Geographies of Crime and Justice: Contemporary Transitional Justice and the Creation of 'Zones of Impunity'

This article explores some of the challenges that transnationalcrimes pose to the operation of transnational justice. By transnationalcrimes, we mean serious violations of international human rightsand humanitarian law that transcend national borders and areperpetrated by state or non-state actors. Many national andinternational legal mechanisms may only address a segment ofthese crimes, creating what we refer to as ‘zones of impunity.’This article examines how these dilemmas are unfolding in threeAfrican contexts: the possibility that Charles Taylor is triedfor crimes in Sierra Leone but not in Liberia; that only Congolese,and not Rwandans or Ugandans, face prosecution for crimes inIturi or elsewhere in the Democratic Republic of Congo; or thatJoseph Kony escapes prosecution in Uganda through being allowedamnesty or exile in Sudan. Our analytic framework considershow geography and politics affect legal responses to transnationalcrimes.     

Emerging powers,soft power,and future of regional cooperation in South Asia

This article looks into the future of regional cooperation in South Asia in the light of two emerging powers: China and India focussing on how their rise would change the relationship in the region. The paper argues that China and India both are trying to enhance their spheres of influence forcing the states in the region to align with either of them in a binary framework of unstable equilibrium and uneasy coexistence rather than reinforcing the regional solidarity of SAARC. Such a competition between China and India and the putative interventionary efforts of Western powers and their agencies in the region are bound to bring implications of profound value for not just regional cooperation but for the individual destinies of the various states involved in the days ahead.     

Exchange rate policy modeling and forecasting the exchange rate: Indian rupee vis‐à‐vis the U.S. dollar

The exchange rate is a very important key financial variable that affects decisions made by the foreign exchange investors, exporters, importers, bankers, businesses, financial institutions, policymakers, and tourists in the developed as well as the developing world. Exchange rate fluctuations affect the value of international investment portfolios, competitiveness of exports and imports, value of international reserves, currency value of debt payments, and the cost of tourists. Movements in exchange rates thus have very important implications for any country's economy's business cycle, trade, and capital flows and are therefore crucial for understanding financial developments and changes in economic policy. The study will be looking at the various aspects of country's economic policy with respect to the exchange rate and modeling and forecasting the exchange rate. The study will be analyzing India's exchange rate story and will be discussing the structure of the foreign exchange market in India in terms of participants, instruments, and trading platform as also a turnover in the Indian foreign exchange market and forward premia. The study will be attempting to develop a model for the rupee–dollar exchange rate taking into account variables from monetary and microstructure models as well as other variables including intervention by the central bank. The main focus will be on the exchange rate of the Indian rupee vis‐à‐vis the U.S. dollar, that is, the Re/$ rate. The data will be covering from January 1990 through April 2013. This study will be examining the forecasting performance of the monetary model and various extensions of it in the vector autoregressive and Bayesian vector autoregressive framework.     

Identification of skull from its suture pattern

The examination of 320 skulls collected at random revealed that the ectocranial suture patterns in them are highly individualistic and that no two skulls can ever have an identical pattern. The possibility of these suture patterns being recorded incidentally in routine diagnostic skull radiographs was verified by examining the skull skiagrams preserved in radiology departments. A positive method of identification of the skull is suggested by the comparison of radiographic with visible skull suture pattern.     

Rethinking Subaltern Resistance

Abstract

This special issue seeks to rethink “resistance” as a critical social science concept in the light of a range of critiques since the 1980s. The five articles in this issue draw their empirical materials from contemporary India, but their arguments have significant implications for those working on other parts of Asia and the world. The articles acknowledge the inherent ambiguities and ambivalences of subaltern resistance in the face of hegemonic social formations, yet, shorn of exoticising and homogenising tendencies, resistance can be reconceptualised as the negotiation rather than negation of social power. Such a reconceptualisation is useful to study a wide range of contentious politics from foot-dragging through protests to social revolutions under a single analytic umbrella. Resistance, in this sense, ought to be recognised as a vital part of a critical realist ontology of society, which helps us understand and critique existing structures of social domination in order to pursue emancipatory possibilities via the generation of social scientific knowledge.     

External Influence and Challenges of State-building in Nepal

This article deals with the role of external actors in the post-2006 state-building process in Nepal. Two issues have dominated the state-building narrative after 2006: the peace-process and the constitutional process. There has been a strong presence of international agencies. Both issues were later usurped by the external agencies and Nepal loses its upper hand in determining politics, policies, and the law and reverted beyond the 1923 situation. Foreign policy, which should have been used to rescue the country from such a dilemma, could not act in the context of a weak centre. Against this background, this article endeavours to explain the degree of external pressure vis-à-vis the state-building process in Nepal. The central argument of this article is that among many other factors, state-building in Nepal suffers both ‘because of and despite’ its geo-strategic locations and it proposes a proactive foreign policy as the balancing force.     

Currie's ‘leading sector’ strategy of growth: an appraisal

Abstract

Development policies in the pastoral areas of Africa assume that pastoralists are poor. Using the Afar pastoralists of Ethiopia as the focus of research this article challenges this depiction of pastoralism by exploring pastoral livelihood goals and traditional strategies for managing risk. Investment in social institutions to minimise the risk of outright destitution, sometimes at the cost of increased poverty, and significant manipulation of local markets enable the Afar to exploit a highly uncertain and marginal environment. Improved development assistance and enhanced targeting of the truly vulnerable within pastoral societies demands an acceptance that pastoral poverty is neither uniform nor universal.