Emerging combatants, war crimes and the future of international humanitarian law

The purpose of this paper is to examine the traditional paradigm of international law that regulates warfare and defines criminal behavior,and examine how the emergence of new actors has changed the environmentof armed conflict. The existing paradigm takes into account state actorsand insurgents who have recognizable political goals. All such combatantshave some stake in the existing international political system and somemeans are available (military intervention, war crimes trials) to compeltheir compliance with the law. However, new categories of combatants areemerging. They are not connected to states, may have no political goalsand are difficult to reach or persuade with time-tested methods.Compelling or persuading them to better compliance with the law is essential to protect vulnerable populations from their depredations.The paper concludes by identifying some contributions that criminologistscan make toward understanding these groups and devising strategies to meetthe challenge of war crimes. Those contributions by criminologists wouldbe equally valuable in dealing with the problem of war crimes and ``traditional' combatants.     

The Evolution of the Centre-right and the State of Scottish Conservatism

This article considers the decline of Scottish Conservatism, 1951–97. The statistical data indicate that 91 percent of the variance in Tory support is accounted for by an underlying negative trend against time, that similar patterns appear when the data is disaggregated by region, and that short-term fluctuations have been more in conformity with English results than is conventionally understood. The process of generational change is seen as a waning of the cultural conditions which produced the centre-right coalition that dominated Scottish politics, 1931–64, and its fragmentation into Conservatism, Liberalism, and Scottish Nationalism. The changed circumstances are not seen as peculiarly Scottish, but the consequences for Scottish Conservatism of an evolution affecting the centre-right across the United Kingdom.     

THE ROARING SILENCE: FEMINIST REVISIONS IN THE EDUCATIONAL POLICY LITERATURE

Absent from assessments of feminism's influence on the academy and the disciplines is an evaluation of the impact of feminist thought on policy research. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate feminist scholarship's presence in the core policy and higher education journals. The first section of the paper explains why it is important to consider the influence of feminism on the policy literature. This is followed by a discussion of what is meant by feminism in the context of this paper. The third section presents the methodology used in evaluating the literature. The paper concludes with a discussion of the findings and implications