Balance of Power or the State-to-Nation Balance: Explaining Middle East War-Propensity

The Middle East is one of the most war-prone regions in the international system. What is the most powerful explanation of the war-propensity of this region? I argue that neither realism nor liberalism are able to account for variations in regional war-proneness. Instead, I advance an alternative explanation based on the concept of the state-to-nation balance in the region. This balance refers to the degree of congruence between the division of the region into territorial states and the national aspirations and political identifications of the region's peoples. The balance also refers to the prevalence of strong versus weak states in the region. Thus, I explain the Middle East's high war-proneness by focusing on its relatively low level of state-to-nation balance. This imbalance has led to a powerful combination of revisionist ideologies and state incoherence. While other regions suffer from state incoherence, powerful revisionist nationalist forces, notably pan-nationalist and irredentists (the “Greater State”), aggravate this problem in the Middle East. These revisionist forces are often transborder and are especially powerful in the Middle East because of the high degree of external/transborder incongruence in comparison with all other regions. The combination of nationalist revisionism and state incoherence has made the Middle East more prone to violence than most other regions.     

Comparative Compliance: Digital Piracy,Deterrence, Social Norms,and Duty in China and the United States

The study of compliance has been predominantly Western, and we do not know whether existing theories and findings also apply elsewhere. As a first venture in developing a comparative view on compliance, this study seeks to gain a comparative understanding of compliance decision making among Chinese and American students. It studies their decisions in response to two scenarios that offer an opportunity to use pirated online content. It tests how their decisions are shaped by subjective deterrence, social norms, and perceived duty to obey the law, comparing a control group with a group who received an explicit deterrence message from a strong campaign targeting the use of pirated digital content. The results indicate that, regardless of the explicit enforcement context, Chinese students' inclination to engage in digital piracy hinges chiefly on the perceived behavior and approval of others. This stands in contrast to US students. Within an explicit enforcement context, both social norms and perceived enforcement affect US students' decision making, whereas when there is no explicit enforcement context, both social norms and perceived duty to obey the law affect decision making. This study thus provides a warning that compliance theories and findings may not generalize well beyond the Western context. This necessitates the development of comparative compliance studies and more cross‐national replication.     

Divesting from Climate Change: The Road to Influence

Is fossil fuels divestment likely to achieve its aims? This article evaluates the rationales for divestment in terms of their capacity to give the campaign influence. It focuses on the direct effects of divestment on financial actors because divestment is a specific means of exerting influence outside of conventional political channels. In seeking to end fossil fuel industries in order to halt climate change, the campaign deploys a variety of arguments to win support and wield influence, namely, the legality of divestment and, indeed, the emerging duty to divest; investors’ moral responsibility to avoid complicity in the fossil fuel economy; investors’ moral responsibility to use their leverage against climate polluters; and the power of financial sanctions to create a business case for abandoning fossil fuels. Although in combination they may be effective, each of these asserted rationales has some limitations that may diminish the influence of the divestment movement. Moreover, the movement does not engage sufficiently with the systemic qualities of finance capitalism that must also be reckoned with in order to address broader patterns of environmental unsustainability. Although the divestment movement aspires to ultimately change government policies on climate change, it may achieve greater influence by also seeking better government regulation of the financial economy.     

Incidental findings in pediatric research

The approach to incidental research findings in children emerges by considering the child-parent relationship and balancing divergent interests and preferences. Incidental findings with clear and proximate clinical importance should be disclosed to both. We recommend that particularly sensitive or private information (e.g., pregnancy or drug use) should be disclosed to the adolescent first, while particularly serious information (e.g., cancer) should first be disclosed to the parent. These approaches allow the researcher to form an alliance with one party prior to engaging the other. However, unlike clinical settings, where there may be presumptive expectations of confidentiality about sharing information within the family, in most research settings it is reasonable to plan to disclose such information to both parties. It is important to communicate this plan during the informed consent process separately to adolescents to avoid enrolling adolescents when sensitive incidental findings such as pregnancy and drug use may be detected. The approach to incidental findings without clear and proximate benefit is challenging. Researchers should plan more limited disclosure of such incidental findings for pediatric participants than for adult participants.     

A post-residential-treatment follow-up of socially and emotionally deviant adolescents in Israel

Fifty-five emotionally and socially deviant but normally intelligent adolescents who had spent 2–7 years in a children's and apprentice home in Israel were followed up 5–9 years after they had left the institution. Their postresidential social and vocational careers were evaluated by means of personal interviews, home visits, and reports from employers, and it was found that good adjustment was substantially related to family background variables (having lived with biological parents prior to residential placement, mutual positive relationship between parent and child, being first born) as well as to satisfactory behavior and performance in peer group, school, and workshop during residence. Level of intelligence, unrelated to overall adjustment, correlated positively with vocational status and income at followup. On the other hand, length of stay in the apprentice home had no impact on postresidential adaptation to work and society. Fewer than 10% of exinmates expressed retrospectively a negative attitude toward their stay in the institution. The importance of paying more attention to the eventual long-term and enduring impact of family relationship on the residential and postresidential behavior of adolescents is discussed, suggesting a shift of emphasis in evaluating factors involved in institutional treatment. Findings also indicate that later social and vocational success may be fairly predicted from observation of behavior during the stay in the institution.The empirical study reported in this article was supported by a grant from the Australian Women's International Zionist Organisation (WIZO), through the initiative of Mrs. Martha Jacobson, Melbourne, chairman of the board of directors.Received his Ph.D. in Psychology and Special Education from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, in 1954. Main research interests are normal and abnormal child development, high-risk infants, adolescence, and handicapped children.Main research interest is institutional care.     

The human ear: its role in forensic practice

The human ear has much to offer investigators in relation to many areas of forensic practice including forensic pathology, anthropology, identification and facial reconstruction and yet its full potential is often overlooked. This review paper explores current knowledge related to the human ear drawing attention to those situations where the ear could play a valuable role in a forensic investigation.     

On collective goods,private wealth,and the core solution of simple games with sidepayments

This essay identifies consequences for the core solution in a class of social decision problems concerning the provision of collective goods (or bads) if the rules are modified to permit sidepayments. In these problems, a kind of formal decision procedure that includes any weighted or unweighted majority rule governs only the decision about collective goods. Each decision about collective goods, however, implies a vector of the agents' endowments of private wealth that can, but need not, vary across the alternatives. Any agent may offer to make sidepayments from this endowment that are contingent on the collective goods decision, but the agent holds preferences that, given any fixed decision about collective goods, strictly increase in the agent's own wealth. The results indicate that the core's response to introducing the possibility of sidepayments depends on whether any agent possesses a veto over the collective goods decision. If no one has a veto, then an outcome belongs to the core of the game with sidepayments only if no sidepayment is made and the same decision about collective goods belongs to the core of the associated game without sidepayments. In this case, introducing the possibility of sidepayments does not bring a new collective goods decision into the core. Indeed, merely adding the possibility of sidepayments can cause the core to vanish. On the other hand, if at least one agent possesses a veto, then introducing sidepayments can (but need not) lead to a new core solution concerning the decision about collective goods. In any such new solution, at least one agent who has a veto — but no one who lacks it — receives a sidepayment.