Defending <Emphasis Type="Italic">Why</Emphasis><Emphasis Type="Italic">Law</Emphasis><Emphasis Type="Italic">Matters:</Emphasis> Responses to Commentaries

Why Law Matters examines various legal and political institutions and procedures and argues that the desirability of these institutions and procedures is not contingent and does not hinge (only) on the prospects that these institutions are conducive to the realization of valuable ends. Instead, various legal institutions and legal procedures that are often perceived as contingent means to facilitate the realization of valuable ends matter as such.     

Armies of God,Armies of Men: A Global Comparison of Secular and Religious Terror Organizations

This article compares the violent activity of secular and religious terror organizations. Utilizing data compiled by the Global Terrorism Database cross-referenced with secondary and primary sources regarding the degree of religious components embedded in organizations’ ideologies, it tests the violent patterns of activity carried out by organizations guided by predominantly secular, secular/religious, and religious ideologies, between the years 1970 and 2012. The findings confirm that a) religious ideology correlates with specific, more deadly, attack tactics and violent patterns; and b) the degree of religious components within terror organizational ideology should be tested along a spectrum: the more religious an organization is, the more attacks it tends to carry out, and the deadlier its attacks become.     

Enhancing democracy via bureaucracy: Senior managers' social identities and motivation for policy change

This article challenges the depiction of bureaucracy as a hurdle to democratic responsiveness. It proposes that senior civil servants' (SCSs) dual position as professionals and citizens may enhance government permeability to salient public agendas. Building on social identity theory, we argue that salient public agendas may arouse SCSs' social identification with in‐groups and thereby elicit their motivation for policy change within their task domain. Employing a mixed‐methods design, we analyze SCSs' social identification with the participants of the large‐scale social protests that took place in Israel during the summer of 2011, and their motivation for policy change in response to the protest agenda. We find that SCSs' social identification with the protesters enhanced their motivation for policy change. In addition, SCSs' perception of a conflict between responsiveness to the protest agenda and their organizational or professional identities shaped their preferences for policy solutions more than their motivation for policy change.     

Perceptions of Time and Their Impact on Negotiations in the Arabic-Speaking Islamic World

This article examines how perceptions of time affect Arabic-speaking Islamic negotiators and how their attitudes about time, and their corresponding behaviors, may differ from those of their Western counterparts. We begin by identifying cultural differences in the conceptualization of time and then comment on the role of time in negotiations, discussing how time influences bargaining, trust, and negotiation tactics. In the section on tactics, we discuss stall-and-delay tactics, the use of the past as an objective standard, and limits on negotiating the future. Our purpose is to encourage negotiators from the West to be knowledgeable about the way they, as well as negotiators from Arabic-speaking Islamic cultures, conceive of and use time in negotiations. We believe that understanding that the very concept of time is often quite different in these two cultures is an important step in facilitating negotiations that cross these cultural boundaries.     

The new sciences,self‐organization and democracy

Social scientists have argued recently that the theory and findings of the new sciences (quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and new evolutionary biology) corroborate the essences of liberal democracy. Specifically, scholars have argued that the new sciences’ principle of self‐organization is closely associated with the idea of individual liberty. This article traces the evolution of the new sciences’ self‐organization theory. It then argues that the effort to anchor liberal democracy in self‐organization is misleading; that is to say self‐organization behaviour neither depends on democracy nor does it culminate in democracy. It is also dangerous, because it absolves human agency from the need to protect the vulnerable institutions of liberal democracy.     

Cultural Trauma as a Potential Symbolic Boundary

Using the case of the Holocaust as a cultural trauma in the Jewish-Israeli context, some insights are suggested as to the ways younger members of collectives view cultural trauma as a symbolic boundary. The findings obtained from three groups of students, each expressing their views on a different facet of the Holocaust as a symbolic boundary, suggest that the major contributing factor that turns cultural trauma into a symbolic boundary is the way in which members of the collective categorize the modes through which others, within and outside the collective, relate to that cultural trauma.

General courts,specialized courts,and the complementarity effect

Among the major decisions any legal system must make is deciding whether to establish general courts with broad jurisdiction, or specialized courts with limited jurisdiction. Under one influential argument—advanced by both judges and legal theorists—general courts foster coherence within the legal system. This Article identifies a distinct effect of establishing general courts: the “complementarity effect.” In the case of complementarity, general courts strategically apply different principles in different fields, such that litigants losing in one sphere (e.g., public law) are compensated in another (e.g., private law). We support this conjecture by analyzing three case studies.     

Muslim identity and Islamic practice in post-Soviet Central Asia

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the newly independent countries of Central Asia had the opportunity to endorse religious freedom. Nevertheless, they chose for the most part to continue the policy of monitoring religious activity, on the pretext of protecting their countries from radical Islam. This study focuses on Islamic praxis in post-Soviet Central Asia. Based on a survey conducted in four Central Asian successor states (excluding Turkmenistan), it examines everyday Islam – observance of precepts, life-cycle rites, prayer and mosque attendance – as well as people's perceptions about the role of Islam in their lives and in the evolution of their societies and the place of Islam in local identity. The authors' findings have not always corresponded to usually accepted hypotheses and they have sought to analyse the reasons for this. Undoubtedly, the exigencies of the current political situation both act as a restraint on respondents in addressing the questions put to them and restrict their religious praxis outside the home. It is difficult to assess how far responses would have differed had the survey been conducted under more favourable circumstances; indeed, some of the questions may have been genuinely misinterpreted as a result of differences in outlook and the use of concepts.