A “Slice of Cheese”—a Deterrence-Based Argument for the International Criminal Court

Over the last decade, theorists have persistently criticised the assumption that the International Criminal Court (ICC) can produce a noteworthy deterrent effect. Consequently, consensus has emerged that we should probably look for different ways to justify the ICC or else abandon the prestigious project entirely. In this paper, I argue that these claims are ill founded and rest primarily on misunderstandings as to the idea of deterrence through punishment. They tend to overstate both the epistemic certainty as to and the size of the deterrent effect necessary in order to thus justify punishment. I argue that we should in general expect reasonably humane punitive institutions to lead to better consequences than if we abolish punishment entirely, and I show that, contrary to widespread assumption among critics of the ICC, we should not expect the conditions characteristically surrounding mass atrocity to undermine this presumption. Properly understood, the ICC equals adding another “slice of cheese” to our comprehensive crime preventive system modelled along the lines of James Reason’s Swiss cheese model of accident causation and risk management. Undoubtedly, some future perpetrators will elope through the holes in this layer too, but others will be deterred.     

Empty promises: Indonesia's non-ratification of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court

Southeast Asia is one of the most underrepresented regions in the International Criminal Court (ICC). I address the question of non-ratification of the Rome Statute with a case study on Indonesia. While the Yudhoyono Administration has repeatedly promised to join the ICC, ratification has not materialized. I argue that Indonesia's tradition of emphasizing the protection of state sovereignty and economic gains in its foreign policy decisions best explains why it remains outside the ICC's jurisdiction. I test this claim by exploring Indonesia's human rights record, potential legal restrictions for the ratification of the Rome Statute, and the influence of domestic political players and external pressures.     

The ICC and the Prevention of Atrocities: Criminological Perspectives

One of the founding principles of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is the prevention of atrocities by punishing those most responsible for them. This paper builds on the literature that has both hailed and critiqued the prospects of the ICC’s ability to deter future atrocities, adding insights from criminology and psychology to enhance the understanding of the ICC’s deterrent capabilities. This will allow for a more careful analysis of how the deterrence process exactly works. The paper then uses these insights to examine the ICC’s experiences over the past 14 years with deterring offenders. The main findings are that, although the ICC can constructively contribute to a normative shift toward accountability and a change in international rules of legitimacy, its prospects for the direct and meaningful deterrence of future atrocities are slim. The current practice of relying on the ICC as a crisis management tool is therefore both unwise and unfair.     

Discovering the New Face of Sovereignty: Complementarity and the International Criminal Court

This article examines the socially constructed nature of sovereignty in order to ascertain a more empirically based understanding of the role that this concept plays in the current postinternational order. In particular, it analyzes the practice of sovereignty in the construction of the newly forming International Criminal Court (ICC). In an attempt to understand the relationship between sovereignty and the ICC, the article addresses the following questions. Does the ICC undermine the principles of state sovereignty? What are the implications of this institution on sovereignty? Finally, can we consider the authority structure of the ICC a new form of sovereignty?     

Rivalry between Taiwan and the PRC in Latin America

Latin America and the Caribbean have been a major battleground of the “foreign policy war” between Taiwan and the PRC over international legitimacy, and recognition. This paper analyzes the growing rivalry between China and Taiwan and its implications. The first part of the paper examines the importance of Latin America and the Caribbean for both Beijing and Taipei. The second section explores political aspects of their involvement in the region. The third part assesses how Beijing and Taipei use economic diplomacy to meet their diplomatic objectives in Latin America. The fourth section examines the implications of the increasing rivalry between Taipei and Beijing in the region. This study is supported by a Fulbright scholarship and a faculty development grant from Merrimack College. The views in the paper are entirely mine and should not be ascribed to the institutions acknowledged above. I would like to express my appreciation to Wang Hsiu-chi at Tamkang University in Taiwan who provided me with excellent facilities during my field trip to Taiwan. Author would like to thank Curtis Martin, Lowell Dittmer, Xiaogang Deng, Antonio Hsiang, Tchen Tchiang, Baohui Zhang, Baogang Guo, Guoli Liu, Ping Li, and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the International Symposium on National Identity and the Future Cross-Strait Relations, University of Macau, in December, 2004.     

国际刑事法院侦查程序初探

百年来,为惩治战犯、实现和平,国际社会成立了五大国际刑事法院,构建了新的法律体系。作为完整的诉讼机构,国际刑事法院设置了国际检察官与案件调查制度,产生了新型的国际侦查程序。国际侦查程序主要包括调查的启动、调查的实施、结果的处分、程序的监督等方面内容。探析国际刑事法院侦查程序对于完善国际刑事法理论与实践具有重大意义。     

From Passive Objects to Active Agents: A Comparative Study of Conceptions of Victim Identities at the ICTY and ICC

Contemporary developments in international criminal justice have led to new systems of victims' rights and redress. A number of studies have identified the processes of victim protection, participation, and reparations at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Court (ICC). However, little attention has been paid to how these changing practices have served to constitute victim identities. This article seeks to address this gap in scholarship through an analysis of the changing definitions, status, and integration of victims into these institutions. It explores how institutional practices serve to construct victims as either “passive objects” or “active agents” of the law. It then considers whether this “active agent” translates to ideas of the person in all social contexts. The article argues that the ICC needs to consider whether victims hold the necessary personal, material, and social “resources” required to action their rights in this institutional context.     

Revisiting the Political Theory of Party Identification

Recently, Lewis-Beck et al. (The American Voter Revisited, 2008b) re-created The American Voter using contemporary data. Although these scholars ultimately conclude that voters today behave in ways that are consistent with the account of voting behavior presented in The American Voter, their work nonetheless highlights the importance and value of re-examining past ideas. Given that Lewis-Beck et al. have re-tested the findings of The American Voter, it is both timely and worthwhile to re-examine Fiorina’s (Retrospective voting in American national elections, 1981) political theory of party identification, which is often seen as a critique of the theory of party identification presented in The American Voter, using newly available panel data. In this paper, I re-examine Fiorina’s (Retrospective voting in American national elections, 1981) political theory of party identification using data from the 2000–2002–2004 NES panel study. In addition to applying Fiorina’s approach to party identification to new data, as a more robust test of Fiorina’s theory, I develop a model of party identification where changes in party identification are modeled as a function of the actual changes in retrospective political evaluations. Overall, my findings are broadly consistent with the findings from Fiorina’s original model of party identification; however, my analysis suggests that the distribution of opinions in the electorate and elite signals may be important to changes in party identification.     

Can it start small, but end big? expanding social assistance in South Africa

Generating heated politics in South Africa is a proposal to introduce a universal basic income grant, known as “BIG”. The “gaps” in the existing system of social assistance grants have caught the attention of activists and politicians across the political spectrum. Most concur on the need to expand the system, but the issue of how its “gaps” should be closed is a matter of great political divergence. To cast light on the significance of these debates, I show how the system's “gaps” are more complicated than measurements of poverty and inequality may suggest. Following the social and economic relations that develop around social grants, my analysis foregrounds a tension in the existing assistance system. Social grants provide a critical source of income for recipients and their kin, assisting them to confront the challenging realities of current labor market conditions. At the same time, social grants act as conduits for historical forces to articulate with local conditions and reshape relationships between citizens, the state, and the market. This tension points to the ambiguity of the BIG proposal and of its potential to engender a larger transformation. My research in South Africa was supported by grants from the Human Rights Program and the Richter Fund at the University of Chicago. I would like to thank the South Africans I interviewed at welfare offices and legal advice centers about the social assistance system and the experience of receiving grants. I also thank Makhotso Pholosi, Tebogo Segale, Pumi Yeni, the staff at the Legal Resources Centre in Pretoria, and my advisors, Jean Comaroff and Jennifer Cole. A version of this paper was presented at the 2002 conference of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network and I thank the members of the panel on the South African Basic Income Proposal for their input.     

Democracy and countries with Muslim majorities: a reply and update

My empirical results in Potrafke (2012) confirm past conclusions that Muslim-majority countries are less likely to be democratic. Hanusch takes issue with my results—and by inference with all past empirical results on the relation between Islam and democracy. In his comment on my study, Hanusch indicates that he believes I was using the POLITY IV index. He has not realized, as I made most clear, that the purpose of my study was to show results based on new data from Cheibub et al. (2010). Hanusch claims to have reversed the conclusion that having a Muslim majority is associated with having autocratic government. He establishes his conclusion by excluding the heartland of Islam from the estimation sample. For his estimates, Hanusch moreover uses data that do not appear to exist, at least in the claimed sources. I update my estimates to address issues that Hanusch raises. My new results confirm the conclusion that countries with Muslim majorities are less likely to be democracies. In deriving this result, I do not follow the strategy proposed by Hanusch of excluding from the data sample the countries in the heartland of Islam.     

Stockholm Syndrome: Radical Islam and the European Response

This paper argues that too restrictive an understanding has governed both academic and popular analysis of the social, cultural, and political conflicts between the Western European majorities and their Islamic minorities. These conflicts are typically viewed through the prisms of majority racism and/or minority economic disadvantage. While such social facts are undoubtedly important, I argue that the ideology of radical Islamism must be taken seriously in any analysis of the problem. Thus, I do two things in this essay. I outline the elements in twentieth-century radical Islamic writings that relate to the relationship between (broadly understood) Islamic and Western civilization; I also offer an overview of the now long-lived situation of culture war in Western Europe that supports my argument that Islamic cultural pathology, more than European racism, is the chief causal factor. This is intended as a warning that “clash of civilization” and “Islamo-fascism” models, usually disparaged in the academy, must be taken quite seriously.     

Zeugmatic Spaces: Eastern/Central European Feminisms

This article stems from a sense of discontent and frustration that the cultural position of Eastern/Central European feminisms have not been theorized enough in comparison with other non-First World feminisms. To construct my argument, I use a rhetorical figure, zeugma, which is able to underpin the specificity and the commonalities of the post-Communist area feminisms as compared to the hegemonic feminisms of the world or to Third World feminisms. Zeugma (from an ancient Greek word meaning “bridge”) is a figure of speech that relies on balance and acceptance of grammatical difference. An almost perfect cultural space shifter, Eastern/Central Europe produces feminist discourses that constitute, in my opinion, zeugmatic spaces in the worldwide concerto of world feminisms. I suggest that many of the problems of contemporary feminist theory arise from the context that has defined feminist theory. Only if we fully understand this context will we be in a position to understand how to escape from the dilemmas posed by this context” (Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care) “Which is why the critique of all discourses concerning gender, including those produced or promoted as feminist, continues to be as vital a part of feminism as is the ongoing effort to create new spaces of discourse, to rewrite cultural narratives, and to define the terms of another perspective—a view from ‘elsewhere’” (Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender)

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Transitional justice in ongoing conflicts

I am honoured to inaugurate the first edition of the InternationalJournal of Transitional Justice. As a prosecutor in my native Argentina, I was closely involvedin its process of transitional justice. Argentina's militarydictatorship – an organized bureaucracy which came topower in 1976 with national and     

Do Policies of Multiculturalism Change National Identities?

‘Policies of multiculturalism are often criticised for undermining national identities in one of three ways and in this article I suggest why this is questionable and then point to a more plausible relationship between the two. More specifically, I offer a hypothesis which is that policies of multiculturalism change national identities and I argue that this hypothesis is both theoretically plausible and empirically plausible in at least one instance. This argument is made in three stages and in the first of them I explain what I think policies of multiculturalism and national identities are. In the second stage I present my hypothesis and explain why it is theoretically plausible. In the third stage I use new evidence to suggest why my hypothesis is also empirically plausible in at least one instance. In the final stage I show why a sceptic who might doubt whether my hypothesis is plausible in other instances need not do so.’     

What Really Happens: Department Secretary Appointments,Contracts and Performance Pay in the Australian Public Service

This account of the practice in the Australian Public Service (APS) for appointing department secretaries, using contracts and rewarding for performance, is based on my own experience in being appointed, reappointed and not reappointed, and in receiving and not receiving performance pay. It also draws on my experience as Public Service Commissioner in assisting with appointments and performance pay of secretaries. I also discuss weaknesses in the current system, and the drift to ‘politicisation’. I was first appointed as a department secretary at the end of 1993 after 25 years in the APS including 15 years in the Senior Executive Service (SES) in three different portfolios (Social Security, Finance and Defence). I was secretary of three different departments (Administrative Services, Housing, and Health, some of which went through changes in name and responsibilities during my tenure) before being appointed as Public Service Commissioner from the beginning of 2002. I retired from the APS in June 2005.     

Lingua franca and linguistic territoriality. Why they both matter to justice and why justice matters for both

The bottom line of my book Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World (Oxford University Press, 2011, paperback 2015) can roughly be captured in the combination of two recommendations: that the democratization of competence English as a lingua franca should be fostered in Europe and elsewhere and that language communities should be allowed to protect their language against the invasion of English and other powerful languages by imposing their own language in public communication and public education within some territorial boundaries. Most of my critics attack one or the other of these recommendations and some question some of the presuppositions of my whole approach. In this response, I try to refute some of these critiques by clarifying my claims or spelling out my arguments, and I make whatever concessions I believe are required.     

The possibility of secular human rights: Alan gewirth and the principle of generic consistency

This article explores Alan Gewirth’s argument for a secular foundation for the idea 2 of human rights as a possible response to Michael J. Perry’s claim “that the idea of 3 human rights is…ineliminably religious.” I examine Gewirth’s reasoning for constructing 3 a theory, namely that existing theories are fundamentally flawed and leave the idea of human rights without a logically consistent foundation, before considering in detail his claims for the Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC). Having looked at his critique of numerous other theories, as well as at his own argument about human action grounding basic rights to freedom and well-being, I then offer a critique of Gewirth’s PGC. Ultimately my conclusion is that Gewrith's 3 theory relies too heavily on the notions, first that we have a meta-desire not to contradict ourselves and, second, that we are unable to find persuasive justifications for our behavior that might allow us to avoid self-contradiction. If one is not troubled by charges of self-contradiction or, as is more often the case, one does not recognize that one’s victim is as much a human being as oneself, Gewirth’s theory 5 V 3 will not seem particularly persuasive. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A28BB025 00003     

Last Thoughts on <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Last Intellectuals</Emphasis>

Over twenty years ago my book The Last Intellectuals put into circulation the phrase “public intellectual.” The term unexpectedly enjoyed great success. It encapsulated a new division between a professional or academic intellectual focused on his or her specialty and an intellectual orientated to a larger public. The former tend to disappear into the university, while they latter write for the educated public. In the twenty years since its publication, my book has been sharply challenged. Moreover the emergence of African-American and women intellectuals, and well as new developments such as Internet, have possibly undermined my thesis. Yet these phenomena amount to revisions, not refutations, of my thesis. Moreover the role of intellectuals in France and Germany suggest that the same process of academization is taking place in other advanced industrial nations. What is called for is not nostalgia or its opposite, a celebration of everything that happens, but a consideration of the real shifts that affect the lives and work of intellectuals.

Taking the Measure of Congress: Reply to Chiou and Rothenberg

e-mail: binder{at}gwu.edu Chiou and Rothenberg raise important questions about how tomeasure key concepts in the study of legislative stalemate inthe U.S. Congress. In challenging my choice of measures to capturebicameral differences, Chiou and Rothenberg argue that my findingsare the artifact of measurement error. In this reply, I reviewthe hurdles involved in measuring policy views over time andacross institutions and suggest that the preferred measure ofChiou and Rothenberg falls short for measuring bicameral differences.Second, I assess the extent to which measurement choices affectthe robustness of my findings about the determinants of gridlock.Drawing on new measures and model specifications, I show thatmy results are robust to alternative specifications. I concludewith an assessment of the broader challenges posed by how wemeasure critical concepts in the study of congressional performance.