State formation and the political economy of India: The Rudolphian paradigm

Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph were world renowned political scientists and iconic academic couple who devoted six decades of their lives to teaching and researching India and South Asia. The liberal-centrist Rudolphian framework is clearly evident in their numerous works. Their writings show the innovativeness and interpretative richness of methodological pluralism questioning the hegemony of western theories and categories. The Geertzian notion of “culture bound” contextualism was central to their ideas on concept formation and “situated knowledge” paradigm. The phrases like “situated knowledge,” “self as other,” “imperialism of categories,” “modernity of tradition”, “living with difference,” and “post-modern Gandhi” provided newer conceptual tools and vocabularies in their writings. Writing within the broader framework of liberal-centrism, they continued to counter generalizations and deepen our understanding about the puzzle of Indian democracy and nature of the Indian state.     

The makings of a man: social generational masculinities in Bangladesh

Abstract

The emergence of specific forms of masculinity is bounded by space and time. While attention has been given to the contexts within which forms of masculinity develop, rather less is known about men’s enactment of masculinity from a social generational perspective. To address this gap, insights from Mannheim’s work on social generations, and Connell’s notions of masculinity are drawn upon to advance understanding of social generational masculinities in modern-day Bangladesh. A multi-site cross-sectional study was conducted in three cities, using interviews to elicit narratives of masculinity from 34 men of three social generations: an older generation (aged 53–75 years and growing up in the 1950s and 1960s), a middle generation (aged 30–46 years and growing up in the 1980s), and a younger generation (aged 19–27 and growing up post-1995). Thematic analysis was used to identify key notions around what it meant to be a man. While all men subscribed to the view that ‘real’ men should be providers, they differed by social generation with respect to perspectives on work, religion and sexuality. Historical, economic and cultural changes across the generations have shaped these differences, highlighting the importance of a social generational perspective for understanding masculinities in Bangladesh.     

Bullies, Gangs, Drugs, and School: Understanding the Overlap and the Role of Ethnicity and Urbanicity

Recent media attention has increased interest in behavioral, mental health, and academic correlates of involvement in bullying. Yet, there has not been much interest in investigating the co-occurrence of other health-risk behaviors, such as gang membership, weapon carrying, and substance use. The potential influence of contextual factors, such as youth ethnicity, urbanicity, and school characteristics, also has been overlooked in previous research. The current study examined different subtypes of involvement in bullying—as primarily a victim, as primarily a bully, as both a victim and bully, and no involvement—and the association with significant health-risk behaviors, including engaging in violence and substance use, as well as academic problems. The analyses use self-report data from 16,302 adolescents (50.3 % female, 62.2 % Caucasian, 37.8 % African American) enrolled in 52 high schools. A series of three-level HLM analyses revealed that bullies and bully/victims were generally at greatest of risk of being involved in violence, engaging in multiple types of substance use, and having academic problems. These findings extend prior research by emphasizing a potential link between involvement in bullying and multiple health-risk behaviors, particularly among urban and African American high school youth.     

Examining Associations Between Race, Urbanicity, and Patterns of Bullying Involvement

Research on the role of race and urbanicity in bullying involvement has been limited. The present study examined bullying involvement subgroups that relate to race, urbanicity, and the perceived reason for the bullying. Self-report data were collected from 10,254 middle school youth (49.8 % female; 62.4 % Caucasian, 19.0 % African American, and 5.6 % Hispanic) and latent class analyses were used to identify three subtypes of bullying involvement: low involvement (50 %), victim (31.3 %), and bully-victim (18.7 %). Irrespective of urbanicity (urban vs. non-urban), African American youth were more likely to be members of either the victim or bully-victim classes than the low involvement class. Further exploration of the community context suggested that urbanicity was associated with the increased likelihood of having been racially bullied. Urban bully-victims were also more likely to have been bullied about money than non-urban bully-victims. Findings underscore the importance of addressing both race and urbanicity for culturally sensitive prevention programming.     

The Politics of Jurisdiction

Jurisdiction is a central concept in the framing of the legal world but it has received short shrift in mainstream legal theory. This article examines the prevailing conceptual forms of jurisdiction in order to retrieve space for the political. The study of jurisdiction is also the study of the political community that it invokes and authorises. The first part of the article examines the three forms that jurisdiction takes in contemporary scholarship (territory, community, governance) to show that each form overlooks some implication of the political community that is tethered to jurisdiction. The second part of the article flips the inquiry to demonstrate the oversight of jurisdiction in theories of sovereign exception. The emergent understanding of jurisdiction as political provides an anchor for the study of jurisdiction going forward and highlights the potential role for jurisdictional arrangements in contemporary public law and constitutional law settings.     

The Development of Criminal Style in Adolescence and Young Adulthood: Separating the Lemmings from the Loners

Despite broad consensus that most juvenile crimes are committed with peers, many questions regarding developmental and individual differences in criminal style (i.e., co-offending vs. solo offending) remain unanswered. Using prospective 3-year longitudinal data from 937 14- to 17-year-old serious male offenders, the present study investigates whether youths tend to offend alone, in groups, or a combination of the two; whether these patterns change with age; and whether youths who engage in a particular style share distinguishing characteristics. Trajectory analyses examining criminal styles over age revealed that, while most youth evinced both types of offending, two distinct groups emerged: an increasingly solo offender trajectory (83%); and a mixed style offender trajectory (17%). Alternate analyses revealed (5.5%) exclusively solo offenders (i.e., only committed solo offenses over 3 years). There were no significant differences between groups in individuals?? reported number of friends, quality of friendships, or extraversion. However, the increasingly solo and exclusively solo offenders reported more psychosocial maturity, lower rates of anxiety, fewer psychopathic traits, less gang involvement and less self reported offending than mixed style offenders. Findings suggest that increasingly and exclusively solo offenders are not loners, as they are sometimes portrayed, and that exclusively solo offending during adolescence, while rare and previously misunderstood, may not be a risk factor in and of itself.     

Hospital Wet Mount Examination for the Presence of Sperm in Sexual Assault Cases is of Questionable Value

Many protocols for the examination of sexual assault victims include the preparation of vaginal wet mount slides to determine whether sperm are present and if so, whether the sperm are motile. We have reviewed findings in 501 case reports to compare the efficiency of sperm detection on wet mounts to subsequent crime laboratory results of sperm searches on vaginal swabs. Sperm were detected on wet mounts in only 41% of cases in which sperm were detected in the crime laboratory. Motile sperm were observed in only 12% of cases reporting a 0–9 h postcoital interval; in three cases, motile sperm were seen at 15 h and beyond, indicating that motile sperm are not reliable evidence of a short postcoital interval. These findings demonstrate that wet mount examinations are of little value in guiding subsequent analyses in the crime laboratory or in corroborating other investigative aspects of the case.     

Vitreous Humor: Biochemical Constituents in Estimation of Postmortem Interval*,†

Abstract: Analysis of biochemical constituents of the vitreous humor can be useful in determining the postmortem interval as there is proportionate postmortem rise of potassium and fall in sodium concentration. We studied 120 autopsy cases to determine the utility of potassium, sodium, calcium, and chloride levels, and sodium/potassium ratio in estimating the postmortem interval. There was a linear relationship between vitreous potassium concentration and postmortem interval, whereas an inverse relationship between vitreous sodium/potassium ratio and postmortem interval was noted. Other factors like age, sex, cause of death, season of death, and refrigeration of sample did not influence the vitreous humor potassium values. Using the statistical tools, a new formula was derived to determine the postmortem interval based on the potassium concentration and a review of previous literature is presented. Hence, the findings of this study supported a central role of vitreous humor biochemistry in many postmortem forensic and pathological evaluations.     

Shipping hazardous waste: implications for economically developing countries

Trade in hazardous waste has given rise to great concerns. One source of transboundary trade in hazardous waste is the ship-breaking industry. Though end-of-life vessels provide incentives to developing countries in the form of raw materials, these same developing countries are not only ill equipped to manage hazardous waste in an environmentally sound manner, but they also lack the resources to mitigate health impacts arising out of the handling of hazardous waste. These concerns of weaker economies have been addressed by the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal. However, the shipping of vessels with hazardous waste for final disposal in developing countries continues. To illustrate the inequity involved in such negotiations, we present a case study of the French aircraft carrier “Le Clemenceau”, which was sent to a shipyard in Alang, India, for disposal. This vessel became the focus of attention given its transport of an unknown amount of toxic waste, including asbestos. Similarly, there are reports that large quantities of toxic waste are still being imported by India from countries that ban the use of this waste. The use, import, and export of these chemicals raise serious environmental and health concerns. This paper assesses the implications of shipping such hazardous waste to developing countries and emphasizes the need for promoting research to plug the gaps and for implementing stringent measures to check the trade in environmental pollutants.