List of books to review

Abstract

Gandhi and British India are dead but not forgotten. Since his assassination in early 1948, Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi has continued to be analyzed, scrutinized, vilified, popularized, and sanitized. In fact, in recent years there appears to have been, if anything, an increase in interest in Gandhi's life and ideas at both the popular and academic levels. The British rulers of India have met a similar fate, and the past decade or so, especially, has seen the growth of both scholarly and popular interest in the British Raj. Part of the reason for this “return” of the Raj as a subject for novels, television, movies, and popular and academic history may have had to do with the rise of Thatcherism in Britain. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher and the British Conservative Party were involved in an explicit attempt to resurrect what they understood as Victorian virtues and regain some of the lost glory of the nineteenth and early twentieth century Pax Britannica. Their project, to reassert Victorian values and resurrect imperial pride, not surprisingly, came at the very time when Britain was in the throes of national decline; in ethnic, racial, and economic terms, the empire on which the sun never set has come home to roost.     

Political Order in Occupied Societies 1 : Realist Lessons from Germany and Japan

Abstract

The American occupations of Germany and Japan have many lessons to offer the United States today as it contemplates creating new political orders in Afghanistan and Iraq. The lessons that are to be drawn are not, however, the ones that are usually drawn by the current administration and others. First and foremost, a systematic comparison with the German and Japanese experiences clearly shows that the preconditions for democratization are not present in the contemporary cases, suggesting that the United States needs to recalibrate its objectives. Instead of seeking democratization, the United States should try first to create stability, even as it creates at least the institutional forms on which a more pluralistic political system can eventually be erected. The U.S. experience with state building in the Philippines and South Korea may be more relevant today than the German and Japanese cases. Other lessons that can be drawn from the German and Japanese as well as other past U.S. experiences with occupying countries include: the importance of finding a common threat that can unite enough indigenous elites that order can be established; integrating the new states into regional systems; and perhaps most importantly, using the instruments of transitional justice (trials, purges, censorship, etc.) in a fashion calculated to rehabilitate and incorporate supporters of the old regimes while delivering a modicum of justice.     

Nationalism and orthodoxy: Nichifor Crainic and the political culture of the extreme right in 1930s Romania

This article explores the interplay of religion, anti-Semitism, and personal rivalries in building the ultra-nationalist movement in 1930s Romania, using the career of Nichifor Crainic as a case study. As a theologian, Crainic created and taught a synthesis of nationalism and Romanian Orthodoxy which was broadly accepted by most ultra-nationalists in interwar Romania. As a journalist, Crainic directed several newspapers which spearheaded acrimonious attacks on democratic and ultra-nationalist politicians alike. As a politician, he joined and left both Corneliu Zelea Codreanu's Legion of the Archangel Michael and A.C. Cuza's National Christian Defense League before attempting to form his own Christian Workers' Party. Crainic's writings ultimately earned him a place as a minister in two governments and membership of the Romanian Academy. His career reveals an ultra-nationalist movement rife with division and bickering but united around a vaguely defined ideology of religious nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism.     

5.2 Education

Growth and Change in the Future City Region. T. Hancock, ed. Leonard Hill, 1976, pp. 262, £6.95.

Efficiency in the Social Services. Alan Williams and Robert Anderson, Basil Blackwell, 1975 pp. 147, £4.50.

Housing Policy and the Housing System. Alan Murie, Pat Niner and Christopher Watson, Allen &; Unwin, 1976, pp. 282, £6.95.

The Sale of Council Houses (A Study in Social Policy). Alan Murie, University of Birmingham, Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, Occasional Paper No. 35, 1976, pp. 166, £4.00.

The Power of the Purse: The Role of European Parliaments in Budgetary Decisions. David Coombes et al. (PEP), George Allen &; Unwin, 1976, pp. 393, £8.95 (hardback).

Government and the Planning Process P. H. Levin, George Allen &; Unwin Ltd., 1975, pp. 337, £6.50.

On Management. Harvard Business Review, Heinemann, 1975, pp. 751, £7.50.

Toward a Critical Administrative Theory. William H. Dunn and Bahman Fozouni, Sage Professional Paper in Administrative and Policy Studies, 1976, pp. 76, £1.50.

The Urban Criminal. J. Baldwin and A. E. Bottoms in collaboration with Monica A. Walker, Tavistock, 1976, pp. 262 £6.50, Social Science Paperback, £3.40.     

Objective ink color comparison through image processing and machine learning

Making changes or additions to written entries in a document can be profitable and illegal at the same time. A simple univariate approach is first used in this paper to quantify the evidential value in color measurements for inks on a document coming from a different or the same source. Graphic, qualitative discrimination is then obtained independently by applying color deconvolution image processing to document images, with parameters optionally optimized by support vector machines (SVM), a machine learning method. Discrimination based on qualitative results from image processing is finally compared to the quantitative results of the statistical approach. As color differences increase, optimized color deconvolution achieves qualitative discrimination when the statistical approach indicates evidence for the different source hypothesis.     

Identity and security in Korea

The summit meeting between the two Korean heads of state, which took place in Pyongyang in June 2000, constitutes a major turning point in the peninsula's history. As the effects of the meeting are gradually unfolding, a period of détente no longer seems impossible. But major difficulties remain unsolved and Korea will continue to be one of the world's most volatile areas. The task of this essay is to identify and analyse some of the entrenched political patterns that will challenge policy-makers in the years ahead. To do so it is necessary to portray the conflict in Korea not only in conventional ideological and geopolitical terms, but also, and primarily, as a question of identity. From such a vantage-point two components are essential in the search for a more peaceful peninsula. Substantial progress has recently been made in the first realm, the need to approach security problems, no matter how volatile they seem, in a cooperative and dialogical, rather than merely a coercive manner. The second less accepted but perhaps more important factor, revolves around the necessity to recognize that dialogue has its limits, that the party on the other side of the DMZ cannot always be accommodated or subsumed into compromise. Needed is an ethics of difference: a willingness to accept that the other's sense of identity and politics may be inherently incompatible with one's own.     

Forensic typing of autosomal SNPs with a 29 SNP-multiplex—Results of a collaborative EDNAP exercise

We report the results of an inter-laboratory exercise on typing of autosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) for forensic genetic investigations in crime cases. The European DNA Profiling Group (EDNAP), a working group under the International Society for Forensic Genetics (ISFG), organised the exercise. A total of 11 European and one US forensic genetic laboratories tested a subset of a 52 SNP-multiplex PCR kit developed by the SNPforID consortium. The 52 SNP-multiplex kit amplifies 52 DNA fragments with 52 autosomal SNP loci in one multiplex PCR. The 52 SNPs are detected in two separate single base extension (SBE) multiplex reactions with 29 and 23 SNPs, respectively, using SNaPshot kit, capillary electrophoresis and multicolour fluorescence detection. For practical reasons, only the 29 SBE multiplex reaction was carried out by the participating laboratories. A total of 11 bloodstains on FTA cards including a sample of poor quality and a negative control were sent to the laboratories together with the essential reagents for the initial multiplex PCR and the multiplex SBE reaction. The total SNP locus dropout rate was 2.8% and more than 50% of the dropouts were observed with the poor quality sample. The overall rate of discrepant SNP allele assignments was 2.0%. Two laboratories reported 60% of all the discrepancies. Two laboratories reported all 29 SNP alleles in all 10 positive samples correctly. The results of the collaborative exercise were surprisingly good and demonstrate that SNP typing with SBE, capillary electrophoresis and multicolour detection methods can be developed for forensic genetics.