Indigenization of the Holocaust and the Tehran Holocaust Conference: Iranian Aberration or Third World Trend?

It is understandable that Iran’s December 2006 hosting of an international conference casting doubts on the historicity of the Holocaust would raise questions about treatments of the Shoah elsewhere in the Third World. In fact, indigenization the Holocaust—the manifold ways in which serious scholars, activists, and writers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America have come to incorporate the Holocaust in their intellectual work—has been positive overall. Within the framework of intellectual globalization, much of the Third World intelligentsia has come to include this most Western of human rights violations within the framework of their own cultures and histories. Although some of the indigenization of the Holocaust is political and instrumental, the deviant variant expressed at the Tehran Holocaust conference is atypical. Governmental respect for the memory of victims of genocide should be considered as an emerging human right.     

Note on land reform in Bangladesh: The efficacy of ceilings

In this note, new data concerning the agrarian structure of Bangladesh are employed to test the efficacy of ceilings on the size of landholdings as a means of making land available to the landless and the near landless. The data confirm that the numbers of potential claimants for land far exceeds the potential supply, even if ceilings on holdings were lowered from 100 standard bighas (331/3 acres) to 25 standard bighas (81/3 acres).     

Marxist scholarship on Thailand the work of E. Thadeus flood (1932–1977)

Abstract

Thadeus Flood died of cancer on December 11, 1977. The last ten years of his life were devoted to promoting revolutionary change and resisting American imperialism in Thailand. His life and work reveal the contradictions of American education and imperialist policy. This is not only because of what he wrote about, but because his life and scholarship transcended his conservative and “apolitical” education, moving him from academic scholarship to political commitment, forcing him beyond the functions within the university for which he had been intended. American imperialism in Southeast Asia gave him a political awareness which his education had consistently denied him. In this brief article I would like to indicate the important lessons which Asian scholars and others can learn from his transformation, and to attempt to assess his seminal contribution to the study of Thailand. I seek to draw, from his life and work, political lessons which can further our common struggles.     

Prosecutor Risk,Maturation, and Wrongful Conviction Practice

In this article we rethink the connection between prosecutorial experience and conviction psychology that undergirds much of the academic literature about wrongful convictions. The conviction psychology account of prosecutorial behavior asserts that prosecutorial susceptibility to cognitive biases deepens over time, thereby increasing the risk that prosecutors will become involved in wrongful convictions the longer they stay in the profession. Our interviews with more than 200 state prosecutors call into question the basis for this asserted correlation between prosecutorial experience and risk of misconduct. The prosecutors we met consistently reported that, all else equal, prosecutors tend to become more balanced, rather than more adversarial, over time. Hence, the prosecutors who present the greatest risk of producing a wrongful conviction are those who are either inexperienced or resistant to the normal maturation process. For this reason, we suggest that wrongful conviction researchers and database designers pay closer attention to the variables associated with prosecutorial experience and resistance that might affect the development of prosecutorial maturity and the consequent risk of wrongful convictions.     

Towards consolidating democracy: The paradoxical role of democracy groups in Thailand

Civil society is thought to contribute to consolidating democracy, but exactly how this happens is not especially well understood. This article examines the recent experiences of ‘democracy groups’ in Thailand. While acknowledging there are other factors that contribute to democratic consolidation, it finds the cumulative effect of Thailand's intermediating organizations, such as democracy groups, appears to be a redistribution of information and resources in ways that are causing changes in state‐society relations, making the country more pluralistic and contributing to consolidating democracy. Democracy groups and other civil society organizations are providing a widening circle of Thais with virtually unprecedented opportunities to participate in the policy‐making process. Yet despite their accomplishments, these groups might have greater consolidating effects if they themselves adhered more to democratic norms and procedures. Nevertheless, without democracy groups and other civil society organizations, Thailand would be less democratic than it is, although democracy is not fully consolidated yet.