Review of Books on Competition Law and Policy

Books reviewed in this article:
G. Amato, Antitrust and the Bounds of Power: The Dilemma of Liberal Democracy in the History of the Market
S. Anderman, EC Competition Law and Intellectual Property Rights: Regulating Innovation
M. Cini and L. McGowan, Competition Policy in the European Union
European Competition Law Annual, 1997, The Objectives of Competition Policy
M. Furse, Competition Law of the UK and EC
D.J. Gerber, Law and Competition in Twentieth Century Europe: Protecting Prometheus
D.G. Goyder, EC Competition Law
V. Korah, An Introductory Guide to EC Competition Law
L. Ortiz Blanco, European Community Competition Procedure
B.J. Rodger and A. MacCulloch, Competition Law and Policy in the European Community and United Kingdom
W. Sauter, Competition Law and Industrial Policy in the EU     

Fathers' rights, women's losses

Recent international moves to defend the family, protect and enhance the rights of men. For example, state proposals to redefine illegitimacy extend men's rights in marriage to unmarried men. Women are losing the choice to bring up children on our own, or together, without men.The position of men in the family is not based upon equality with women. Fatherhood is not the equivalent of motherhood, nor the support for it. The particular right of fatherhood is the right of men to take up a social position of authority over women and children. This is not an interchangeable position, for fatherhood is accrued solely to men. Social policies which encourage the presence of men in all families, and support the ‘role’ of father, perpetuate sexual inequality and discrimination against women.     

Service delivery in francophone West Africa: the challenge of balancing deconcentration and decentralisation

The article reviews the experiences with decentralisation of one West African country, Guinea, with the intent of drawing lessons and exploring approaches to assist countries in the sub‐region in rendering decentralisation—an effective means for service delivery improvements. Section II describes the West Africa context in terms of the dynamics of deconcentration–decentralisation and lays out a conceptual framework to guide the analytical assessment of countries in the sub‐region, attempting to decentralise. This framework is used in the Guinea case, described in Section III. Section IV concludes by synthesising the profile of Guinea, and positions its dominant style in relation to the proposed ideal types of decentralisation approaches. This part of the article discusses the implications of its findings for decentralisation policy and implementation, and offers some remarks on the road ahead for decentralisation in West Africa. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The alla franca dandy; modernity and the novel in the late 19th-century Ottoman Empire

ABSTRACT

In the late 19th-century Ottoman novel, an iconic character draws attention: the alla franca dandy; a man who admires the Western culture to the point of mindless imitation, and who stands aloof from his own society as he condemns the Ottoman/Islamic culture in aesthetical terms. He was born out of the Ottoman intellectuals’ ideas of and anxiety over Westernization, who sought to modernize the society without subverting the traditional foundations. As the Ottoman/Islamic and Western cultures collided, the alla franca dandy figure became the embodiment of Westernization gone astray and served the intellectuals’ objective to educate the masses by setting a bad example to be avoided. However, though the alla franca dandy figure was brought forth, in this manner, to circumscribe the proper limits of modernization, he ironically evolved, through the novels of different authors, to express individualistic attitudes, and put forth a modernist critique of the Ottoman/Islamic tradition as the intellectuals’ epistemological assumptions eroded and the society’s present is questioned and problematized as in need of intervention.     

Pre-crime,Post-criminology,and the Captivity of Ultramodern Desire

This article further elaborates on the “pre-crime society” thesis as developed and examined by Arrigo and Sellers. Specifically, the article focuses on the ultramodern era of digital inter-connectivity and argues that productive psychic desire is held clinically captive. Ultra-modernity is populated by cyber-forms of human relating and of economic exchange that nurture hyper-securitization. We discuss how the maintenance of hyper-securitization supports a pre-crime society, and how hyper-securitization’s object of desire consists of sign-optics (i.e., panopticism, synopticism, and banopticism). We argue that the co-constitutive forces (i.e., relational flows and fluctuations) of this desire represent the sign-exchange values of post-criminology. Post-criminology’s signifiers include, among others, “predictive policing”, “crime mapping”, and “actuarial penology.” Post-criminology’s signifieds (re)produce captivity-generating bio-digital “laws” of human relatedness. Among others, these laws sanction the neurosis of de-vitalization and certify the psychosis of finalization. We explain how the unchecked excess neutralizations of de-vitalization and finalization cultivate clinical captivity. Clinical captivity is a social anxiety in which reciprocal consciousness, inter-subjectivity, and mutual power are limited in existence (the reduction of inter-relatedness) or are denied an existence (the repression of inter-relatedness).

     

Examining the Effectiveness of Restorative Justice in Reducing Victims’ Post-Traumatic Stress

Crime victimisation is a significant life event that can lead to the development of post-traumatic symptomology. Compared with the general population, victims of crime are significantly more likely to present with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Restorative justice is an approach to criminal justice that considers the goal of the justice system to restore victims to their state pre-victimisation. The purpose of this review was to evaluate the effectiveness of restorative justice in reducing symptoms of post-traumatic stress that develop following victimisation. Relevant databases were searched to identify quantitative studies measuring post-traumatic symptoms in victims of crime who successfully completed either a restorative justice or customary justice intervention. A total of seven studies were identified examining one or more facet of post-traumatic symptomology. These studies provide modest support that restorative justice did produce a greater improvement on post-traumatic symptoms than customary justice procedures. However, this was only consistently evidenced for symptoms of avoidance and intrusion, whereas there were mixed findings with regard to the subscales of negative alterations in mood and cognition, and arousal and reactivity. Reasons for these inconsistencies are discussed and recommendation made for further empirical work on this subject.