Confronting Religion: Veiled Witnesses,the Right to a Fair Trial and the Supreme Court of Canada's Judgment in R v N.S.

The Supreme Court of Canada's decision in R v N.S. is significant because the majority seems to endorse an understanding of confrontation that assumes a defendant's right to a fair trial is imperilled by a witness who seeks to give evidence while wearing the niqab. The case is of interest because it permits reflection upon the interrelationship between the right to a fair trial and the right to confront witnesses enshrined in Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Given that the European Court of Human Rights conceptualises confrontation in epistemic terms, it is argued that it would be unlikely to find that a conviction based upon evidence from a niqab‐wearing witness would infringe the right to a fair trial. This note examines the value of demeanour evidence and whether the majority in R v N.S. was correct that the abrogation of the ability to assess demeanour evidence necessarily undermines trial fairness.     

Affect Regulation and the Cycle of Violence Against Women: New Directions for Understanding the Process

The process of the intergenerational transmission of violence is not well understood. A risk and resilience model of criminal violence against women was investigated using secondary data. The sample was composed of adolescent male juvenile delinquents who had been physically abused by their parents, and who were followed up at ages 25 and 31. A series of structural equation models were fit to investigate whether dysregulated affect mediated the effects of attachment and family chaos on the adult perpetration of violence against women. These models support the hypothesis that affect dysregulation may act as a mediator. Results raise new ideas about the mechanisms by which violence may be transmitted across generations.     

加强党内民主带动人民民主

发展社会主义民主政治是我国全面建设具有中国特色社会主义的基本目标之一.胡锦涛总书记在中国共产党十七大报告中对加强社会主义民主政治和加强中国共产党党内民主建设的阐述,既有高度的理论性,又具有实践上的可操作性,引起了国内外的广泛关注.这些论述对今后一个时期加强党内民主和社会主义民主政治建设具有重大意义.     

Democracy and Legitimacy in the Shadow of Purposive Competence

This article argues that the way EU competences are defined plays an important role in the social legitimacy problems of the EU. The fact that its powers are purposive compels the EU to privilege narrow functional goals and act in a highly focused way. This has the consequence that politics cannot be meaningful within the EU, since essential choices of direction are pre‐empted. It also has the consequence that EU law is over‐instrumental and lacks expressive qualities, alienating the public. Now that EU law is so broad, the same defects are being imposed increasingly on Member States. Without another form of conferred power, the legitimacy of the EU, and of law and government in Europe, will be increasingly undermined. The constitutional DNA, which has been a functional success for Europe, may also be its political nemesis.     

Affect and Fairness in Economics

A strained relationship exists between mainstream economics and ethics. Over the last decade, behavioral economists have strongly argued for the importance of fairness in motivating behavior, based on substantial experimental evidence. Two main approaches to the modeling of fairness have been proposed: the outcome-based inequity aversion approach, and the intention-based reciprocity approach. Both approaches have been quite successful in explaining the experimental evidence. Nonetheless, this paper questions the role that is assigned to fairness in these models and the way fairness is incorporated, using recent experimental findings concerning emotions and fairness perceptions. The analysis supports the view that feelings are important for justice, also from a policy perspective, and pleads for closer attention being paid to the functioning of emotional brain systems.

Cosmopolitan Democracy and the Rule of Law

The ongoing process of globalization calls out for novel forms of transnational liberal–democratic decision–making. In this spirit, David Held and a group of interlocutors (especially Daniele Archibugi) propose an ambitious model of "cosmopolitan democracy." Although the proponents of cosmopolitan democracy are right to insist that transnational liberal democracy must avoid the dangers of an excessively centralized world–state, their own efforts to do so ultimately fail. The weaknesses of their ideas about the notion of the "rule of law" generate unforeseen theoretical difficulties for their account. Any transnational network of liberal–democratic governance worth defending will need to do a better job preserving a substantial quotient of traditional rule of law virtues.     

Democracy and Justice

Mackies volume is a path-breaking, thorough, and innovative overview of the subject of social choice and its implications for understanding democracy. It is made up of various lines of analysis including historical interpretation, a review of massive numbers of statistical studies and a careful analysis of numerous aspects of the logical proof of Kenneth Arrows Impossibility Theorem. It will be must reading for all who wish to understand democracy given the work in the social choice field over the last 50 years. On the other hand, it has its shortcomings. By focusing on a particular school of attackers of democracy (led by William Riker), the book becomes less balanced and less useful than it might be. Most unfortunately, Mackie does not take the plunge to see what positive elements flow from such related fields as theories of justice. Finally, by avoiding these other fields, the centrality of politics in the pursuit of justice is one of the implications of the analysis that is missed.     

Democracy and Disagreement

Abstract. According to Popper's critical rationalism, the possibility of disagreement is at the heart of open societies. If this is assumed to be true, is it not illiberal to try to justify principles of justice, which can be regarded as the subject of an unending collective deliberation? I suggest that it is not, using an analogy with scientific progress. Moreover, I try to show that Rawls's achievement is misunderstood if one forgets that it is supposed to overcome the antinomy between “la liberté des Modemes” and “la liberté des Anciens.” In this respect, I insist on some unnoticed similarities between Rawls's and Popper's points of views. I conclude on the idea of the “neutrality” of the theory of justice, suggesting a link between Rawls's approach and the French republican tradition.     

法治化进程中的村民自治问题初论

中国法治实现的关键在于民主;中国能否长出民主的关键在于农村,今天存在子中国农村的村民委员会的“科层化”倾向非常严重。如果希望村民能真正做到自治,村委会就不应该被“科层化”以至成为行政权力的填充物,只有这样,中国的民主才能健康成长。     

Democracy and the Symbolic Constitution of Society

Building on Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms, this paper argues that the continuities and discontinuities characterizing the passage from medieval politics to modern democracy can best be understood by reference to political power's symbolic structure. For the one, political power, whether theocratic or democratic, always mediates an absolute power; as mediation, political power enacts the twofold movement which Cassirer has identified as characteristic of all human symbolization: a distancing of, and approximation to, reality. For the other, democracy institutionalizes a category distinction between meaning and being, making of political unity a functional, rather than substantial, unity.     

Religion and Bullets in North-Eastern Nigeria

As an entity, Nigeria is cracking and melting away. The barometer that measures the pressures its people have exerted on one another is fast reaching its elastic limit. The problem with Nigeria lies in the fact that although we honestly could live together simply, it seems it is difficult to simply live together. My submission here does not portray the usual flamboyant intellectualism associated with academic lectures. It is devoid of the normal bibliographic dressing found in journal literature. It may not pass the test of professorial or doctoral research. It is something else. It is an honest reflection from someone caught up in the web of bitter experiences. It is an experience of one who has seen a brother kill his own brother in the Name of God. It is a story of brethren turned enemies. It is a story of a people who fight for God in a battle that is not His. I am from Michika Local Government of Adamawa State in Northern Nigeria; I am the Catholic Bishop of Yola Diocese, the Chairman Christian Association of Nigeria Adamawa State Chapter and this is my story.     

二元民主结构中的党内民主与人民民主

中国的民主结构是由党内民主与人民民主构成的独特的二元民主.其中,党内民主是核心和灵魂,是民主发展中的主要矛盾和矛盾的主要方面.党内民主领导和决定着人民民主,根本的是要通过党内民主的先进性来实现,但将西方政治学或法学中的所谓"合法性"理论适用于党内民主对人民民主的领导,是不恰当的.充分研究党内民主,大力发展党内民主,打开中国民主发展之门的金钥匙就找到了.     

Corporations,Sovereignty and the Religion of Neoliberalism

This article seeks to contribute to the thinking of forms of corporateness, sociality and authority in the context of, but also beyond, neoliberalism, the neoliberal state and neoliberal accounts of the corporation. It considers neoliberalism in relation to the theological genealogies of modernity, politics and economy, and the way in which neoliberalism itself functions as a secular religion—one which intensifies liberal individualism and involves a blind faith in the market redefining all social interactions in terms of contract. I turn to the theological genealogies of sovereignty and economy, and of the corporation, as a way of grounding a radical consideration of collectivity and sociality. For, while the rise of neoliberalism is associated with the growth of multi-national or trans-national corporations, the privatisation of state assets and the corporatisation of public institutions, each of these involve not a diminishing of the state or the project of state sovereignty but rather its reformulation, reaffirmation and intensification. The corporation, despite being redefined as the interaction of fundamentally self-willing and contracting individuals operating in the market, is still fundamentally intertwined with state sovereignty. Attempts to address or respond to corporate power need to go beyond calls for greater regulation of corporations, increased corporate social responsibility or even the desire to eliminate corporate personhood. Rather, what is required is a greater emphasis on the notion of corporateness that undergirds the theological genealogy of the corporation—for if neoliberalism functions as a religion then part of the solution may be a theological one.     

正确把握民主和集中两种手段的作用

建设社会主义民主政治,是建设中国特色社会主义的根本性问题。在民主问题上,不少人长期存在把民主理想化、目标化、片面化、绝对化的思想误区。其实,民主总体上是一种在社会政治生活中起基础性调节作用的手段。资本主义可以用,社会主义也可以用。不同阶级使用它,它就具有不同的本质属性。民主同其他任何事物一样,也有双重性,并非是完美无缺的东西。民主对社会政治生活的调节作用不是万能的,必须有集中手段的宏观调控作用相配套。两种手段并用,才能确保社会长治久安、稳定和谐。民主集中制是我们政治体制的优势所在。我们要在推进社会主义民主政治的过程中,从法律上完善民主和集中两种手段,适度选择民主的内容和形式,重点实现立法民主化、决策科学化、选人科学化、财政透明化、执法公开化,从而实现好、维护好、发展好人民的根本利益。