Defense Transformation in Latin America: Will It Transform the Technological Base?

Developing the defense trilemma of choices between autonomy, stability, and global integration, this article analyzes the strategic tension in military acquisition between undertaking technology partnerships versus off-the-shelf purchases of equipment to meet modernization needs in Latin America. The Brazilian case is examined for its lessons in how partnerships can help countries to achieve strategic goals while promoting industrial capacities.     

Armed conflict,land grabs and primitive accumulation in Colombia: micro processes,macro trends and the puzzles in between

Armed conflict is widely believed to disrupt agricultural production and ‘reverse’ development, but it may also involve the violent transformation of rural economies from subsistence to commercial agriculture. The case of Las Pavas, an estate in northern Colombia, provides further evidence that armed conflict created opportunities for violent land grabs and the expansion of commercial agriculture in Colombia. However, aggregate data suggest that primitive accumulation may be only part of the story behind the massive scale of forced displacement and dispossession. A research strategy that accounts for the diversity of subnational contexts, processes and outcomes is needed.     

The dynamics of rural poverty in Latin America

The development and perpetuation of a functional dualism between the subsistence sector and the commodity‐producing sector is an objective outcome of the laws of capital accumulation in the periphery of the world capitalist system. The necessity for this dualism derives from the drive of capitalists to maximise profits and thus maintain low wages. Its possibility arises from social disarticulation whereby labour's income does not participate in expanding the market for the modern sector. Through dualism, surplus value is increased not only by the orthodox means of central economies—principally increasing the productivity of work to reduce necessary labour embodied in wage goods—but, in addition, and dramatically more effectively, by collapsing the price of agricultural labour by an amount equal to the production of use‐values by the worker's family in the subsistence plot. In this way, subsistence agriculture supplies cheap labour to commercial agriculture which, in turn, supplies cheap food to the urban sector where it sustains low wages. Socially disarticulated accumulation and functional dualism between capitalist and precapitalist modes perpetuate primitive accumulation in the modern sector based on surplus extraction from the peasant sector fundamentally via the labour market. This specific form of overexploitation of rural labour implies a particular dynamic in the use of labour and natural resources in subsistence agriculture. The pattern of rural poverty and the subjective contradictions of peripheral capitalism can thus largely be understood by identifying the antagonistic contradictions to which the subsistence economy is subject in adjusting to domination.     

Facts Tell A Different Story

正China has billionaires and is a top destination for foreign direct investment. It has thousands of branches of Starbucks and KFC,along with significant private ownership of capital. It suffers from different levels of inequality. These factors lead many to question whether it really is what it claims to be: a socialist country.     

The Chinese Dream

At the end of 2014,Chinese President Xi Jinping put forward the strategic layout of the Four Comprehensives—comprehensively building a moderately prosperous society,deepening reform,advancing the rule of law,and strictly governing the Communist Party of China.Later,the new guideline for development became the overall framework for the current leadership's work and has aroused interest at home and abroad.From Issue No.17 onward,Beijing Review publishes a series of commentaries by foreign researchers commissioned by Renmin University of China’s Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies.     

Identification of a Suspect in a Murder Case through Recovery of Fingermarks from a Fired Cartridge Case

During the period of one year, the Police of the State of Espírito Santo in Brazil analyzed 1,431 cartridge cases obtained from crime scenes and seizures. The cartridges were subjected to a development sequence (cyanoacrylate fuming + gun bluing + fluorescent dying), and panoramic images of the developed fingermarks were generated based on the photographs taken during the rotation of the cartridges. Ridge details were observed in 50 cartridges, but only in 5 cartridges, the marks were considered with value for identification. The fingermarks were searched in the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) of the Brazilian Federal Police and, in one case, it was possible to obtain the suspect's identification. In our knowledge, this is the first case in Brazil of identification of a suspect based on a fingermark recovered from a fired cartridge case.     

Marginal vote seeking in multi member districts

Differences in the number of seats that similar vote shares can deliver make some votes more marginal than others. In multi-member district systems, high-marginal-return votes are very volatile and research has assumed that parties do not go after them. This paper rejects this assumption, introducing a theory of marginal vote seeking across multi-member districts. By leveraging a novel mathematical algorithm and a cross sectional data set, we find evidence that parties seek marginal votes in these systems despite their volatility. In the case of the poverty alleviation programs used here, their use to attempt to secure marginal votes overwhelms the program’s poverty alleviation goals. Estimates suggest that a district’s share of a program’s budget can increase by as much as 8% simply because of this district’s likelihood of delivering marginal votes.     

The Principle of the ‘Common’, Legal Pluralism and Decolonization in Latin America

Law and Critique - This paper aims to introduce, in the context of Latin America, the theoretical epistemic discussion regarding the theme of the ‘common’ as a political principle which...