Jihad in a World of Sovereigns: Law,Violence, and Islam in the Bosnia Crisis

This article argues that jihads waged in recent decades by “foreign fighter” volunteers invoking a sense of global Islamic solidarity can be usefully understood as attempts to enact an alternative to the interventions of the “International Community.” Drawing from ethnographic and archival research on Arab volunteers who joined the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia‐Herzegovina, this article highlights the challenges and dilemmas facing such jihad fighters as they maneuvered at the edges of diverse legal orders, including international and Islamic law. Jihad fighters appealed to a divine authority above the global nation‐state order while at the same time rooting themselves in that order through affiliation with the sovereign and avowedly secular nation‐state of Bosnia‐Herzegovina. This article demonstrates an innovative approach to law, violence, and Islam that critically situates states and nonstate actors in relation to one another in transnational perspective.     

Illicit markets,violence, warlords,and governance: West African cases

It is commonly assumed that wartime leaders of illicit commercial networks engage in exploitative behavior and lack popular support. Evidence from West Africa suggests otherwise. Some wartime leaders use their commercial activities in post-conflict situations to build political support among demobilized fighters. Wartime leaders may then use these relationships to launch successful electoral campaigns and to protect themselves from political marginalization or even prosecution for their wartime activities. These developments represent the emergence of new forms of governance outside the framework of imported notions of reform and state-building.     

The application of NIST's Fire Dynamics Simulator to the investigation of carbon monoxide exposure in the deaths of three Pittsburgh fire fighters

A case is reported in which computer fire modeling was used to reevaluate a fire that killed three fire fighters. NIST's Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) was employed to model the fire in order to estimate the concentration of carbon monoxide present in the dwelling, which was the immediate cause of death of two of the fire fighters, who appear to have removed their face pieces in order to share available air. This estimate, along with an assumed respiration volume and known blood carboxyhemoglobin, was plugged into a standard equation to estimate the time of exposure. The model indicated that 27 min into the fire, the carbon monoxide concentration had already reached approximately 3600 ppm. At this concentration, and a respiration of 70 L/min, an estimated 3 to 8 min of exposure would have been required to accumulate the concentrations of carboxyhemoglobin (49, 44, and 10%) measured on the fire fighters at autopsy.     

Interdiction and Indoctrination: The Counter‐Terrorism and Security Act 2015

Lying behind the recent Counter‐Terrorism and Security Act 2015 is the phenomenon of foreign terrorist fighters which has sparked international and national attention. The 2015 Act deals with many facets of counter terrorism legislation, but its two principal measures are singled out for analysis and critique in this paper. Thus, Part I of the Act seeks to interdict foreign terrorist fighters by preventing suspects from travelling and dealing decisively with those already in the UK who pose a risk. Part V of the Act implements the second, broader aspect, of legislative policy, reflecting the UN emphasis on ‘Countering Violent Extremism’, through the statutory elaboration and enforcement of the ‘Prevent’ element of the long‐established Countering International Terrorism strategy, which aims to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting violent extremism. These measures are explained in their policy contexts and set against criteria of effectiveness, personal freedom, and accountability.     

200位深圳业主对决惠州开发商

近200位深圳业主在惠州采取的法律行动肯定是基于维护自己的权益，但他们能否给惠州地产界带来改变尚无答案     

Social Welfare and ISIS Foreign Fighters

European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research - We provide empirical support for a positive relationship between social safety spending and the phenomenon of ISIS foreign fighters, particularly...     

Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East. Hashemi Nader and Danny Postel,eds. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

In 2014, the Middle East appeared to teeter on the brink of an all-out sectarian war between Sunnis and Shi’as. In June of that year, the major Iraqi city of Mosul fell to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in a matter of days, bringing the group closer to its vow to eliminate all Shi’as and other religious minorities living in its self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate. Several hundred miles to the west, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps were actively training Afghan Shi’a fighters to support the demoralized troops of Bashar Assad.     

Does democracy or personal freedom affect the flow and return of IS foreign fighters?

European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research - A considerable number of foreign fighters who joined the Islamic State (IS) came from developed countries enjoying high levels of democracy and...     

A Collaboration,Not a Duel

In a number of articles published in LG, advocates take on the appearance, in readers' eyes, of lone fighters for truth, law, and justice in the courts. There is no other party on whom a defendant can depend for defense of his legal rights. The picture that emerges is that of the defense counsel as an "adversary" in the case, conducting a struggle over the defendant with another "adversary," the procurator, the state prosecutor. In such a situation, the latter naturally seeks to incriminate, to bring about punishment of the defendant. And for him this is, after all, easy, for behind him is the entire powerful system of the procuracy with all its organizational and technical resources!     

论党性原则与党员行为规范

强化共产党员的行为规范是加强党的执政能力建设的一个重要内容,是执政之固、保持党员先进性和党肌体惩腐自净的需要。强化共产党员行为规范,坚持党性原则是关键,党性原则要求共产党员时刻加强马克思主义理论修养;时刻坚持党内民主集中制原则;时刻牢记全心全意为人民服务的宗旨并身体力行之;时刻模范遵守党的纪律;时刻坚定中国工人阶级先锋队战士的政治立场。     

Metadata Retention as a Means of Combatting Terrorism and Organised Crime: A Perspective from Australia

On October 13, 2015, new laws came into force in Australia requiring telecommunications service providers to retain and store their ‘metadata’ for 2 years so that it remains available for analysis by anti-terrorism strategists and organised crime fighters. But there are ongoing issues associated with this legislative approach, including the threats to privacy thereby, and concerns that the retention system can be circumvented entirely. This paper will outline the legal and criminological questions that need to be explored in order to help policymakers work through these issues so that an appropriate balance can be struck between forestalling crime and terrorism using all available electronic means, and not unduly curtailing the legitimate rights to privacy that citizens in modern democracies currently expect to enjoy.     

The hooligan's mind

Football hooliganism is a world phenomenon and an everyday matter. Society spends a lot of money to prevent and control it. We need to know what hooligans think in order to anticipate their actions and prevent their violent behaviors. In this paper, I propose a theory of the hooligan's conscious mind, by analyzing the thinking of a real Italian hooligan who was my patient. I will show that violent behaviors of hooligans are not unconscious, because the mental states (both beliefs and goals) of hooligans are explicitly represented in their mind. In contrast, I will suggest that both supporting and fighting are planned (i.e., goal directed), because "recognized supremacy" is explicitly represented as the ultimate goal. In fact, hooligans support and fight in order to be recognized as good hooligans, i.e. as good supporters as well as good fighters.     

The Hamdan Case and the Application of a Municipal Offence: The Common Law Origins of 'Murder in Violation of the Law of War'

This article examines the legal origins of ‘murder inviolation of the law of war’, an offence defined in theUS Military Commissions Act (MCA) and resorted to in the caseagainst Salim Ahmed Hamdan. Hamdan was acquitted of conspiringto commit this offence based in part on a questionable legalinstruction. The acquittal may have been proper under a correctview of the law. Nevertheless, the specific context in whichthis offence was alleged, combined with the judge's instruction,highlights key aspects of the US approach to the prosecutionof unprivileged fighters for a ‘law of war violation’.This approach, which is substantially represented by the USSupreme Court's judgment in ex parte Quirin, has been criticizedby International Humanitarian Law (IHL) scholars as an erroneousview of customary IHL. However, close analysis of the legaland historical context in which this approach developed revealsthat ‘murder in violation of the law of war’ isa municipal US offence that represents an English common lawimplementation of the law of nations. This article explainswhy reading this offence to incorporate IHL war crimes, as Hamdan'sjudge did, is inappropriate in the context of the MCA and Hamdan'scase. It then demonstrates that the authorities relied uponby the Quirin Court, the Lieber Code and a treatise by authoritativeUS military law commentator, William Winthrop, understood punishmentfor law of war violations to be permitted by the law of nationsbut imposed under municipal law. Thus, ‘murder in violationof the law of war’ is properly viewed as a municipal,common law offence punishing unprivileged fighters. In futurestudies the author will address the appropriateness of prescribingand enforcing this municipal offence in extraterritorial armedconflict.     

Taking advantage of new technologies: For and against crime

Advancement in the field of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) changes not only our society but also crime. It opens more opportunities for crime and draws people into committing crime, leading to an unprecedented growth in the crime rate. On the other hand, it has also been applied to criminal justice. Crime fighters use the ICTs to control crime and gain efficiency in their policing efforts to service the community. This has led to more effective police work. As both criminals and police benefit from ICTs, these new technologies create new pitfalls for both criminals and law enforcement. Use of technologies by criminals represents challenges and risks to the crime fighter and vice versa. This triggers a crime race and raises notable social concerns on the adverse use and potential abuse of ICTs. Proactive territorial-based regulations, although called for, do not always provide solutions. The borderless nature of ICTs may not allow for rigid regulations and instead challenges the principle of criminal laws. As such, international laws and regulations combined with reliance on technologies are crucial to counter the crime race.     

Everyone Knows the Game: Legal Consciousness in the Hawaiian Cockfight

Past legal consciousness research has revealed a great deal about what individuals think and do with regard to law, but less attention has been paid to the social processes that underpin these attitudes, beliefs, and actions. This article focuses particularly on a “second‐order” layer of legal consciousness: people's perceptions about how others understand the law. Ethnographic observations and in‐depth interviews with cockfighters in rural Hawaii reveal how law enforcement practices not only affect cockfighting rituals, but are embedded within them. Police practices and informal rules work in concert to shape fighters' second‐order beliefs. These beliefs have implications for participants' understanding of central concepts, including order, disorder, and illegality. Examining legal consciousness from a second‐order perspective also underscores that notions of legitimacy are constantly created and recreated. Recognizing legitimacy's inherently relational nature helps us understand how experiences of law are synthesized into beliefs—for example, when an unusual police action directed toward a subgroup of fighters compromised the law's legitimacy for them. Foregrounding the relational nature of legal consciousness offers scholars a means to better understand and operationalize the dynamic nature of human relationships to law.     

Gangs and Coups D' Streets in the New World Disorder: Protean Insurgents in Post-modern War

The mutation of protean “street gangs” to insurgents illustrates that insurgents need not be ideologically oriented, and need not be traditional revolutionary fighters emerging from the mountains and jungles to take down or control a government. Rather, they may have their own specific commercial money-making motives, and can emerge out of the favelas, callampas, villas miserias, and pueblas jovenes (city slums) not so much to replace governments as to gain very lucrative freedom of movement and action within a supposedly sovereign national-state. Also, mature second and third generation gangs have been known to act as proxies and mercenaries for traditional nation-states that want to maintain “plausible deniability,” and to act as mercenaries for warlords, organized criminal organizations, and/or drug-trafficking cartels that—on certain occasions—need additional “fire-power”. The instability and lack of individual and state security generated by gangs phenomenon and their nefarious allies are also known to lead to the radical change of failed state status. In these terms, gangs are no longer a singular law enforcement issue. As crime and war become more and more indistinguishable, gangs must be considered a larger national security issue—that, paradoxically, must be viewed as a local concept.     

How an Authoritarian Regime in Burma Used Special Courts to Defeat Judicial Independence

Why do authoritarian rulers establish special courts? One view is that they do so to insulate the judiciary from politically oriented cases and allow it continued, albeit limited, independence. In this article I present a contrary case study of an authoritarian regime in Burma that used special courts not to insulate the judiciary but to defeat it. Through comparison to other Asian cases I suggest that the Burmese regime's composition and character better explain its strategy than does extant judicial authority or formal ideology. The regime consisted of war fighters for whom the courts were enemy territory. But absent popular support, the regime's leaders could not embark immediately on a radical project for legal change that might compromise their hold on power. Consequently, they used special courts and other strategies to defeat judicial independence incrementally, until they could displace the professional judiciary and bring the courts fully under executive control.     

The emergence of a group of four characters (Vāsudeva, Saṃkarṣaṇa, Pradyumna, and Aniruddha) in the Harivaṃśa: points for consideration

There are good reasons to think that Vāsudeva, Saṃkarṣaṇa, Pradyumna and Aniruddha already form a sort of implicit tetrad in the HV. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to often overlooked data related to this tetrad. (1) Upon first reading, the sequence of the HV episodes appears to be somewhat disconnected, and might lead one to conclude that no such grouping of these figures had as of yet taken place. Nevertheless, a closer look at the structure of the text makes it clear that these four characters are one of the main focuses of the narrator’s interest. (2) The relationships of these four heroes to one another and to other deities will be examined. In addition to their close kinship, these heroes with the exception of Aniruddha, are also said to be incarnations of other entities; thus the logic underpinning this grouping must be located at this other level. (3) Considered against the backdrop of the entire HV, one realizes that a basic pattern is established in which the presence of the goddess, under various names and functions, is required not only to facilitate Saṃkarṣaṇa’s and Kr̥ṣṇa’s births and actions on earth, but also the actions of Pradyumna and Aniruddha. In fact, neither Kr̥ṣṇa Vāsudeva, nor Saṃkarṣaṇa, nor Pradyumna nor Aniruddha can act entirely independently of her assistance. (4) The HV does not employ the word vyūha in connection with the group of Vāsudeva, Saṃkarṣaṇa, Pradyumna and Aniruddha. Nevertheless, during the battle waged to deliver Aniruddha, the idea of vyūha is present even if the word itself is not. HV 110.47–49 describes a true trivyūha composed of three fighters (Vāsudeva, Saṃkarṣaṇa and Pradyumna), who are arranged in such a way as to protect one another. The episode of Aniruddha’s liberation appears to be the missing link, showing clearly that at least Kr̥ṣṇa, Saṃkarṣaṇa and Pradyumna are capable of assuming a vyūha as they fight the Rudraic forces.     

The Universal Terrorist: The International Community Grappling with a Definition

Steps have been taken on the international level towards determininga widely acceptable definition of terrorism as a basis for internationalconventions. One basic distinction in this context is betweenstate-sponsored ‘official’ terrorism and individualterrorism directed against those in power. With respect to ‘individual’terrorism, a widely accepted definition refers to acts or threatsof violence committed with the intention to intimidate a populationin furtherance of some non-economic goal. The old problem ofdistinguishing terrorists from legitimate freedom fighters hasbeen alleviated but not yet totally resolved. Another issueconcerns the question of whether to exempt actions of and/ordirected against armed forces from the definition of terrorism.Overbreadth rather than vagueness is a problem of many currentdefinitions of terrorism: since they include as ‘baseoffences’ less serious violations of individual or communalinterests and even the mere intention or threat to commit them,they fail to reserve the stigma of terrorism to those offencesthat truly threaten the social fabric.     

The International Law of Naval Blockade and Israel’s Interception of the Mavi Marmara

In this article I discuss the legality of Israel’s interception of the Mavi Marmara on 31 May 2010. Although Israel’s stopping, boarding and inspection of the Mavi whilst on the high seas would undoubtedly constitute a violation of the law of the sea during peace time, I examine whether this violation can be justified on the basis of international humanitarian law. Specifically, Israel asserts that it was enforcing a naval blockade. I examine the legality of this blockade. I suggest that the blockade was unlawful on the basis that customary international humanitarian law permits the use of naval blockades only in times of an international armed conflict. I argue that on 31 May 2010 Israel was not engaged in an international armed conflict with Hamas. Moreover, I submit that customary international law prohibits the use of blockades where they are intended to deny the civilian population objects essential for its survival or where the damage to the civilian population is excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage. Israel argues that the intention of the blockade was to prevent war material from being delivered to Hamas fighters. This notwithstanding, I argue that because this blockade was causing a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza on 31 May 2010, it was incompatible with customary international law and therefore unlawful. Furthermore, even if the deployment of the blockade could be considered lawful, I argue that the enforcement of the blockade was unlawful because Israel’s use of force to capture the vessel went beyond what was necessary in the circumstances.