The Revolution and the Criminal Law

Egyptians had many reasons to overthrow the government of Hosni Mubarak, and to challenge the legitimacy of the interim military government. Strikingly, among the leading reasons for the uprising and for continued protest are reasons grounded in criminal justice. Reflection on this dimension of the Egyptian uprising invites a broader examination of the relationship between criminal justice and political legitimacy. While criminal justice is neither necessary nor sufficient for political legitimacy, criminal injustice substantially undermines political legitimacy and can provide independent reasons for revolution. A state may compromise its legitimacy by committing criminal acts, by perverting or subverting the criminal process, and by failing to discharge its duty to punish serious wrongdoing—a duty that then falls to individuals to discharge either directly (through vigilantism) or indirectly (through revolution). Contrary to the views of many leading criminal law theorists, the duty to punish serious wrongdoing applies to individuals and not only to states. The relevance of political legitimacy to criminal justice is more complicated. Individuals are morally obligated to follow the morally justified laws of an illegitimate state, but are not morally obligated to follow the morally unjustified laws of a legitimate state. Nor may any state punish in the absence of moral wrongdoing and moral fault. However, illegitimate states may be incapable of justly holding individuals accountable to the state, to the community, or to victims through criminal trials. This incapacity provides an additional reason to overthrow illegitimate states and replace them with legitimate states capable of justly administering a just criminal law.     

Staffing the higher civil services in Bangladesh: An analysis of recruitment and selection processes

In developing a recruitment and selection policy for the Bangladesh Civil Service there has been significant disagreement over whether this should be based exclusively on merit or whether merit should be modified in the interests of equity. The government has, in practice, required that the policy should recognize the principle of equity and various interests have been given a privileged status in recruitment. At the same time the administration of the recruitment process has been conducted in a way that has undermined confidence in it. The authors describe the policy differences and problems of administration concluding with ideas on desirable reforms.     

Neopatrimonialism and corruption: towards a new common sense*

ABSTRACT

Neopatrimonialism, according to the distinguished development scholar, Thandika Mkandawire [2015. “Neopatrimonialism and the Political Economy of Economic Performance in Africa: Critical Reflections.” World Politics 67 (3): 563–612], provides the ‘common denominator’ for a host of practices of politics in Africa; viz. patronage, corruption, cronyism, and predation. So deeply embedded is this view among mainstream thinkers, that ‘underneath every policy lurks neopatrimonialism’, that the idea has come to be imbued with the ‘air of irrefutable common sense’. This paper deconstructs common sense refracted through the lens of present-day statecraft and the deceptive and subversive nature of contemporary neoliberal governance. It cautiously outlines the contours of a new common sense, placing emphasis on theorisation, a situated politics, institutional recalibration, fundamental changes in social relations, and the adoption of ‘bad’ and unorthodox development policies.     

Microfinance,wage employment and housework: a gender analysis

This paper examines the loan-use pattern of women involved in wage employment and their benefits from such loans in Bangladesh. The effects of wage employment on gender relations and how these women balance loan use, wage employment, and housework were also explored. The study was conducted among women enrolled in the Ayesha Abed Foundation (AAF) of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) in Jamalpur district, central Bangladesh. The AAF was established to generate employment and income for poor rural women. Data were gathered through survey, interviews, and focus-group discussions. Findings revealed that women wage earners avail themselves of the BRAC loans for consumption, asset accumulation, land purchase, and other productive purposes. About 53% of their loans were used by others and only 34 out of 341 women in the sample actually used the loans themselves. The loans were repaid by sewing or subsistence work, mainly in the subcenters (52%), through income from rickshaw pulling by their husbands (24%), and by selling vegetables, eggs, or milk. Furthermore, findings showed that the household work of women wage earners is generally taken up by other women in the family and has resulted in more men taking part in household responsibilities. In conclusion, wage employment plays an important factor in the promotion of the economic and social empowerment of women. Economic empowerment is observed in the greater degree of control women have over the money they earn. Social empowerment is manifested in the expanding mobility of women, whereby they are able to interact with other women and generate support systems.     

Rethinking informal labor in peripheral capitalism: the dynamics of surplus,market, and spatiality

ABSTRACT

The paper presents a critique of the discourse of precarity that assumes that regulated era labor relations in advanced capitalist economies represent the norm, while ‘irregular work’ represents a historical aberration under capitalist employment. We argue that this approach fails to inform labor theorists in any meaningful way as it conceals the differences in the social relations under which work is performed. The catchall term ‘precarious labor’ makes it difficult to design policies for specific social groups who are non-homogenous in social relations. We propose a Marxian socio-spatial class framework that gives visibility to three key dimensions: 1) the manner in which surpluses are produced, appropriated, and distributed during the labor process; 2) the spatial component of where work is performed, and 3) the degree of market-orientation. Recognizing on the one hand that precarity will always be a ubiquitous feature of capitalist labor markets, and that there are differences within forms of work depending on the social context and location of work on the other, has a number of benefits for contemporary debates. These include a better appreciation of the multiplicity of processes in which labor participates and generates radically new ways of thinking about anti-capitalist resistance across national boundaries.     

The pattern of suicide in Pakistan

There is paucity of information on suicide from Pakistan, an Islamic country in which data collection poses formidable challenges. A variety of social, legal, and religious factors make reporting and diagnosing suicide difficult. Paradoxically, incidents of suicide are regularly reported in newspapers in Pakistan. In the absence of other means these reports serve a useful, though basic information source for suicidal deaths. A 2-year analysis of all such reports in a major newspaper in Pakistan showed 306 suicides reported from 35 cities. Men (n = 208) outnumbered women by 2:1. While there were more single than married men, the trend was reversed in women. The majority of subjects were under 30 years of age and "domestic problems" was the most common reason stated. More than half the subjects used organophosphate insecticides, while psychotropics and analgesics were used infrequently. The study challenges the widely held belief that suicide is a rare phenomena in an Islamic country like Pakistan, and underscores the need for more culture specific research on this important public health problem.     

Representations of crime,power and social decay in the South African post-colony in the film Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema (2008)

The film Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema, released on August 29, 2008, decries the proliferation of crime, violence and social decay in the South African post-colony. The aim of this article is to interrogate the banality in the use of violence and power in the South African post-colony. The filmic narratives of Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema reveal that behind the ‘rainbow’ façade presented by South Africa, one encounters festering poverty in ‘non-white’ communities, racial acrimony, broken promises, social and class struggles, and tales of betrayal of the majority of black people by the elite black leadership which now sit comfortably in the seats vacated by their former colonisers. An analysis of the narratives of the film Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema permits one to locate apartheid-based economic disparities as still haunting mainly ‘non- white’ local communities, although some whites have not been spared by the vicious new normal of poverty and the effects of corruption. This interpretation is further questioned in the film which shows that, after apartheid, the nationalist leadership encouraged a negative culture of entitlement. The irony in the film is that the masses are also tainted in so far as they commit crimes against other ordinary people and refuse to take responsibility or, rather in an escapist way, blame all the woes of the post-colony on apartheid. Thus, the narratives of Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema beg the question: What is going wrong with the dream of democracy for all, irrespective of race, that was the founding principle of the new nation?