Nationalism,Territory, and Organized Violence: Introduction to the Special Issue

Recent decades have seen significant advances in research on the relationship between nationalist ideology and organized violence. New scholarship has paid much closer attention to the microdynamics of violence, the strikingly uneven distribution of violence, the relationship between master cleavages and intimate local and personal struggles, and to process, history, and contingency. Nationalist ideology is understood to be bound up intimately with institutions and with everyday relationships at the local level. We introduce the contributions to this special issue, outlining the way in which they highlight the power of ideas, narratives, and microlevel solidarity in mobilization for violence and how they address the crucial importance of territoriality in linking ideas and action.     

Global Justice and the Distribution of Natural Resources

What should a political theorist say about the justice of the global distribution of natural resources? One issue is whether principles of distributive justice should be applied globally, and this has been debated between nationalists and cosmopolitans. A second, though, is how the category of 'natural resources' should be conceived in relation to other distributable goods. This has not adequately been addressed even by theorists of global justice who expressly focus on natural resources. In particular, neither Charles Beitz's argument for a natural resources redistribution principle nor David Miller's argument against works with a satisfactory account of how the physical distribution of resources relates to the distribution of their economic value. A more satisfactory account can be developed from the perspective of ecological economics as inspired by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. From this perspective, global inequalities in the command of natural resources can be viewed with the clarity that a normative theory of their justice requires. If natural resources are re-conceptualised in terms of 'ecological space', Beitz's argument can be recast and vindicated. The re-conceptualisation is necessary to overcome the problems with the original version, as is shown by reference to the existing alternative formulations of Hillel Steiner and Thomas Pogge.     

We demand work! ‘Dispossession’, patronage and village labour in Bibiyana,Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

This paper critically appraises the usefulness of idioms and theories of ‘dispossession’ to describe changes taking place in rural Bangladesh, where rapid industrialization and ‘development’ have led to profound shifts in the agrarian economy. On the basis of long-term fieldwork in north-eastern Bangladesh, where the multinational company Chevron operate a large gas field, I argue that rather than political and economic struggles in the area involving access to land, it is access to work which is now all important for livelihoods and, as such, has become the basis for local patronage and political power. Theories of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, still widely cited in the anthropology of neo-liberal development in South Asia, are thus of limited help in explaining the changes and continuities which animate local political and economic struggles.     

Religious Characteristics and the Death Penalty

Using one mock trial scenario, this study investigated whether religious and demographic factors were related to death penalty attitudes and sentencing verdicts. Those who favored the death penalty differed from those who had doubts about the penalty in gender, affiliation, fundamentalism, evangelism, literal Biblical interpretism, beliefs about God’s attitudes toward murders, and perceptions of how their religious groups felt about the death penalty. These relationships generally held after mock jurors were death qualified. Gender, fundamentalism, literal interpretism, beliefs about God’s death penalty position, and perceptions of how one’s religious group felt about the death penalty predicted death penalty sentencing verdicts. Future research could determine whether using peremptory challenges to exclude potential jurors based on religion can help lawyers choose a more favorable jury. The present research was supported by the National Science Foundation award number 0351811, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, the American Psychology-Law Society, and the University of Nebraska Law-Psychology Program. This research was presented at the 2006 conference of the American Psychology-Law Society. The authors are grateful for the research assistance of Nick Fanning and Beth Herschlag and for the helpful comments from Brian Bornstein, Rich Wiener, Bob Schopp, Dick Dienstbier, and several anonymous reviewers.     

Sacral fusion as an aid in age estimation

The degree of fusion at the anterior aspect of the sacral vertebrae has been scored in 242 male and female skeletons from the Lisbon documented collection, ranging from 16 to 59 years old in age. Statistical tests indicate a sex difference towards earlier fusion in young females compared with young males, as well as a clear association between degree of fusion and age. Similar results have been found by other authors in documented skeletal samples from Coimbra and Sassari, and the recommendations stated by these authors regarding age estimation have been positively tested in the Lisbon collection. Although more research from geographically diverse samples is required, a general picture of the pattern of sacral fusion and its associations with age and sex is emerging. We also provide a practical example of the usefulness of the sacrum for age estimation in a forensic setting, a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War. It is concluded that the scoring of the degree of fusion of the sacral vertebrae, specially of S(1-2), can be a simple tool for assigning skeletons to broad age groups, and it should be implemented as another resource for age estimation in the study of human skeletal remains.     

Use of Cardiac Injury Markers in the Postmortem Diagnosis of Sudden Cardiac Death

In the daily practice of forensic pathology, sudden cardiac death (SCD) is a diagnostic challenge. Our aim was to determine the usefulness of blood biomarkers [creatine kinase CK‐MB, myoglobin, troponins I and T (cTn‐I and T), and lactate dehydrogenase] measured by immunoassay technique, in the postmortem diagnosis of SCD. Two groups were compared, 20 corpses with SCD and 8 controls. Statistical significance was determined by variance analysis procedures, with a post hoc Tukey multiple range test for comparison of means (p < 0.05). SCD cases showed significantly higher levels (p < 0.05) of cTn‐T and cTn‐I compared to the control group. Although only cases within the first 8 h of postmortem interval were included, and the control group consisted mainly of violent death cases, our results suggest that blood troponin levels may be useful to support a diagnosis of SCD.     

Eyewitness Memory in Context: Toward a Taxonomy of Eyewitness Error

Although eyewitness memory and identification have captured substantial research interest in the past decades, an understanding of the types and prevalence of errors typically made by eyewitnesses is lacking. The purpose of the present research was to begin the development of a taxonomy of eyewitness error, employing standardized stimuli and established techniques. Respondents were exposed to a crime scene modeled on SWAT-training scenarios for systematically varied exposure times, and were then asked to describe what they had seen. The stimuli and questions employed were prepared with the aid of senior police field training officers. As anticipated, eyewitness performance in general was subject to a variety of inaccuracies. Physical errors, such as mistakes in the clothing or physical characteristics of the perpetrator, or in details of the environmental context, predominated. However, other less-expected errors were also observed: in relatively low numbers of cases, witnesses inferred emotional states or intent on the part of the perpetrator or victim. Some contributed wholly artificial backstories, reported the future actions of the perpetrator or victim as memories, or even inserted themselves into the scene. The pattern of results was shown to interact with exposure time, gender of the perpetrator, and the presence or absence of weapons in the scene. The results of this study are consistent with reconfigurative theory dating to Bartlett (1932), with subsequent research, and with more recent work under the aegis of Gestalt/Feature-Intensive Processing theory. These findings provide information on types and prevalence of eyewitness error which should prove useful in investigative and courtroom settings.