“The Opium Wars”: The Biopolitics of Narcotic Control in the United States, 1914–1935

The emergence of the narcotic control regime in the early twentieth century US provides a historical case study of what Michel Foucault has called “biopolitics”. At the collective level, narcotic control policy emerged as a regulatory mechanism to secure the national population from the spread of addictive substances through an elaborate system of surveillance and control. At the individual level, the drug user emerged as a new criminal subject at the center of an array of medico-penal technologies that sought to understand the psychological and somatic dimensions of addiction, and to normalize the addicted person.     

Producers' response in rice production — A comparison between ten Indian states under planning

This investigation attempts to compare rice producers' response to price and yield expectations in terms of changes in the planted area in different Indian states under two decades of planning. It provides an explanation of why the response function may differ between the states and offers supporting evidence.     

Challenging the State: Effect of Minority Discrimination,Economic Globalization,and Political Openness on Domestic Terrorism

Discrimination against minority groups is a robust predictor of domestic terrorism. However, economic and political openness might further facilitate mobilization of such aggrieved sections of a larger population. This study relates economic and political openness to minority discrimination in explaining vulnerability to domestic terrorism. Terrorism is a rational choice when a minority’s deprivation of public good provisions increases, while global economic integration and limited political openness facilitate rebel mobilization. Using data on 172 countries, I find strong support that countries discriminating against minority groups are more likely to experience domestic terrorist attacks when their economic and political systems open up.     

Regional Development of Small Firms in Poland

Employing a probit, logit and gompit model this paper demonstrates that small firm development, represented by a group of structural, behavioral and performance variables determine regional location in Poland. The paper uses original data that samples the small firm stratum in two contrasting regions, Pomorskie and Lubelskie. The following variables were shown to be significantly correlated with regional location: legal structure, subcontracting, technological level of the products of the firm, average wage and intention to expand turnover.     

Willingness and Opportunity: A Study of Domestic Terrorism in Post-Cold War South Asia

Domestic terrorism, as a form of intrastate violence, has varied widely in South Asia along with the post-Cold War period of global economic integration and political openness. How are these two phenomena—economic integration and emergence of democracies—related to domestic terrorism in South Asia? I argue that resorting to terrorism is a rational choice when individuals'/groups' cost of heterogeneity—deprivation from public goods due to geographical and ideological distance—increases; opportunity is provided by democratization and integration into the global economy. The testable hypotheses derived from the theory are empirically tested on a dataset of five South Asian countries for the time period between 1990 and 2007. The results show that both minority discrimination and presence of unconsolidated democratic institutions increase terrorism in the highly heterogeneous South Asian countries. International trade in the presence of minority discrimination increases homegrown terrorism, but foreign direct investment neither increases nor decreases such incidents.     

The Homegrown Threat: State Strength,Grievance, and Domestic Terrorism

Scholars maintain that, similar to insurgency, terrorist violence is precipitated by both relative deprivation and state weakness. Yet aggrieved minority groups within a country should turn to terrorism when they are weak relative to the state rather than strong. Empirical evidence shows minority group discrimination and fragile political institutions to independently increase domestic terror attacks. But it remains unclear whether grievances drive domestic terrorism in both strong and weak states. Using data from 172 countries between 1998 and 2007, we find that for strong states the presence of minority discrimination leads to increased domestic terrorism, while for weak states the presence of minority discrimination actually leads to less domestic terrorism. Consequently, increasing state capacity may not be a panacea for antistate violence, as nonstate actors may simply change their strategy from insurgency or guerrilla warfare to terrorism. Efforts to reduce terrorist violence must focus on reducing grievance by eliminating discriminatory policies at the same time that measures to improve state capacity are enacted.     

The Role of Political Exclusion and State Capacity in Civil Conflict in South Asia

Extant literature on intrastate conflict independently explores terrorism and civil war. However, both terrorism and civil war are probably parts of a continuum of intrastate conflict with the former at one end and the latter at the other end in terms of intensity. I argue that two factors play important roles in rebels’ decision-making calculus, namely, the size of their support base and state strength. Terrorism, as a strategy of the weak, is optimal when the rebel groups have little support among their audience and the state is strong. On the other hand, guerrilla warfare is an ideal strategy when such groups have a greater support base and the state is weak. The theoretical argument is tested on a dataset of Myanmar and six countries of South Asia and for 1970–2007.