Expert intervention: knowledge,violence and identity during the Algerian crisis, 1997–1998

Civil wars and humanitarian intervention became two of the most dominant security concerns of the 1990s and Algeria was one of the many sites where these discourses were played out, especially during the wave of massacres that claimed the lives of hundreds (if not thousands) of Algerian civilians between mid-1997 and early 1998. The internationalization of the Algerian Civil War was driven as much by the horrific violence as by a lack of certainty as to the identity of those perpetrating the massacres. The indeterminacy of violence in Algeria provided the warrant for experts to fill the void. Yet interpretations of the violence in Algeria, coupled with the generic logics of intra-national armed conflicts and the use of international coercive force for the protection of human rights, produced divergent problematizations of the crisis. This paper thus examines the ways in which Algeria was, and often was not, produced as a civil war and a humanitarian crisis by expert and scholarly knowledge and practice. Through an analysis of the exclusionary effects of the dominant understandings of political violence in Algeria, we are able to understand the conceptual impasse that faced international action against the massacres.     

Permissive Laws and the Dynamism of Kantian Justice

If Kant’s theory of justice is known for one thing, it is for offering a vision of a perfectly just society that is utterly disconnected from the imperfect societies that we occupy. The purity of Kant’s account has attracted criticism from those who claim that if a theory of justice is to be practical, it must offer more than a vision of a perfectly just society. It must also explain how existing societies mired in injustice are to be brought into ever-closer conformity with the ideal that justice prescribes. In this essay, I will argue that this is exactly what Kant’s mature legal and political theory offers. To discern this feature of Kant’s theory, a neglected component must be integrated into his broader framework. This component is what Kant refers to in Toward Perpetual Peace as a permissive law of public right.     

Lawful and unlawful seizure of aircraft

Professor Sundberg attempts to show that there is a very important reservation made when the word “unlawful” was included in the title of the antihijacking convention entered into at The Hague in 1970, and that the avenues into which it leads are largely unexplored. With the aid of a number of litigated hijacking cases he shows that the doctrine of justification—one of the general defences admitted in all penal‐law systems—also addresses itself to matters occurring abroad, including foreign penal‐law systems, and that this doctrine is sufficiently broad to provide good defenses in a great many hijacking cases simply as a side effect of what foreign policy is pursued. Professor Sundberg ends with the pessimistic note that conventions probably cannot be drafted without such a reservation simply because governments cannot achieve by convention what they have not succeeded to achieve at home by statute.     

European integration and lessons for China

This paper compares the European Union and the People’s Republic of China by viewing them primarily as conglomerates of smaller constituents, each with their own political and economic significance in relations with their respective political centres. While this is a perspective that is more easily applied to the EU given that each of its members enjoys sovereignty and also the Union’s rather short history, Chinese area studies have only recently begun viewing China as a sum of its parts. The present study while conscious of the huge differences in the historical development and present realities of both the EU and China, posits that the similarities in the centre-constituent as well inter-constituent relationships developing in both the EU and China allow for important lessons to be drawn. A key focus is the differentiated set of relationships developing between Brussels and the latest entrants to the EU and between the older and newer members of the EU. In China, too, the nature of relationships between the central government and the better-developed coastal provinces is different from those that Beijing has with the central or western provinces, with implications also for the relationships among these different sets of provinces themselves. The tensions and charges of unfair treatment seen in the accessions of the Central and Eastern European nations to the EU, have an echo in the similar complaints that have been coming from the interior provinces of China since the beginning of economic reforms in that country, and perhaps, provide pointers to the future direction of the development of centre-province and inter-provincial relationships in China.     

Ultrastructural differences of fibrin coagulation before and after cardiovascular arrest

The reconstruction of killing offences often requires the differentiation between vital and postmortal blood traces at the sites of action and finding. Earlier investigations seemed to imply the possibility of such a differentiation depending on the different clot structure. We therefore examined clots prior and after 10 minutes of complete occlusion of the upper extremity morphologically and morphometrically with the REM. The morphologic comparison of these clots revealed narrow, round shaped fibrin fiber networks for clots of native blood, whereas clots after occlusion showed linear, rarely connected long fibrin fibers. The morphometry of the fibrin free spaces revealed a significant enlargement of the single fibrin free spaces as well as of the total fibrin free space after occlusion. For capillary blood a significant decrease in fiber diameter was observed after occlusion. The examination of clinical clotting parameters revealed alterations of thrombocyte aggregation for the collagen induction, a slightly reduced thrombocyte retention and slightly steeper flanks in the thromboelastogram after occlusion. The reason for these changes was interpreted as lack of high energetic phosphates in the retraction process as the clotting cascade itself requires a very high amount of these phosphates. Use of these results in the forensic practice will have to take factors as temperature, drying out, surface-structure and many others into account.