‘No one is Forgotten,Nothing is Forgotten’: Duty,Patriotism, and the Russian Search Movement

This article discusses duty in relation to the past, focusing on Russia’s nationwide Search Movement (Poiskovoe dvizhenie). This civil movement of volunteers searches for the remains of fallen soldiers left on the battlefields of World War II all over Russia and has young people as its main target group. Despite in many ways being critical of the state, the Search Movement explicitly wants to make a contribution to the patriotic upbringing of Russian youth. In its work, the movement relates to the official government plans for patriotic education. Several obligations are central to the notion of patriotism: for the Search Movement, an obligation to the past, to remember, is the most important. In this article I will examine how the malleable concept of duty allows the Search Movement to carry out work implicitly critical of state failings in the name of patriotism.     

An Application of Unconditional Quantile Regression to Cigarette Taxes

This study investigates heterogeneous response to state cigarette tax increases using unconditional quantile regression (UQR). We make two contributions to the empirical policy analysis literature. First, we argue that UQR provides more policy‐relevant information than conventional quantile regression in most empirical state policy analyses. Second, we document cigarette tax elasticity across a sample of adult smokers in the Current Population Survey Tobacco Use Supplements between 1992 and 2011. Our ordinary least squares regression show an imprecise negative relationship between taxes and cigarettes smoked in the past 30 days, while UQR reveals a U‐shaped relationship: Only moderate smokers reduce their smoking following a cigarette tax increase, and the magnitude of the effect is small. A $1.00 (135 percent) increase in the cigarette tax leads to a 3.5 percent reduction in the number of cigarettes smoked in the past 30 days among the most responsive smokers (implied tax elasticity = ?0.03).     

From Nomos to Hegung: Sovereignty and the Laws of War in Schmitt's International Order

Carl Schmitt's notion of nomos is commonly regarded as the international equivalent to the national sovereign's decision on the exception. But can concrete spatial order alone turn a constellation of forces into an international order? This article looks at Schmitt's work The Nomos of the Earth and proposes that it is the process of bracketing war called Hegung which takes the place of the sovereign in the international order Schmitt describes. Beginning from an analysis of nomos, the ordering function of the presocratic concept moira is explored. It is argued that the process of Hegung, like moira, does not just achieve the containment of war, but constitutes the condition of possibility for plural order.     

Social identities in the policy process

Policy Sciences - This paper introduces social identity theory and self-categorization theory to policy process research. Drawing from the prominent and widely acknowledged psychological social...     

Weisungsfreie Verwaltungsbehörden nach Art 20 B-VG idF der B-VGN 2008

Die Einrichtung weisungsfreier Verwaltungsbeh?rden war bislang dem Verfassungsgesetzgeber vorbehalten und die Kompetenz des einfachen Gesetzgebers im Wesentlichen auf die Einrichtung von Kollegialbeh?rden mit richterlichem Einschlag begrenzt. Mit der B-VGN 2008 wurde die Einrichtung weisungsfreier Verwaltungsbeh?rden nunmehr – iSd Vermeidung verfassungsrechtlicher Sonderbestimmungen – dem einfachen Gesetzgeber übertragen. Art 20 B-VG idF der B-VGN 2008 wirft zahlreiche Fragestellungen auf, die zT auch bereits den Gegenstand verfassungsgerichtlicher Verfahren bildeten. Der folgende Beitrag widmet sich einigen ausgew?hlten Themen, wobei insbesondere die Auswirkungen der Novelle auf Kollegialbeh?rden mit richterlichem Einschlag n?her untersucht werden sollen.     

Justice delayed? Internationalised criminal tribunals and peace-building in Lebanon,Bosnia and Cambodia

In countries emerging from violent conflict and/or mass atrocity, there is an urgent need to promote stability and often also widespread demand for accountability for abuses which have taken place. Debate has raged among scholars and practitioners about whether justice should be sacrificed or delayed for the sake of peace, or should be promoted even if it is in the short term destabilising. In many countries emerging from conflict processes of accountability, or transitional justice processes, operate almost simultaneously alongside processes of peace-building such as disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of ex-combatants, reform of the security sector and rule of law promotion, in the immediate aftermath of conflict. These can include domestic processes of truth-telling, prosecution, reparation and amnesty, or internationally promoted processes such as international criminal tribunals. They can also include internationalised criminal tribunals, which have mixed national–international staff. While scholarship has increasingly focused on the engagement between transitional justice and peace-building processes in the relatively near term, far less has examined the role of processes of accountability that follow conflict termination by a significant period of time, justice delayed. Drawing on recent fieldwork, the authors examine three internationalised criminal tribunals developed some 15 years after the termination of conflict in countries that experienced three very different types of conflict, conflict resolution and peace-building or reconstruction in Bosnia, Lebanon and Cambodia. They find that despite claims made by advocates for such institutions, such tribunals may only have limited impact on longer term peace-building and that the effects of flawed peace-building activities affect the operating environment of the tribunals.     

Human trafficking and drug distribution in Sweden from a market perspective—similarities and differences

Based on several studies, the aim of the article is to compare trafficking in women for the purpose of sexual exploitation to trafficking in drugs. Women are recruited and drugs are bought in other countries and transported to Sweden. What are the similarities and differences between the recruitment phase (women) and the purchases (drugs)? Both sexual services and drugs are sold in local markets. This requires marketing, contacts and access to customers. Women need accommodation and often a place to sell the services, drugs must be stored somewhere and prepared for sale. Procurement, trafficking and the purchase of sexual services are illegal and in the case of drugs even consumption and possession for personal use is illegal and prosecuted. Facilitators often play an important role in connecting customers and providers. This article will further describe what kind of organizational structure is needed to arrange these logistics and some different strategies used by organizers and distributors.     

Suicide with acetylsalicylic acid

The authors report on a suicide of a 41-year-old man with acetylsalicylic acid. According to his own statement the man had taken about 200 tablets of Aspirin (65 g acetylsalicylic acid) and initially showed no symptoms of intoxication. 4-5 hours after ingestion he vomited twice, but clear intoxication symptoms like convulsions and cardiac arrhythmia occurred not earlier than 11 hours after ingestion. Resuscitation by the emergency physician was not successful. The chemical-toxicological analysis (HPLC-DAD) of blood samples taken in the hospital approximately 12 h after ingestion showed salicylate in concentrations of 475 mg/L to 557 mg/L. The post-mortem concentrations of salicylate were within the lethal-toxic range, i.e. 762 mg/L in heart blood and 215 mg/L in femoral blood. All tested organs contained equally lethal salicylate levels (e.g. 503 mg/L in the liver and 251 mg/L in the brain).