The Strategic Logic of Credit Claiming: A New Theory for Anonymous Terrorist Attacks

In theory, terrorism is a political communication strategy for groups to convey their grievances and the costs of ignoring them. In practice, though, terrorist groups take responsibility for just a small portion of their attacks. Rather than getting credit for the violence, terrorist leaders generally deny their operatives committed it. This theoretical and empirical disconnect may explain why scholars have ignored the subject of unclaimed attacks despite these being the norm. With a mixed-methods research design, our study helps to fill this lacuna by proposing and testing a new theory to help account for variation in which attacks are claimed.     

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Metaphor and Imagination in James Wilson's Theory of Federal Union

"Through metaphor, the past has the capacity to imagine us, and we it." -Cynthia Ozick, in "The Moral Necessity of Metaphor"
American federalism is nothing more-und nothing less-than a metaphor.
This was how lames Wilson, the most prominent lawyer at the Philadelphia Convention, came to approach the novel problem of understanding and conveying what federalism in a modern republic should mean. The Federal Republic created in 1787 was, for Wilson, more than a mutter of ingenious political design, more than a mutter of the "new science of politics," and more than a mutter of constitutional law or constitutionalism itself-unless the Constitution were seen to "comprehend" the moral purpose and moral promise of the new nation.
To Wilson, this view of the importance of the moral content of republican federalism was entailed by the "knowledge" that he took to be the necessary foundation of the Republic. It was this knowledge of certain fundamental principles- of "moral science,'I human nature, and the nature of language, and, more generally, of "cultivation" us a political and social process that was also an end in itself-that ultimately justified "the People" us the "sublime" metaphor governing American constitutional theory.
Yet, for all Wilson's faith in figurative "comprehensiveness," his distinctive approach to securing the New Republic through a federal union of the American People seems to have proved less and less compelling to his contemporaries the more he tried to pursue it as far us his vision of a politics of cultivation directed.     

International Cooperation,Spoiling, and Transnational Terrorism

Do interstate relations influence the sources and targets of transnational terrorism? A considerable body of recent research suggests that the answer to this question is yes, and that one state may sponsor terrorist attacks to weaken the bargaining positions of other states. We suggest, in contrast, that positive or cooperative actions invite terrorist attacks from a different source: nonstate groups wishing to spoil interstate cooperation that they oppose. We assess this argument with a dyadic dataset using monthly data on transnational terrorist attacks and cooperative and noncooperative actions between states. Our results suggest that spoiling in response to interstate cooperation is an important determinant of transnational terrorism.     

Up and Down the Zoning

In a specific downzoning situation, the question is not so much whether the new classification reduced the value of the property in comparison to the prior zoning, but rather whether the new classification is reasonable. Since the landowner has no right to expect zoning to continue, the courts are more concerned with the reasonableness of the new zoning as applied to the specific property and not the diminution in value under the new classification.     

From the Banan Tree of Kouroussa: Mapping the Landscape in Mande Traditional History

The West African Mande worldview links spiritual elements of myth, legend, and magic to conspicuous landscape features, the functional dimension of which is illuminated by a body of work on “native mapping” by anthropologists looking at Native American peoples. Efforts to interpret the Mande people’s perspective on their own history have focused on the actors and their deeds at the expense of attention to the physical environment in which events occur. While acknowledging the risks of relying on elements with no known date of introduction into the discourse, this article argues that in some cases iconic landscape references can be used to test the accuracy of Mande epic texts. Comparison of Mande topographical references to examples from Native American folklore demonstrates a universal concern for relating the past and present spatially in oral tradition.     

Binary decision analysis: An empirical approach to predicting and understanding organizational decisions

Binary decision analysis is an alternative approach to the analysis of organizational decisions that lends itself well to mathematic analysis. The purpose of this paper is to present and test the application of the binary approach to decision analysis and its subsequent mathematical testing using logit regression. Binary decision analysis focuses on each decision as a single choice between two distinct alternatives or a step in a sequence of such binary choices in more complex organizational decisions. Logit regression is a type of regression especially developed to deal with binary dependent variables in the context of inferential statistical testing. By successfully combining these two approaches, and adhering to the theoretical and statistical assumptions upon which they are based, a potentially useful tool of organizational decision analysis results. An applied example of this approach tests its utility. Appropriate conclusions about the method are made based on that test.