Alignment Cooperation and Regional Security Architecture in the Indo-Pacific

ABSTRACT

Although the US-led system of formal alliances remains the main pillar of the regional security architecture in Asia, alignment cooperation – centred on the Indo-Pacific maritime conceptualisation of the region – has been on the rise. This includes informal bilateral and minilateral agreements for security collaboration between regional and extra-regional US treaty allies or close security partners, notably Japan, Australia, India, the United Kingdom and France. While the various alignments complement and address the deficiencies of the formal US-led alliances, the functional and informal characteristics of alignments allow countries to pursue security cooperation both in conjunction with the United States and independently of it. This leads to a more fluid security architecture that increasingly reflects the diversity of emerging regional ‘architects’, among which Japan is assuming a leading role, as much as the region’s array of new security challenges.     

Theory of Custom,Dogmatics of Custom,Policy of Custom: On the Threefold Approach of Polish‐Russian Legal Realism

Proceeding from the insights of Petra?ycki, Polish‐Russian legal realists (PRRs) distinguished legal theory, legal dogmatics, and legal policy. Legal theory describes legal phenomena in a value‐free way and formulates causal laws concerning those phenomena. Legal dogmatics and legal policy are, by contrast, value‐laden sciences involving the subject's—i.e., the scientist's—own attitudes toward existing or imagined phenomena: Dogmatics evaluates behaviors based on the subject's adoption of given normative sources (NSs) as binding, while legal policy evaluates the effects produced by given NSs based on causal laws and on the subject's goals (for Petra?ycki, these goals come down to that of fostering love, or benevolence). PRRs then conceptualize custom as a representation of people behaving in a certain way (R_c): We have a custom on the threefold condition that (a) R_c is believed true by a given X, (b) R_c causes the existence of a given normative psychical experience (NPE) in X, and (c) X expressly refers to—or would refer—to R_c in justifying an NPE. PRRs use the term customary law to refer to legal experiences (i.e., NPEs involving a sense of entitlement) caused and justified by an R_c. From a theoretical perspective, both the subject's adoption of custom as a binding NS and its truth are irrelevant. It is only the presence of a customary NPE in the X under study that matters. From a dogmatic perspective, by contrast, what matters is (a) whether the dogmatician—qua subject—adopts custom as a binding NS, (b) whether it is true that people behave in a given way b_w, and (c) whether b_w resembles the behavior that is deontically qualified in the norm under dogmatic evaluation. Finally, from a legal‐political viewpoint, PRRs hold that customary law in modern societies, owing to its conservative nature, should be eradicated for the goal of removing inequalities and fostering benevolence.     

A Break?

Since the financial crisis of 2008 we have seen a rise in suicides across the world. Greece for example in 2011 saw a sustained increase in suicides of 35.7%. In this article I draw our attention to well-publicized suicides that took place in Greece. I focus on the suicide notes left behind. The suicide notes, I suggest, can be read as offering us a critique of the anxious times in which we find ourselves. They are offering us a critique in two senses: (a) a critique of the way we are being governed (through austerity memorandums and a neoliberal logic); and (b) a critique of the affirmative ways of responding towards the financial crisis (through occupations, demonstrations etc.). Consequently these suicide notes can be read as a demand for having a break from this neoliberal logic and organization of life and asking us to re-imagine our social and political realm. In arguing thus, the article draws on Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown and others.     

The Issue of Age Estimation in a Modern Skeletal Population: Are Even the More Modern Current Aging Methods Satisfactory for the Elderly?,

The main idea behind age assessment in adults is related to the analysis of the physiological degeneration of particular skeletal structures with age. The main issues with these procedures are due to the fact that they have not been tested on different modern populations and in different taphonomic contexts and that they tend to underestimate the age of older individuals. The purpose of this study was to test the applicability and the reliability of these methods on a contemporary population of skeletal remains of 145 elderly individuals of known sex and age. The results show that, due to taphonomic influences, some skeletal sites showed a lower survival. Therefore, the methods with the highest percentage of applicability were Lovejoy (89.6%) and Rougé‐Maillart (81.3%), followed by Suchey‐Brooks (59.3%), and those with the lowest percentage of applicability were Beauthier (26.2%) and Iscan (22.7%). In addition, this research has shown how for older adults the study of both acetabulum and auricular surface may be more reliable for aging. This is also in accordance with the fact that auricular surface and the acetabulum are the areas more frequently surviving taphonomic insult.     

From unknown to known: Identification of the remains at the mausoleum of fosse Ardeatine

During the Second World War, on 24th March 1944, 335 Italians were massacred near Rome by the occupying forces of Nazi Germany. Four months later forensic examination led to the identification of 323 out of 335 victims. After approximately 60?years, the identification of the remaining unidentified twelve victims began with anthropological and genetic analysis carried out by a team of Italian forensic experts. Anthropological analysis was performed in field in order to confirm the sex of each victim and verify the presence of only one individual in each grave for a correct sampling. Selected bone fragments for each individual were then collected and transferred to the laboratory for genetic analysis. Although the anthropological ante mortem information was limited, morphological and metrical data was collected for a possible future identification of the victims. Subsequently, the typing of autosomal loci, Y-STR and mtDNA D-loop region of all bone and available reference samples was conducted. LR and cumulative LRs obtained from autosomal STR and Y-STR results confirmed the alleged relationship between three victims and their relatives with values over 10⁴ (one sample) and 10⁶ (two samples). Therefore, the genetic analysis offered the families the possibility of replacing the number of the grave with the name of the victim.     

Taphonomic Marks on Pig Tissue Due to Cadaveric Coleoptera Activity Under Controlled Conditions

The aim of this work was to study taphonomic marks that cadaveric coleopteran can produce under controlled conditions. To evaluate this, pig trotters were initially exposed to adults of Dermestes maculatus De Geer at 21 ± 5°C and a 12:12‐h day/night cycle. Observations were made and photographs taken every 4–5 days for 9 months. When feeding and reproducing, D. maculatus produced, in both adult and larvae stages, different types of marks such as holes, striations, scratches, and pits in several kinds of tissue such as integumental, connective, and muscular, in both their fresh and dried stages. Bite marks were also evident. The results in this study provide not only taphonomic but also biological and forensic information. This is the first time that this kind of experiment has been performed.     

The dynamic of family structures in seventeenth-century Moldavia. Adoption and godparenthood

This study analyzes aspects related to family structure and kinship (in particularly, to relations between parents and children, but other types than the blood relations) and the influences they had on seventeenth-century Moldavian society. In the first part, the focus is on the practice of adoption that is mainly mentioned in documents through the expression taking into one's soul and has as its main purpose ensuring posterity and implicitly transmitting patrimony. This analysis is based on juridical disposition and diverse types of documents conserved referring to this practice, trying to outline the importance of this gesture in Early Modern Moldavian society and the nature of the reasons which caused the individual to choose this lineage manner. Also, for a better understanding of the role and the amount of the patrimony inherited by the adopted children in the destiny of a family and its social implications, the method of comparing the adoption in contrast with other spiritual kinships, especially with baptismal sponsorship, has been used.