Rebuilding Utopia? Critical criminology and the difficult road of reconstruction in Latin America

This contribution assesses the developmentof criminology, during the last few decades, and contemplates the future course of critical criminology in view of developments in current capitalism, and their impact on ``Third World' societies (Latin America in particular).     

Unity and Disunity in the FMLN

Problems of unity can affect an armed opposition group at many stages of its existence—during the war, in peace negotiations, and in its transition to political party. This article assesses how internal divisions affected the performance of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador. It finds that while the FMLN suffered significant internal divisions in the early years of the war, it remained remarkably unified from 1983 on. Significant divisions began to appear during the later war years but were not exacerbated until after the war's conclusion, when repeated fracturing occurred. The FMLN began to present itself as a programmatically coherent party only in 2005, and this ideological homogeneity allowed it to establish a series of partnerships with moderate, non‐revolutionary sectors of Salvadoran society and to achieve victory in the 2009 presidential elections.     

Direct and Indirect Xenophobic Attacks: Unpacking Portfolios of Identity

Political Behavior - Political threats are typically conceptualized by scholars as targeting particular groups of people. We call for also conceptualizing threats as political attacks directed...     

La crisis de la deuda soberana y la reforma del artículo 135 de la constitución española

The following piece of paper is a critical approach to the amendment of the Article 135 of the Spanish Constitution, by means of which the principle of balanced budget and the restricting of the public expenditure are constitutionalized. This work consists of four different paragraphs: the first one, in which a chronological approach to the debt crisis in the Eurozone and the reform of the Article 135 of the Constitution are carried out; the second one, where the new features that the current Article 135 contain are presented; the third one, in which the critical analysis of the 2011 constitutional reform is now developed (around tour fundamental axes: content, procedure, time and purpose and significance); and the fourth one resulting with a number of final considerations.     

Mounting the Summit

<正>Women’s empowerment and peacekeeping missions get African Union leaders’attentionA head of state escaping arrest,Hollywood glamor,and rambling presidential soliloquies.Not the setting of a movie,but the points for which the 25th African Union(AU)Summit,held in South Africa’s Johannesburg from June 7 to 15,is likely to be remembered.While leaders gathered to discuss pressing issues of peace and security,gender equality,     

A Calming Influence

A shimmering movement rustles millions of leaves and the trees seem to have taken on a life of their own.There was no wind blowing,which could only mean one thing.Birds—lots of them.The thousands of egrets that infest the dense forest at the entrance to the mystical Qingcheng Mountain are more     

A note on reverse auctions

Reverse auctions are a new type of auction which has recently spread over the internet to sell a large variety of goods, from electronics to airline tickets. The objective of this note is to illustrate how a reverse auction works, compare it to the other existing auctions and discuss the legal issues that may arise.     

Triangulation of Salient Studies to Date on Trust-Building in Mediation

Many studies have empirically demonstrated the importance of trust-building between mediators and parties to a dispute. We wrote this article in response to a call by Stephen Goldberg and Margaret Shaw for studies conducted in North America to be triangulated in other countries where mediation is taking off as an alternative tool in the resolution of disputes. Our objective was to test theories on the factors that increase trust-building in mediation. With this in mind, the study conducted by Jean Poitras in Montreal (Canada) was triangulated in the Balearic Islands (Spain) and an analysis was made of the similarities and differences between both studies using different methods.     

The simple economics of class action: private provision of club and public goods

This article uses economic categories to show how the reorganisation of civil procedure in the case of class action is not merely aimed at providing a more efficient litigation technology, as hierarchies (and company law) might do for other productive activities, but that it also serves to create a well defined economic organization ultimately aimed at producing a set of goods, first and foremost among which are justice and efficiency. Class action has the potential to recreate, in the judicial domain, the same effects that individual interests and motivations, governed by the perfect competition paradigm, bring to the market. Moreover, through economic analysis it is possible to rediscover not only the productive function of this legal machinery, but also that partial compensation of victims and large profits for the class counsel, far from being a side-effect, are actually a necessary condition for reallocation of the costs and risks associated with the legal action.