Precedents in the Mountains: On the Parallels and Uniqueness of the Cases of Kosovo, South Ossetia and Abkhazia

International law, especially its customary part, evolves toa great extent through acts of State practice serving as precedents.If States do not want that their behaviour becomes law (i.e.if they prefer to act contrary to Kant's categorical imperative),they claim that certain acts of their behaviour are so unique,so peculiar that they must not be considered as contributingto the change of law (they express their opinio non juris).In the 1990s, the UN Security Council also found that only uniquenessof situations in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia-Herzegovina justifiedthe use of "all necessary means" to deal with those situations.More recently, the recognition of the independence of Kosovoby a number of States and the recognition of Abkhazia and SouthOssetia by Russia were described by recognizing States as beingso unique, so sui generis that they could not serve as precedents.The article argues that the uniqueness, or parallels for thatmatter, is usually in the eye of the beholder. Whether certainsituations, facts or acts serve as precedents depends to a greatextent on whether one is interested in seeing them as precedentsor not. People too often act upon their ideologies, beliefsand prejudices, not upon facts; the latter are interpreted inthe light of preconceived ideas, or as Charles King, writingof the Georgia–Russian war, observes, "unfortunately,Western thinking of Russia has too often substituted analogyfor analysis" ("Putin's March to the Sea", Foreign Affairs,Vol. 87, No. 6, November–December 2008). Then this articleproceeds to study in greater detail parallels and differencesbetween Kosovo, on the one hand, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia,on the other. The study ends with an inquest into the matterof how different States (or categories of States) deal withsecessionist problems.     

Regimes on Pillars: Alternative Welfare State Logics and Dynamics

Social welfare arrangements represent the conjunction of the twin logics of regimes and pillars. Regimes describe who receives the benefits and on what conditions; pillars describe who pays for and who provides the benefits. There are historical associations and '"natural" affinities' between certain regimes and certain pillars. But there is also scope for novel combinations and recombinations. Many contemporary welfare state reforms are best conceptualized in terms of shifting the mix of pillars and blurring regimes.     

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.     

Global Governance through Private Organizations

Governance at international and global levels is not only provided through states and markets but also through a variety of private organizations. The business world is well represented through this kind of organization and contributes to global governance through self-regulation across a number of industries. This article examines these efforts in the encompassing organization of global commerce, in the pharmaceutical industry and among dye stuffs producers. Smaller organizations are generally better suited to monitor compliance and impose sanctions on members violating the codes and norms behind self-regulation. Even small organizations, however, are confronted with problems and there is also evidence of large and very complex organizations having established effective mechanisms as alternatives to public regulation. These experiences can be built into theories on self-regulation as a form of global governance.     

The size of second chambers and European assemblies

Abstract. Second chamber sizes (in terms of seats) tend to increase with increasing population like first chamber sizes. Population seems to affect first chamber size directly, while the size of the first chamber goes on to affect second chamber size. When selected on the basis of territorial sub-units, the second chamber size tends to be around the geometric mean of first chamber size and the number of sub-units. From the viewpoint of representing the total population and the constituent sub-units, the European Parliament is more akin to a first chamber and its size has been approaching the cube root of population typical of first chambers. The Council of the European Union (CEU) is more akin to a second chamber and its size, in terms of qualified majority voting (QMV) votes, was approaching the size typical of second chambers at a given population. However, the Treaty of Nice has boosted the CEU to a size comparable to that of the European Parliament (EP), which may not be functional. Analogies to domestic first and second chambers suggest that the optimal size for the 27-country CEU might be 150 to 190 seats (Nice proposes 345), while that for the EP might be around 780 seats (Nice proposes 732).     

Managing Value Conflict in Public Policy

Policy issues are often characterized by conflicting values. Conventionally, students of public policy have conceptualized government's response to value conflicts as a matter of "balancing" competing goals, or striking trade-offs among values. In this paper we argue that this way of managing value conflicts represents only one possibility from a larger and more varied repertoire of strategies that draw from more complex models of practical reasoning. Policy actors do sometimes try to strike a "balance" among conflicting values, but they often avail themselves of other strategies as well: they cycle between values by emphasizing one value and then the other; they assign responsibilities for each value to different institutional structures; or they gather and consult a taxonomy of specific cases where similar conflicts arose. We argue that each of these strategies can be rational in some institutional contexts, and that conclusion challenges the view that policy values must always be treated as commensurable for rational policy choices to be made. Government responds to value conflict in ways that are more varied and changing than existing views of public policy imply.