Locke and the Politics and Theology of Toleration

Locke's theory of toleration has been understood to rest on the claim that persecution was insufficient to instil either (i) true or (ii) sincere belief in people. Although Locke did indeed make both these claims, neither was fundamental to his theory. Locke was principally concerned to deny that persecution was necessary to instil true or sincere belief; its insufficiency to those ends he, and his contemporaries, took for granted. His denial of the necessity of persecution presupposed that human beings were, in principle, naturally adequate to the discovery of God's wants for them. The same presupposition, which derives from natural theology, underwrote the views in politics and revealed theology that complete his theory and supplied its moral content. Contemporary theories of toleration purposing to proceed on Lockean assumptions are morally and philosophically impoverished by their failure to see the requirements laid on an adequate theory of toleration by genuinely Lockean terms.     

A re‐examination of welfare states and inequality in rich nations: How in‐kind transfers and indirect taxes change the story

Previous studies find large crossnational differences in inequality amongst rich Western nations, due in large part to differences in the generosity of welfare state transfers. The United States is the least generous nation and the one having the most aftertax and transfer inequality. But these analyses are limited to the effects of cash and nearcash transfers and direct taxes on incomes, while on average, half of welfare state transfers in rich nations are inkind benefits—health insurance, education, and other services. Counting inkind benefits at government cost and accounting for the indirect taxes used to finance transfers substantially reduces crossnational differences in inequality at the bottom of the income distribution. The findings have implications for how we think about tradeoffs across welfare state domains that all nations face and we illustrate this with reference to the current U.S. debate about health insurance. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

The Worldwide Search for Techno-thieves: International Competition v. International Co-operation

In an age of explosive worldwide growth of electronic data storage and communications, many vital interests require the effective protection of information. Today's information age requires businesses to compete on a worldwide basis, sharing sensitive information with appropriate parties while protecting that information against competitors, vandals, suppliers, customers, and foreign governments. Elements of the US civilian infrastructure, such as the banking system, the electric power grid, the public switched telecommunications network, and the air traffic control system, are central to so many dimensions of modern life that protecting these elements must have a high priority. Governments have an important stake in assuring that rival nations do not appropriate technology.     

Peace-building in Haiti: the case for vertical integration

In light of growing attention to grassroots and community-based approaches to peace-building, this paper explores this ‘local turn’ through an examination of ongoing efforts to address community-based insecurity in the urban slums of Port-au-Prince. In recent years, these communities have been the site of an ongoing series of experiments, involving a range of different actors, aimed at reclaiming them from armed gangs. However, the fragmented nature of these interventions and the range of different strategies deployed, from enforcement to inducement to engagement, have limited their overall impact. Drawing on a distinction between horizontally- and vertically-integrated peace-building, as well as on recent insights about the centrality of state-society relations in peace-building processes, we make a case for greater coherence and co-ordination between bottom-up community violence reduction efforts and top-down police reform. In the particular case of Haiti, we suggest that renewed interest in community policing may provide one platform through which a more vertically-integrated form of peace-building, one which connects community-level agency with wider, structural-level reform processes, might emerge.     

Explaining energy disputes at the World Trade Organization

The international trade regime has seen an explosion of challenges to government support for renewable energy in recent years, yet fossil fuel subsidies, which dwarf renewable energy subsidies, have remained unchallenged. Existing explanations for this puzzling discrepancy have focused on four rationales: major fossil fuel exporters have not historically been members of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization (WTO); WTO subsidies rules are inadequate to deal with the specifics of the fossil fuel trade; nations have developed separate institutions to govern energy; and all states have fossil fuel subsidies, so a challenge to one country’s subsidies will prompt a reciprocal challenge. This article makes two contributions. First, it uses a survey of existing renewable energy trade disputes to critique the existing explanations. Most importantly, the article shows that the threat of reciprocal litigation exists in the renewable energy sector, and that WTO subsidies rules are rarely used to challenge renewable energy subsidies. Hence, neither the threat of reciprocal litigation nor the relative ease of applying WTO subsidies rules explains the discrepancy in the number of disputes. Second, the article hypothesizes that the economic diversification of energy-producing countries is correlated with and may drive whether energy-producing countries face WTO challenges to their energy support policies. Most major fossil fuel producers lack significant non-fossil fuel exports that could be restricted in order to induce them to reform their fossil fuel policies, the usual mechanism for enforcing a WTO judgment. States may also be more likely to challenge new, rather than long-standing, trade restrictions. This suggests that trade challenges will arise more frequently where innovation leads to competition and a demand for new trade restrictions (as in renewable energy), as opposed to in mature sectors of the economy (i.e., the fossil fuel industry). Economic diversification, in turn, is a good predictor of innovation.     

Rethinking Chile’s ‘Chicago Boys’: neoliberal technocrats or revolutionary vanguard?

The term ‘Chicago Boys’ remains closely associated with the orthodox neoliberal adjustment implemented in Chile by the Pinochet dictatorship. The conventional portrayal of the Chicago Boys is of a group of US-trained, technocratic economists who institutionalised neoliberal principles and technocratic prerogatives in public policymaking in Chile. This article will contend the Chicago Boys were much more than neoliberal technocrats: they were a revolutionary vanguard that designed and led a capitalist revolution and radically altered the material and ideological foundations of the nation.