Justified state partiality and the vulnerable subject in migration

According to David Miller, there exists a special relationship between migrants at the border and members of a political community that the migrant hopes to join. It is the task of a political philosophy of migration to define a state’s obligations toward individuals who are vulnerable to the state’s actions without being members of the political community. I define the vulnerability in question as lacking capacity to be autonomous for lack of options to realize one’s plan of life. I then discuss Miller’s claim that what matters is sufficiency of generic options rather than access to all options. Miller wants to say that sufficiency can be achieved by assuring the protection of human rights. This claim neglects the source of the individual migrant’s vulnerability. I therefore argue that Miller neglects the specific relationship he has identified between potential host state and hopeful migrant, and advocate instead that the potential host state has to consider the vulnerability that is due to its own policies, such as migration regimes. This grounds a causal responsibility to protect the basic interest in leading autonomous lives for the migrant at the border.     

Lost Cause-ism in American Southerners’ News Writing About the First Russo-Chechen War (1994–1996)

In this article, I analyze how writers for newspapers in the American South used a culturally salient story about the past—the Myth of the Lost Cause—to make sense of an event in the present—the First Russo-Chechen War (1994–1996). I take a Proppian approach, according to which a story’s plot is defined as a set of functions, or generalized acts that influence course of the story’s action. Stories that appear to be different thus can share the same plot, inasmuch as they are composed of the same functions. I argue that, to construct narratives about the First Russo-Chechen War, Southern news writers substituted concrete actions from the conflict in Chechnya into the familiar functions that make up the plot of the Lost Cause. I use a combination of discourse analysis and qualitative content analysis to show how those functions appear in five Southern news accounts of the First Russo-Chechen War.     

Book reviews

The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel, by Jeff Nunokawa. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Review of Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria and Reading Difference in Nineteenth‐Century France, by Jann Matlock (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)     

No Sex,No Crime,No Shame: Privatized Care and the Seduction into Responsibility

The article reflects on the interrelation between neo‐liberal economy and sexuality. The neo‐liberal paradigm issues a paradoxical appellation of individualization and privatized responsibilities. The latter not only refer to personal well‐being and growth, but also demand for care relations, which substitute for the shrinking of the social system. The thesis is that homosexual lifestyles figure as avant‐garde positions, which promise to provide a “solution” to the paradoxical demands for individualization and care. Reading visual representations of lesbian and gay figures in media and advertisements the author argues that non‐normative genders and homosexual ways of existence gain access to the mainstream via the mechanism of “projective integration”. This mechanism stimulates a new hegemonic consensus via the disarticulation of the socio‐political contradictions of the global capitalist economy and the affirmation of not only new forms of intimacy, but also new forms of exclusion.     

Testing responsive regulation in regulatory enforcement

The policy ideals of responsive regulation have been developed on the basis of substantial empirical evidence. The overall formulation of responsive regulation theory itself, however, has rarely been empirically tested. This article sets out the theoretical concept of responsive regulation in the context of business regulation enforcement and discusses how we might operationalize and empirically measure it. We develop two alternative theoretical interpretations of responsive regulatory enforcement: “tit for tat” responsive regulation and “restorative justice” responsive regulation. We then measure business firms' perceptions of the reactions and counter‐reactions of a regulatory enforcement agency throughout the investigation and enforcement process. We find little evidence of tit for tat responsiveness actually occurring in practice. To the extent that tit for tat responsiveness does exist, we find a small amount of evidence that it has the hypothesized effects on behavior but not on attitudes. We find clearer evidence of restorative justice responsiveness having the hypothesized effects on attitudes but not on behavior.     

Transitional Justice, Interdisciplinarity and the State of the 'Field' or 'Non-Field'

¹Transitional justice appears to be an established field ofscholarship connected to a field of practice on how to dealwith past human rights abuses in societies in transition. Theoriginal focus of transitional justice discourse was that humanrights law requires accountability in transitions, rooted inthe discipline of law. Over time, this focus has been expandedto include a much broader range of mechanisms, goals and inquiriesacross a range of disciplines. In order to probe the currentstate of the field, this article argues against the currentconception of transitional justice as a praxis-based interdisciplinaryfield. It suggests that there is a hidden politics to how transitionaljustice has been constructed as an interdisciplinary field thatobscures tensions between the range of practices and goals thatit now incorporates.     

Kriminalpolitische Initiative: Mehr Sicherheit durch weniger Haft! – Vorschläge Nr 4 (7. Juni 2009)

Die Vorschläge der "Kriminalpolitischen Initiative" (KI) zum Haftentlastungspaket haben einige Ergebnisse gebracht (vgl StRÄG 2008 BGBl I 2007/109).1) Daneben gibt es bestimmte Fragen, die noch nicht in Angriff genommen wurden. Die KI greift daher zwei ihr wichtig erscheinende Probleme heraus, die einerseits am unteren, andererseits am oberen Ende der Intensitätsskala strafrechtlichen Freiheitsentzuges liegen, und macht dazu die folgenden Vorschläge.