The Precarious State of Famine Research

In 2017 famine struck yet again. While famine continues to haunt many fragile countries, the paper reveals a faltering scholarly interest in famine research, particularly within the research tradition of development studies. Today, the research field is rather dominated by the research traditions of history and economics. Interestingly, the steepest decline in scholarly attention to famine coincided with Amartya Sen being awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998 in part for his work on famine. The paper points to three characteristics of famine research that might account for this rather puzzling development: (i) the field of contemporary famine research exhibits limited interest in theory-building; (ii) the field is impeded by inaccessibility to key research sites; and (iii) the field is weakened by a small and dispersed research community. The paper suggests remedies that might address these obstacles to contemporary famine research in development studies. To facilitate more theoretical development, scholars could engage with the recent call for a criminalisation of famine, and the broader field of disaster research could be used as an institutional catalyst for scholars of famine.     

Manipulating the Census: Ethnic Minorities in the Nationalizing States of Central Asia* 1

Even though self-critical dealing with the past has not been an official criterion for joining the EU, the founding of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research and the Holocaust conference in Stockholm at the beginning of 2000 seem to have generated informal standards of confronting and exhibiting the Holocaust in the context of “Europeanization of Memory.” Comparative analysis shows that post-Communist museums dealing with the World War II period perform in the context of those informal standards. Both the Jasenovac Memorial Museum in Croatia and the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banská Bystrica were founded in the Communist era and played an important role in supporting the founding myths of the two countries. Both were subjected to historical revisionism during the 1990s. In the current exhibitions from 2004/2006, both memorial museums stress being part of Europe and refer, to “international standards” of musealization, while the Jasenovac memorial claims to focus on “the individual victim.” But stressing the European dimension of resistance and the Holocaust obscures such key aspects as the civil war and the responsibility of the respective collaborating regime.     

The French Constitutional Law of 23 July 2008 as seen by MPs: Working or Talking Parliament?

The French constitutional law of 2008 is, with the modification of 47 articles, the most important revision of the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, at least in quantitative terms. Surprisingly, there have been few attempts to evaluate the effects of the reform, whose official aim was to improve the status of the role of the (traditionally weak) French parliament. The purpose of this contribution is to analyse how MPs themselves judge this reform and its effects, especially on the role of the parliament and its everyday work. To do so we make use of the data of the LEGIPAR research project (September 2009–January 2011): 227 MPs answered closed and open questions about their perception of parliamentary work in face-to-face interviews. The data of the project DEPASTRA (2005–6) allow for a comparison with MPs' positions before the vote of the constitutional revision of 2008.     

Cross-border Policy Networks in the Basel Region: The Effect of National Borders and Brokerage Roles

This paper provides evidence of how national borders affect the structure of policy networks. Our analysis of the Basel cross-border metropolitan region located across Switzerland, France and Germany considers the case of public transportation in border regions. Using a social network analysis of the relationships between 44 actors, we show that national borders play a diminishing role in the formation of policy networks for both information exchange and decision making. Local actors develop different brokerage roles according to their country of origin: Swiss actors function as coordinator and representative brokers vis-à-vis actors located in France and Germany.     

Institutions and representation: How institutional rules shape political recruitment in French regional elections

This article attempts to develop an approach to political recruitment that combines the study of strategies deployed by candidates, party officials and local leaders, with an analysis of the effects induced by the institutional environment within which they act. It is suggested that institutional ‘rules’ specific to French political life shape the competition among political actors who participate in the selection of candidates standing for regional election. More specifically, political recruitment can be fully understood only if three kinds of institutional variables are combined: the rules of the regional electoral system; the organisational features of political activity at the local level; and, above all, the variety of non‐codified norms and criteria which orient the perceptions and beliefs of the political groups involved in the selection process. The main empirical conclusion is that institutional variables engender ‘unexpected effects’ which modify traditional mechanisms of local elite recruitment.     

On the dynamics of legal convergence

In this paper, we study the dynamics of legal rules in a model with two nation-states playing a non cooperative game. For each country, changing the legal system is a costly process. At the same time, the existence of different legal systems is also costly for all nation-states. We show that despite the non cooperative behavior of countries, a process of legal convergence is achieved in the long run through small step by step changes. This result depends neither on the number of players in the game, nor on the time horizon of policy makers. Complete legal convergence can be obtained in a finite time. Coordinated efforts to achieve legal convergence are then unnecessary. We show that they might even be counterproductive, in the sense that the welfare of nation-states is higher under legal competition, compared to cooperative legal unification.     

The sampling of ignitable liquids on suspects’ hands

In arson cases, the collection and detection of traces of ignitable liquids on a suspect's hands can provide information to a forensic investigation. Police forces currently lack a simple, robust, efficient and reliable solution to perform this type of swabbing.In this article, we describe a study undertaken to develop a procedure for the collection of ignitable liquid residues on the hands of arson suspects. Sixteen different collection supports were considered and their applicability for the collection of gasoline traces present on hands and their subsequent analysis in a laboratory was evaluated. Background contamination, consisting of volatiles emanating from the collection supports, and collection efficiencies of the different sampling materials were assessed by passive headspace extraction with an activated charcoal strip (DFLEX device) followed by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) analysis. After statistical treatment of the results, non-powdered latex gloves were retained as the most suitable method of sampling.On the basis of the obtained results, a prototype sampling kit was designed and tested. This kit is made of a three compartment multilayer bag enclosed in a sealed metal can and containing three pairs of non-powdered latex gloves: one to be worn by the sampler, one consisting of a blank sample and the last one to be worn by the person suspected to have been in contact with ignitable liquids. The design of the kit was developed to be efficient in preventing external and cross-contaminations.     

The EU offensive against IP offences: should right-holders be offended?

Preliminary comments by interested parties on the draft EuropeanDirective on criminal measures aimed at ensuring the enforcementof intellectual property rights and the corresponding FrameworkDecision were made at a public hearing in the European Parliamenton 22 November 2005. At this hearing it became apparent thatconsensus on the proposed measures will be hard to reach, asright-holders and their lobby groups seem surprisingly reticentwith regard to the proposed harmonization. This article summarizesthe draft proposal and comments on some of the most relevantobservations made at the hearing.