In the Service of Power: The Global Political Economy of Citizenship and Human Rights

This article investigates how the idea of universal human rights has been co-opted by the prevailing (neo)liberal consensus in support of processes associated with capitalist globalization. So-called “civil and political” rights form the core of (neo)liberal values upon which free market, laissez-faire economics are based, but the idealism of the dichotomy of first and second generation rights is profoundly ideological. Through an examination of the idea of the international citizen, it is argued that the attempt to introduce a duty to promote the widest possible social good falls far short of an obligation to respond to claims for alternative conceptions of “economic and social” rights; far less alternative models of social affairs. Drawing on empirical evidence from Africa, the article contends that the dominance of (neo)liberal rights is integral to the emerging (neo)liberal constitution of the global order effected in the name of “human rights”, “democratization”, “citizenship”, “good governance” and “civil society”.

Never in the recent past have the founding principles of universal rights been so instrumentalized in the service of power, to such an extent that … in the opening years of the twentieth-century, we can speak of a veritable apogee of hegemony and an unprecedented crystallization of the hatreds that it arouses. (Bessis, 2003 Bessis, S. 2003. Western Supremacy: The Triumph of an Idea?, London: Zed.  [Google Scholar])     

Sexual murderers' implicit theories

Interviews with 28 sexual murderers were subjected to grounded theory analysis. Five implicit theories (ITs) were identified: dangerous world, male sex drive is uncontrollable, entitlement, women as sexual objects, and women as unknowable. These ITs were found to be identical to those identified in the literature as being present in rapists. The presence of dangerous world and male sex drive is uncontrollable were present, or absent, such that three groups could be identified: (a) dangerous world plus male sex drive is uncontrollable; (b) dangerous world, in the absence of male sex drive is uncontrollable; (c) male sex drive is uncontrollable in the absence of dangerous world. These three groups were found to differ in motivation: (a) were motivated by urges to rape and murder; (b) were motivated by grievance, resentment and/or anger toward women; (c) were motivated to sexually offend but were prepared to kill to avoid detection, or secure compliance.     

How Smart Is my Dummy? Time Series Tests for the Influence of Politics

Kevin Grier Department of Economics, 335 Hester Hall, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019 e-mail: angus{at}ou.edu Of necessity, many tests for political influence on policiesor outcomes involve the use of dummy variables. However, itis often the case that the hypothesis against which the politicaldummies are tested is the null hypothesis that the interceptis otherwise constant throughout the sample. This simple nullcan cause inference problems if there are (nonpolitical) interceptshifts in the data and the political dummies are correlatedwith these unmodeled shifts. Here we present a method for morerigorously testing the significance of political dummy variablesin single equation models estimated with time series data. Ourmethod is based on recent work on detecting multiple regimeshifts by Bai and Perron. The article illustrates the potentialproblem caused by an overly simple null hypothesis, expositsthe Bai and Perron model, gives a proposed methodology for testingthe significance of political dummy variables, and illustratesthe method with two examples.

Before the curse of statisticsfell upon mankind we lived a happy, innocent life —HilaireBelloc, On Statistics