Reviews

Archie Brown and Michael Kaser, (eds.) Soviet Policy for the 1980s, London: Macmillan/ St Antony's, 1982. 282 pp. £20.00 (hardback) £7–95 (paperback).

David Holloway and Jane M. O. Sharp, (eds.) The Warsaw Pact: Alliance in Transition? London: Macmillan, 1984, 290 pp. £25.00.

Daniel N. Nelson, (ed.) Soviet Allies: the Warsaw Pact and the Issue of Reliability. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1984—UK suppliers, Bowker Publishing Company, xiii + 273 pp. £22.50.

Bohdan Harasymiw, Political Elite Recruitment in the Soviet Union. London: Macmillan, 1984, xviii + 277 pp. £25.00.

Rex A. Wade, Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984, ix + 391 pp. $32.50.

Joachim Hoffmann, Die Geschichte der Wlassow‐Armee. Einzelschriften zur militärischen Geschichte des Zweiten Weltkrieges. Band 27. Verlag Rombach, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1984, xviii + 468 pp. DM. 32.00 (paperback).

Michal Mirski, The mixed economy: NEP and its lot. Translated from Polish by Roger A. Clarke. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1984, 295 pp. DKr. 125.

Jean‐Charles Asselain, Planning and Profits in Socialist Economies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984, xii + 269 pp. £12.50.

Roger Skurski, Soviet Marketing and Economic Development. London: Macmillan, 1983, 190 pp. £20.00.

Borys Lewytzkyj, Politics and Society in Soviet Ukraine 1953–80. Edmonton: Alberta: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1984, 219 pp.

Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity 1980–82. London: 1983, George Sanford, Polish Communism in Crisis. London‐New York: 1983.

Jack Bielasiak and Maurice D. Simon, (eds.) Polish Politics: Edge of the Abyss. New York: Praeger, 1984, xv + 366 pp.

Kari Möttölä, O. N. Bykov and I. S. Korolev, (eds.) Finnish‐Soviet Economic Relations, London: Macmillan (in association with the Finnish Institute of International Affairs), 1983, xxi + 358 pp. £30.00

John Dunn, The Politics of Socialism, An Essay in Political Theory Cambridge University Press. 1984, xviii + 107pp. £15 (hardback) £4.95 (paperback).     

Reviews

Prof. W. E. Butler (ed.). Russian Law: Historical and Political Perspectives. Leyden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1977, xi + 266 pp. Dfl. 76.00. $31.50

Peter H. Solomon, Jr., Soviet Criminologists and Criminal Policy. Specialists in Policy‐Making. London: Macmillan Press, 1978. x + 253 pp. £10.00.

Mawdsley, E. The Russian Revolution and the Baltic Fleet. War and Politics, February 1917—April 1918. London: Macmillan (in association with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies), 1978. xv + 213 pp., ill., map, bibl.

George Garvey, Money, Financial Flows and Credit in the Soviet Union. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1977 (published for the National Bureau of Economic Research Inc.). xii + 223 pp. £11.00.

Stanislaw J. Sawicki, Soviet Land and Housing Law, a Historical and Comparative Study, New York, London: Praeger Publishers, 1977. xxiii + 199 pp. £13.05.

Hélène Carrère d'Encausse: L'empire éclaté. Paris: Flammarion, 1978, 314 pp.

S. G. Solomon, The Soviet agrarian debate, a controversy in social science, 1923–1929. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1977. xvi + 309 pp. $15.25.

David Lane and Felicity O'Dell, The Soviet Industrial Worker: Social Class, Education and Control. Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1978. 167 pp. £7.95.     

Who Can Keep the Peace? Insurgent Organizational Control of Collective Violence

Every armed organization seeks the ability to turn violence on and off by getting fighters to fight when ordered and to stop fighting when similarly ordered. This ability is a defining feature of what makes organized violence, in fact, organized. While state militaries develop clear hierarchies and disciplinary procedures to accomplish this goal, the complexity of civil war makes the task more difficult for insurgent groups. I argue that the leaders of insurgent organizations are able to turn violence on and off when they have deliberately established resource control through the direct, and exclusive, distribution of resources to their followers and those followers are socially embedded, meaning that members are united by strong horizontal ties and group norms. In contrast to existing approaches, I argue that material and social endowments do not predetermine whether leaders can establish resource control or embeddedness. Further, laying out the precise organizational mechanisms that determine when organizations can turn violence on and off challenges the utility of conceptions such as “fragmentation” or “cohesion” for explaining insurgent behavior and conflict outcomes. I test the theory by examining variation in behavior over time in two organizations facing different structural contexts—Jaysh al-Mahdi in Iraq and the Viet Minh in Vietnam—and find strong support for my argument while casting doubt on existing explanations.     

Wench Tactics? Openings in Conditions of Closure

Picking up the question of what FLaK might be, this editorial considers the relationship between openness and closure in feminist legal studies. How do we draw on feminist struggles for openness in common resources, from security to knowledge, as we inhabit a compromised space in commercial publishing? We think about this first in relation to the content of this issue: on image-based abuse continuums, asylum struggles, trials of protestors, customary justice, and not-so-timely reparations. Our thoughts take us through the different ways that openness and closure work in struggles against violence, cruel welcomes, and re-arrangements of code and custom. Secondly, we share some reflections on methodological openness and closure as the roundtable conversation on asylum, and the interview with Riles, remind us of #FLaK2016 and its method of scattering sources as we think about how best to mix knowledges. Thirdly, prompted by the FLaK kitchen table conversations on openness, publishing and ‘getting the word out’, we respond to Kember’s call to ‘open up open access’. We explain the different current arrangements for opening up FLS content and how green open access, the sharedit initiative, author request and publisher discretion present alternatives to gold open access. Finally drawing on Franklin and Spade, we show how there are a range of ‘wench tactics’—adapting gifts, stalling and resting—which we deploy as academic editors who are trying to have an impact on the access, use and circulation of our journal, even though we do not own the journal we edit. These wench tactics are alternatives to the more obvious or reported tactic of resignation, or withdrawing academic labour from editing and reviewing altogether. They help us think about brewing editorial time, what ambivalence over our 25th birthday might mean, and how to inhabit painful places. In this, we respond in our own impure, compromised way to da Silva’s call not to forget the native and slave as we do FLaK, and repurpose shrapnel, in our common commitments.     

idPAD: Paper Analytical Device for Presumptive Identification of Illicit Drugs

As drug overdose deaths across the United States continue to rise, there is increasing interest in field testing of illicit substances. This work discusses a paper-based analytical device (idPAD) that can run a library of 12 colorimetric tests at the same time, each detecting different chemical functional groups and materials found in illicit drugs, distractor substances, and cutting agents. The idPAD requires no electricity, costs less than $2 USD, and requires minimal training to operate. The results of the 12 tests form a color barcode which is “read” by comparison to standard images. The accuracy of the idPAD was assessed using samples of heroin, cocaine HCl, crack, and methamphetamine at concentrations of 25%–100% in a lactose matrix, as well as pure lactose. Based on 840 “reads” by three different users, the idPAD showed 95% sensitivity and 100% specificity for detecting these drugs; the most common error was mistaking cocaine HCl for crack or crack for cocaine HCl. In a second step, samples of heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine (n = 30) and distractor substances (pharmaceuticals, cutting agents, and other illicit drugs, n = 64) were tested by two readers, yielding a sensitivity of 100% and specificity of 97%. Targeted substances were detected reliably at 55–180 μg/lane, and the idPAD was found to be stable for at least 3 months when stored at room temperature. The library approach used in the idPAD may provide the accuracy and robustness necessary for a presumptive field drug test.     

Cuba's Response to COVID-19: What Underlies its Apparent Success?

Over the last few months extremely positive accounts have been circulating of Cuba's role and approach in the COVID-19 response, both nationally and internationally. A universal healthcare system with family doctors and nurses providing door-to-door services, as well as the swift introduction of measures to control movement have been some of the factors underlying this relative success. However, this success hides the disadvantageous social reality facing the majority of Cubans, including differential access to services, a health system that is struggling and limited choice and freedoms.     

Azerbaijan after Heydar Aliev

G. Carter Bently. Ethnicity and Nationality: A Bibliographic Guide. Publications on Ethnicity of Nationality of the School of International Studies, No. 3. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981. Pp. xxii, 370. $37.00.

Stephen Steinberg. The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity and Class in America. New York: Atheneum, 1981. Pp. x, 277. $14.95.     

Netherlands East Indies: The Large Colonial Surplus of Indonesia, 1878‐1939

Surprisingly few previous contributions to estimates of Indonesia's colonial surplus have been made, all of them using the export surplus method. Having defined the colonial surplus, the export surplus method is rejected here as unnecessary and misleading. The Indies balance of payments data are used critically for the first time. Adding missing items and further analysing an odd but very big private item much larger estimates of the colonial surplus are produced. A comparison with the colonial surplus of British India is made. In all, the new colonial surplus for the Netherlands East Indies is estimated at almost 24 billion guilders, approximately US$10 billion or some US$156 billion in today's terms. Those figures are considered large indeed.