The Rise and Return of the Indo-Pacific: Oceans,Seas and Civilisational Linkages

The Indo-Pacific, constructed either as a region, super-region or non-region, is currently a hotly contested map-making phenomenon. Various countries and cultures, washed by the waters of these amorphous oceanic boundaries and sea spaces, are currently seeking to establish exclusive territorial claims over these water spaces by invoking stories and narratives taken from pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial eras. These stories are often used in an attempt to legitimate “natural”, and more essentialist relationships between certain cultures and/or nation-states with their surrounding seas. These narratives both challenge the broader international system and its rule of law, and create internal narratives, strengthening domestic and national support for state-building programs in the region/s. But the Indo-Pacific is more than a contestation between nation-statist imaginations and aspirations. It also invokes stories which seek to develop and celebrate a shared “maritime regionalism” beyond the exclusive and usually dominant politics of nation-states. Finally, a third interpretive category is used: the construction of the Indo-Pacific as a globalised “non-space”.     

Age assessment by rib phase analysis in Turks

The I?can's phase method for the estimation of adult age at death from the sternal extremity of the fourth rib was introduced in 1983. Over the years, numerous tests have confirmed the reliability of this technique on varied samples. However, no large scale study has been conducted to test the application of this method on a modern white sample geographically, genetically, and culturally diverse from the American white database. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to apply rib phase standards to a Turkish sample to test if the progression of morphological changes follow the same age sequence. Using a sample of 150 males and 144 females of known age at death, each rib was phased using the standards developed by I?can and associates in 1984 and 1985. The phase estimations were then subject to an analysis of variance. The results of the study indicated that Turkish ribs show the same morphological characteristics that define the phases at nearly identical ages. Variation as measured by the standard deviation increased from phase 5 on in both sexes. In conclusion, this study demonstrated that the rib phase standards can be accurately applied to Turks. Investigations of this nature are vital because one cannot assume that a method developed from one group is applicable to a distant population, especially in medicolegal proceedings.     

Rapid and nondestructive analysis of lipstick on different substrates using ATR-FTIR spectroscopy and chemometrics

Lipstick can be an important piece of evidence in crimes like murders, rapes, and suicides. Due to its prevalence, it can be an important corroborative evidence in crime reconstruction. The analysis of such evidence can provide an evidentiary link between the suspect, the victim, object, or the crime scene. We report the use of nondestructive ATR-FTIR spectroscopy combined with chemometrics for the classification of 10 brands of lipsticks with nine samples each. Chemometric method of partial least square-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) has been employed to interpret the data and classify the samples into their respective classes. The PLS-DA model provides an AUC figure above 0.99 in all brands except one; for which it is slightly less at 0.94. We have also tested the traces of these lipstick samples on different substrates treating them as unknowns in the already trained PLS-DA model. 100% of the samples on nine substrates viz. a cotton, nylon, plastic, dry tissue, denim (blue jeans), wet tissue, nitrile gloves, white paper, and polyester were correctly attributed to their source brand. In conclusion, the results suggest that ATR-FTIR combined with the chemometrics is a rapid, nondestructive, and accurate method for the discrimination and source attribution of lipstick. This study has potential for use in actual forensic casework conditions.     

Human Rights,Public Budgets,and Epistemic Challenges

Ideally, governing institutions would be designed so that they would produce and implement with certainty ‘human rights-compatible budgets’, i.e. budgets that adequately reflect the obligations enshrined in human rights. However, there are various reasons why a government may ultimately fail to produce such budgets. This article focuses on under-examined challenges for budgeting for human rights: epistemically oriented challenges. More specifically, the article engages in ‘horizon scanning’, and it maps key underlying factors that can be conducive to epistemically oriented challenges to produce and implement human rights-compatible budgets. In addition, the article considers the road ahead from the perspective of institutional design.     

Paid military service at the intersection of militarism,nationalism, capitalism,and (hetero)patriarchy: escaping without leaving ‘manhood’

The variety of the political standpoints of governments that have initiated exempted military service for several times in Turkey is a sign of a general agreement on its legitimacy. However, Turkey is a country where conscientious objection is almost a taboo. I try to decipher the assumptions behind what is (il)legitimate, and their manifestations in the sociopolitical life from a gender perspective informed by the feminist theory. I argue that what lies behind these is the interconnection between militarism, nationalism, patriarchy, and capitalism. I show how they reciprocally support each other through a critical discourse analysis of the debate on legitimacy of paid military service and illegitimacy of conscientious objection. I conclude that the nature of these debates leads to a reproduction of the hegemonic definitions of manhood and womanhood, together with the reproduction of the masculinization of the political sphere at the expense of the exclusion of and discrimination against other identities.     

Encounters with Europe in an Era of Domestic and International Turmoil: Is Turkey a De-Europeanising Candidate Country?

Abstract

This article provides a novel conceptual framework to understand the impact of the European Union on Turkish politics and policies in the aftermath of the opening of accession negotiations in 2005. It argues that the post-2005 developments in Turkey not only attest to lesser and more limited Europeanisation, but also entail a process that is increasingly gaining momentum in the country and which is referred to as ‘de-Europeanisation’.     

Public confidence in the judiciary: the interaction between political awareness and level of democracy

Apart from the studies that focus on public attitudes toward higher courts in advanced democracies, we know little about the factors that can explain public confidence in the judiciary in a comparative setting. In this regard, the goal of this study is to explain whether, and to what extent, the country's level of democracy moderates the impact of political awareness on public confidence in the judiciary. This study uses hierarchical linear models to analyse the interaction between individual and country level factors by using the World Values Survey (2005–2009) data for 49 countries and various other data sources. Our empirical results show that in advanced democracies political awareness variables like education and political participation have a positive impact on public confidence in the judiciary, whereas in countries with weak levels of democracy higher political awareness leads to increased cynicism about the judiciary. These results suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach to explain confidence in the judiciary is not possible when we are dealing with a wide range of societies that vary in terms of many characteristics, both institutional and cultural.     

Why do some international institutions contain strong dispute settlement provisions? New evidence from preferential trade agreements

To understand why some international institutions have stronger dispute settlement mechanisms (DSMs) than others, we investigate the dispute settlement provisions of nearly 600 preferential trade agreements (PTAs), which possess several desirable case-selection features and are evoked more than is realized. We broaden the study of dispute settlement design beyond “legalization” and instead reorient theorizing around a multi-faceted conceptualization of the strength of DSMs. We posit that strong DSMs are first and foremost a rational response to features of agreements that require stronger dispute settlement, such as depth and large memberships. Multivariate empirical tests using a new data set on PTA design confirm these expectations and reveal that depth – the amount of policy change specified in an agreement – is the most powerful and consistent predictor of DSM strength, providing empirical support to a long-posited but controversial conjecture. Yet power also plays a sizeable role, since agreements among asymmetric members are more likely to have strong DSMs due to their mutual appeal, as are those involving the United States. Important regional differences also emerge, as PTAs across the Americas are designed with strong dispute settlement, as are Asian PTAs, which contradicts the conventional wisdom about Asian values and legalization. Our findings demonstrate that rationalism explains much of international institutional design, yet it can be enhanced by also incorporating power-based and regional explanations.