US concept wars,civil liberties and the technologies of fortification

The horrific events of September 11, 2001 led to calls for the deployment of state-of-the-art security systems and the creation of an “invisible shield” to protect America. Such proposals immediately triggered debate about the constitutional ethics of surveillance in the United States. While there has been widespread support for the surrender of some cherished civil liberties in the war against terror, surveillance, especially the visual variety, is still seen to be innately un-American. Technologies like biometric face recognition systems, critics argue, are not consistent with the values of an open society and should consequently be considered with great caution. The widespread introduction of such invasive technology, pundits claim, would signal a victory for the terrorists.Many American commentators fail to recognize, however, that the United States, far from being the open society they imagine, has long been characterized by exclusion. Moreover, such exclusion is increasingly enforced by the same high technology of which biometrics is a part. In fact, for at least a decade before the declaration of the war on terror, the United States has been undergoing a multifaceted process of fortification both within its cities and at the US-Mexican frontier. Investigation of this phenomena reveals the central role of the US’s longest running concept war, the war on drugs. This paper argues that within this narrative biometric surveillance and the creation of “an invisible wall” should not be regarded as a break with American traditions but as the next organic phase of an ongoing process of fortifying the United States.     

The Parliamentary Enquiry on Fraud in the Dutch Construction Industry Collusion as Concept Between Corruption and State-Corporate Crime

In December 2002 the final report of the Royal Commission concerning Irregularities in the Dutch Construction Industry was published. The broadcasting of the public hearings in the months before was breaking news. It proved the whole sector participated in illegal practices, ranging from fraud, unjustified subsidies and license issuance to real bribery and money or favours to individual politicians or higher-ranking public servants; from undercutting the market, monopolisation and forcing up prices, to selective control by partial inspectorates. In his article the author, an advisor to the Commission, summarises the mayor types of irregularities the report reveals with special interest in the network dimension they had in common. The Commission spoke about collusion as the key problem. Collusion can be described as secret agreement for a fraudulent or deceitful purpose, especially to defeat the course of law. Theoretically this concept can have many faces. In this parliamentary enquiry it was illustrated in three ways: as anti-trust illegalities, as a kind of governmental crime, and as kind of corruption. The report showed a long-lasting structural interrelation between these three types with a special role for the twining between collusion and corruption. Corruption research often mentions collusion as a cause, condition or explanation of corruption. But rarely is that argument illustrated in detail. This article seeks to do so. Especially when corruption is hard to grasp in modern society, a solution could be to take collusion as ‘a network offence’ more seriously. The collusion subsystems revealed hereare relatively stable networks, invulnerable to individualised anti-corruption legislation. The author pleads for stricter rules governing state-corporate interrelationships, more severe control on network abuses, and the introduction of minimum standards for public contracting as proposed by Transparency International.     

Victim Policy Transfer: Learning From Each Other

This paper looks at the recent introduction of victim impact statements in several European countries. It asks whether victim impact statements are a positive addition to victim policy and practice in Europe and examines the challenges of adapting to the civil legal tradition a tool that was developed in a common law country.     

Border Enforcement,Organized Crime,and Deaths of Smuggled Migrants on the United States – Mexico Border

In response to ever increasing numbers of illegal immigrants entering the United States from Mexico, the United States adopted a border enforcement strategy in the 1990s that sought to bring the problem under control. This strategy relied primarily on increasing the number of Border Patrol agents directly on the border, the erection of walls at heavy traffic areas, and insertion of electronic surveillance systems. While these efforts succeeded in making it more difficult for illegal migrants to gain entry into the United States undetected, it also resulted in an increased reliance on human smugglers. Thus, the nature of the problem has shifted from one of illegal immigration to one of human smuggling. In an effort to gain entry successfully, smugglers have continued to lead migrants through hazardous terrain along the border where surveillance is less intense. Anecdotal evidence is presented which suggests that smugglers' drive for profit often results in the abandonment and death of migrants. Implications for future border policing strategy and research are discussed. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the International Conference on Organized Crime and Humanitarian Disasters at the initiative of the International Scientific and Professional Advisory Council of the United Nations Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Programme (ISPAC) in cooperation with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Courmayeur Mont Blanc, Italy, December 3–5, 2004.     

Regional Technological Differences: The Case of Southern European Union

This paper examines the spatial spillover effects and the productivity rate of patents in southern European Union. It provides a systematic analysis of the relationship between productivity of patents and the factors that generate economically useful new technological knowledge. An applied spatial econometric framework is employed since this approach is particularly useful in the study of the spatial patterns of patents productivity, at the lowest possible levels of spatial aggregation.     

Gender Patterns of Research and Licensing Activity of Science and Engineering Faculty

In this paper we extend our earlier work on science and engineering faculty disclosure and licensing activity to examine a characteristic of faculty ignored in our earlier work – the gender of faculty in our database of over 4500 faculty at 11 major universities. Not surprisingly, women comprise only 8.55% of the faculty in our sample. They are most represented in the biological sciences and the women in the sample are more likely to be younger faculty. The most striking result from highlighting women in the sample is that women are less likely to disclose inventions than men despite the fact that there are no significant differences in publication patterns. While disclosure activity varies by gender, we find that the disclosure activity of women and men converges over the period of our sample.JEL Classification: J16, L3, O3Financial support was provided by National Science Foundation (SES 0094573), the Alan and Mildred Peterson Foundation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.     

Governance and Incentive Regulation in Defence Industry Enterprises: A Case Study

In this paper, we analyse the relative efficiency of the Portuguese defence industry with a stochastic frontier. In so doing we consider whether government subsidies have, in fact, resulted in an increase in the technical efficiency of the Portuguese defence-sector companies and whether there is a governance environment to enforce the desired improvement in efficiency. We find that the results are, at best, mixed, leading us to conclude that the incentive regulation introduced by the Ministry of Defence is not achieving its aims. Moreover, governance issues are not on the government agenda. Therefore, we propose a policy revision to enforce efficiency, based on a governance environment framework.JEL M14, D72, K22, K33     

Credible Criminal Enforcement

Economic models of crime and punishment implicitly assume that the government can credibly commit to the fines, sentences, and apprehension rates it has chosen. We study the government’s problem when credibility is an issue. We find that several of the standard predictions of the economic model are altered when commitment is taken into account. Specifically, when only fines are used, commitment results in a lower apprehension rate and hence a higher crime rate. However, when jail is used (with or without fines), apprehension rates and jail terms may be higher or lower compared to the optimal static policy.JEL K14, K42     

Taxes,Tradable Rights and Transaction Costs

With respect to market-based policy approaches, it is a widely held view that corrective taxation entails substantial, though far fewer transaction costs than tradable permit systems. This conclusion only holds if set-up costs are singled out. This paper explores all relevant market, managerial and political transaction costs associated with environmental taxes and tradable emission rights. It is argued that the prevalence of transaction costs is largely dependent on the design of the policy instrument, respectively the tax base or the trading regime chosen. Comparative analysis further shows that a cap-and-trade program of emission permits distributed for free, traded on a brokered market and monitored upstream is not only more effective, but also likely to entail fewer transaction costs than environmental taxes. Any attempt, in turn, to save the huge information, enforcement and compliance costs incurred by corrective taxation impairs its efficacy by severing the link between the environmental externality and the tax base.JEL Classification: K32, K34     

Interrupting the Myth of the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Partage</Emphasis>: Reflections on Sovereignty and Sacrifice in the work of Nancy,Agamben and Derrida

Agamben traces the bio-political essence of modern politics to the non-sacrificial killing of Homo Sacer in Roman law. Nancy, on the other hand, links the history of Western politics to the fundamental logic of sacrifice in Western metaphysics. He nevertheless contemplates the possibility that Western societies may finally have arrived at the threshold of a non-sacrificial existence. Derrida seeks to resist the sacrificial logic of Western metaphysics and politics, but nevertheless appears to accept it as an irreducible fact of human co-existence. Unlike Nancy, he envisages no actual or actualised beyond beyond the realm of sacrificial metaphysics and politics. He thus can be said to interrupt Nancy’s ‘myth’ of a non-sacrificial partage. This article compares these three philosophical stances in the hope of throwing more light on the role of sacrifice in the law and politics of our time. Professor of Law, Rand Afrikaans University. Conversations with Ann van Sevenant, Carol Clarkson, Louise du Toit, Peter Fitzpatrick, Costas Douzinas and Adam Thurschwell gave impetus to many of the themes developed in this article. Concomitant shortcomings and inaccuracies, as always, are mine.