The blood feud in Waziristan

Water puppetry has become an iconic representation of Vietnam, and Hanoi's Th?ng Long Water Puppet Theatre is flourishing as part of the international tourist package. This article documents the radical modification in this theatre's performance themes in 2013 – from traditional to explicitly ethnicised – and subsequent reversion the following year. In exploring the possible role of state propaganda in these changes, and the government's mechanisms of influence over water puppetry, the politics of representation within Vietnam's art and performance sector are exposed.     

Predicting Bureaucratic Control: Evidence from the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments

The extent to which politicians control bureaucracies that are delegated authority over public policy involves fundamental positive and normative issues for the study of politics. Considerations related to such issues have stimulated a great deal of debate about whether the legislature exercises control over bureaucratic performance. However, establishing the measurable empirical conditions under which elected officials do and do not assure agency responsiveness remains unsettled.
In light of this state of affairs, we try to determine whether it is possible to develop a general means of predicting control, or at least of predicting what we term "intent to control," based on the assumption that legislators' preferences toward agency responsiveness reflect the nature of the policy environment. Our application to the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 finds strong empirical evidence that statutory provisions vary predictably, depending upon whether legislators possess the requisite technical ability and are likely, or wish, to be held politically accountable. Our results indicate that control varies for reasons that fit well with our understanding of how elected officials deal with complexity and their own political situations. Our findings also imply that subtle, but measurable, differences in the specific policy environment are crucial for understanding control.     

Approaches to Defining "Empire" and Characterizing United States Influence in the Contemporary World

The militant unilateralism of the George W. Bush administration has revived interest in such closely related and contested terms as "superpower,""hegemon,""empire," and "imperialism." This article identifies four different but somewhat overlapping approaches to defining "empire": ideal type, self-consciously empirical, constructivist, and overtly normative. The author's personal view is that any notion of American Empire or indeed U.S. hegemony or even superpower is profoundly misleading. Although the United States still ranks high on the scale of most traditional realist power factors, United States capabilities appear to be gravely waning today and its exercise of both hard and soft power has recently been so inept as to limit its current influence and possibly future role in global politics.     

Can We Protect How We Do What We Do? A Consideration of Business Method Patents in Australia and Europe

In the long history of monopolies, business method patents area novel and recent edition. In the Digital Age, where time ismoney and speed is everything, innovative methods for undertakingbusiness are as important to a business as the products or servicesit provides to its clients. In recent years several reviews,conducted in both Australia and internationally,⁴ have questionedthe appropriateness of patenting business methods. This paperreviews the availability of business method patents in Australiain light of the 2006 decision of the Full Court of the FederalCourt in Grant v Commissioner of Patents,⁵ which confirmed theneed in Australia for a ‘useful product’ to issuefrom the working of a method (business or otherwise) in orderfor the method to be patentable. This paper will review argumentsboth criticising and defending business method patents and considerwhether business methods warrant special treatment.