A Talmudic constrained voting majority rule

Public Choice - Talmudic Law requires a minimal supermajority (13 out of 23) for conviction, but at the same time, provides that a unanimous conviction leads to a mistrial. We derive the necessary...     

Trying to Have Your Cake and Eating It: How and Why the State System Has Created Offshore

From modest beginnings in the wholesale financial market specializing in government debt, offshore has expanded rapidly, penetrating and then dominating an ever growing portion of international economic life. This article reflects on the relationship between offshore and the concept of state sovereignty. My argument is that far from escaping the state, offshore is intimately connected with the state system. The concepts of sovereignty and national self-determination played simultaneously an enabling and constraining role in the development of offshore. Furthermore, having "created" offshore, sovereignty and self-determination are themselves constrained and (re-)enabled in turn. Offshore therefore is not a diminution of state sovereignty but a legally defined realm marking differential levels of intensity by which states propose to apply their regulation. Such a bifurcation of juridical space represents a process by which the state is reimagining its relationship to its territory.     

Libya: Teetering Between War and Diplomacy The Islamic State’s Role in Libya’s Disintegration

This analysis explores post-Qaddafi Libya as it becomes a failed state, alongside international efforts to mend its internal rifts and restore an effective government and thereby halt its national disintegration. Attaining a modus vivendi amongst the internal rival political and military actors looks to enable a war effort to loosen the grasp of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which infiltrated Libya’s Mediterranean coast in 2014 and gained a strategic foothold in the heart of Libya and nearby its oil ports – Libya’s economic lifeline. An internal agreement looks to rebuild the state security system that can confront the continuing tribal, ethnic, Salafi-jihadistic, and criminal militarisation of Libya, which also contributes to its bloody chaos. This exegesis focuses on the brief but challenging period of 2014-2016 in terms of the threats to Libya’s governmental and territorial integrity, outlining the principal junctures and actors.     

Socially Responsible Private Regulation: World‐Culture or World‐Capitalism?

This article analyzes the phenomenon of “corporate social responsibility” (CSR; specifically: social private regulation) in light of two sociological paradigms of globalization: “world‐culture” and “world‐capitalism.” The study treats three analytically distinct features of CSR: the political contestation over its meaning, the role of business studies in transforming it into a managerial model, and its consolidation as a market of authorities. The study finds that (1) while CSR may be theorized as a emergent “world cultural” model, the culture paradigm does not take sufficient account of the role of corporations in shaping it, and (2) while both paradigms recognize the transition from political contestations over the character of CSR to its deployment by means of private regulation, the world‐capitalism paradigm offers stronger tools for theorizing the mechanisms of change that mediate between political agency and institutionalized regulatory outcomes.