Navigating Silences and Disruptions in the Field

This paper will analyse what it takes to conduct feminist and sensitive research in countries that have seen mass human rights violations. Transitional justice research involves critical examination of difficult topics which raises a number of ethical and methodological issues for both the participants and the researchers. Although empirical research has been a facet of the studies produced in the field, researchers’ accounts of undertaking research in often politically sensitive environments is largely missing from published books and research reports. This paper is informed by personal experiences of doing research in wartime rape in the ethnically and politically divided country of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I argue that the researcher’s profile and positionality directly affects the fieldwork and that fieldwork is a dialogical process which is structured by the researcher and the wider political processes in the country.     

The Paradox of American Global Power

This paper will address these two questions:

1. 1
   Can the US be meaningfully seen as an empire in the ways it has behaved since entering the world stage as a central player after World War II?
    
2. 2
   If it is an empire, how has this affected the quality of its democratic life and institutions? One central hypothesis connects both explorations. It can be formulated as follows: if there is a logic to the life of empires that one might call the imperial imperative—a logic according to which the pursuit of hegemonic control to the far periphery of empire calls for ever greater concentration of power at the center—the US too will show the effects of this logic. In spite of its creed of democracy and republicanism the US, acting as an empire, cannot escape this imperial imperative. An obvious test case is offered by the two recent presidencies of George W. Bush and of Barack Hussein Obama. Although the latter presented himself as the anti-Bush, opposing all transgressions of constitutional constraints that his predecessor had stood for, and promising to take America back to its first republican principles, the imperial imperative, according to our hypothesis, would prevent Obama from pursuing such a course.
    

     

Remarks on the Origin of All-Inclusive Pervasion

Previous studies have claimed that the term ‘all-inclusive pervasion’ (sarvopasa?hāravyāpti) appeared for the first time in the Hetubindu, and that it was Dharmakīrti who created this theory. This article attempts to modify this view and to show that the prototype of this theory can already be found in Dignāga’s system of logic. Dignāga states in the third chapter of the Pramā?asamuccayav?tti that the co-existence of a logical reason with what is to be proved is understood by means of two types of exemplification that sum up external items (bāhyārthopasa?h?ta). Furthermore, with respect to where the pervasion is indicated, he states in the second chapter of the same work that the non-deviation of a logical mark from what is to be proved is indicated elsewhere (anyatra). He also implies that anyatra means in the substratum in general (ādhārasāmānya) and that the subject is implicitly included in other substrata, i.e., in the substratum in general. Building upon Dignāga’s awareness of the issue, the conflict between the universality of pervasion and the particularity of actual inference, Dharmakīrti reinforced Dignāga’s system of logic by demonstrating that a property to be proved as the universal is not particularised by the subject by the use of the idea of ‘the exclusion of nonconnection’ (ayogavyavaccheda) and by adopting the concept of ‘all’ in place of ‘external items’.     

Structural Determinants of Homicide: The Big Three

Building upon and expanding the previous research into structural determinants of homicide, particularly the work of Land, McCall, and Cohen (1990), the current paper introduces a multilevel theoretical framework that outlines the influences of three major structural forces on homicidal violence. The Big Three are poverty/low education, racial composition, and the disruption of family structure. These three factors exert their effects on violence at the following levels: neighborhood/community level, family/social interpersonal level, and individual level. It is shown algebraically how individual-level and aggregate-level effects contribute to the size of regression coefficients in aggregate-level analyses. In the empirical part of the study, the presented theoretical model is tested using county-level data to estimate separate effects of each of the Big Three factors on homicide at two time periods: 1950–1960 and 1995–2005 (chosen to be as far removed from one another as the availability of data allows). All major variables typically used in homicide research are included as statistical controls. The results of analyses show that the effects of the three major structural forces—poverty/low education, race, and divorce rates—on homicide rates in US counties are remarkably strong. Moreover, the effect sizes of each of the Big Three are found to be identical for both time periods despite profound changes in the economic and social situation in the United States over the past half-century. This remarkable stability in the effect sizes implies the stability of homicidal violence in response to certain structural conditions.     

Static and Dynamic Indicators of Minority Threat in Sentencing Outcomes: A Multi-Level Analysis

Designation as a “Habitual Offender” is an enhanced form of punishment which unlike, “Three Strikes” or “10-20-Life,” is entirely discretionary. We use Hierarchical Generalized Linear Modeling to assess the direct effects of race and Latino ethnicity on the designation of Habitual Offenders as well as the effect of both static and dynamic indicators of racial and ethnic threat on those outcomes. Our data include 26,740 adults sentenced to prison in Florida between 2002 and 2004 who were statutorily eligible to be sentenced as Habitual. The odds of receiving this designation are significantly increased for black and Latino defendants as compared to whites, though race and ethnicity effects vary substantially by crime type, being strongest for drug offenses and negligible for violent crimes. Static measures of group level threat (% black and % Latino) have no cross-level effect on sentencing by race or Latino ethnicity. However, increasing black population over time increases the odds of being sentenced as Habitual for both black and Latino defendants. Increasing Latino population increases the odds of Habitual Offender sentencing for Latinos, but decreases it for blacks. The prospect of engaging dynamic as opposed to static measures of threat in future criminal justice and other social control research is discussed.     

Shaping the Spiderweb: Towards the Concept of Joint Commission Through Another Person Under the Rome Statute and Jurisprudence of the International Criminal Court

This article argues that the concept of joint commission through another person has a central place in the co-perpetration architecture of the Rome Statute and jurisprudence of the International Criminal Court. The concept of joint commission through another person envisages a commission of a crime by two or more individuals through one or more subordinated persons. Even though the concept of joint commission through another person does not expressly derive from the Article 25(3)(a) of the Rome Statute of the ICC, this article argues that an individual can be held responsible as a co-perpetrator of a crime committed jointly with another individual through subordinated individuals if he or she has joint control over the crime because of his/her essential contribution to the commission of the crime.     

Acculturative Stress,Perceived Discrimination,and Vulnerability to Suicide Attempts Among Emerging Adults

Cultural factors are often neglected in studies of suicidal behavior among emerging adults. The present study examined acculturative stress and perceived discrimination as statistical predictors of a suicide attempt history among an ethnically diverse sample of 969 emerging adults, ages 18–25 (M = 18.8). Females made up 68% of the sample, and the racial/ethnic composition included Asian, Latino, Black, and White (US-born and non-US-born) individuals. There were no statistically significant racial/ethnic differences in endorsement of a suicide attempt history, with an overall rate of 8% in the sample. Asian participants reported higher acculturative stress than all other racial/ethnic groups, while both Asian and Black participants reported having experienced more discrimination in the previous year, compared to other groups. Logistic regression analyses suggested that familial acculturative stress was associated with 2 times higher odds of endorsing a past suicide attempt, overall. More specifically, it was associated with over 2 times higher odds among Asian participants, over 4 times higher odds among Black participants, and over 3 times higher odds among non-US-born White participants, while social acculturative stress was associated with over 3 times higher odds of endorsing a past suicide attempt among Latino participants. Environmental acculturative stress was associated with decreased odds of endorsing a suicide attempt history, overall, but not when examined separately by racial/ethnic group. Perceived discrimination was associated with over 5 times higher odds of a suicide attempt, overall, and specifically was associated with over 3 times higher odds among Latino participants and over 10 times higher odds among White, US-born participants. These findings suggest the importance of addressing culturally-related variables in treatment with emerging adults of racially/ethnically diverse backgrounds to reduce risk for suicidal behavior.     

On Justice

This paper returns to the question of how to think of justice through Teubner’s recent definition of what he calls juridical justice. Juridical justice is defined as distinct from political, moral, social and theological conceptions of justice. Teubner attempts to think of an imaginary space for a juridical justice ‘beyond the sites of natural and positive law’ and searches for a conception of justice as the ‘law’s self-subversive principle’. This article reviews Teubner’s conception of juridical justice and further proposes a distinction between juridical and non-juridical understandings of justice.     

Teaching Dissent in the Law School: Have Students Learned to Disagree?

This paper offers an analysis of the qualitative evidence obtained from a research project in relation to the teaching of a module on the Trials of Dissenters in the context of an undergraduate law degree. It will consider whether a pedagogically innovative course has encouraged and enabled undergraduate law students to think more creatively on the issues raised by specific historic trials and to be prepared to construct more critical and open ended arguments. The study of the Trials of Dissenters, we hoped, would encourage our students to dissent both from the standard model of legal education and from the acceptance of what lecturers say as “true”. We here consider the success of our project in relation to how students view dissent.