Making a Cold War in the Near East: Turkey and the Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1947

During the post-war negotiations in the years of 1945 and 1946, the Soviets launched a bitter war of nerves against Turkey in order to establish a military base in Istanbul and share control of the Straits. It was crucial for Britain that the USSR be prevented from gaining any influence in Turkey. However, as Britain was in no position to support Turkey financially, American authorities encouraged by London and Ankara took over the responsibility for Turkey. This articles examines the Great Powers rivalry over Turkey and Turkey’s response to it. It argues that regional factors other than US–Soviet confrontation, such as Turkey’s security search against the Soviets, also played a crucial part in starting the Cold War in the Near East.     

Understanding the essential principles of landlord and tenant laws in Nigeria through judicial decisions

Tenancy relationships in Nigeria are largely regulated by statutes. Most of the provisions of these statutes to lawyers and other stakeholders are susceptible to inconsistent interpretations. In recent times, the courts in Nigeria have taken steps to look beyond the law books and give flesh to areas in tenancy matters where there seem to be inadequacies in the provisions of the laws. In doing this, the courts have come up with some legal principles that the relevant statutes do not explicitly provide for, but arguably flow from the provisions of such statutes – a good example being the principle that a tenant who contests ownership with the landlord loses right to statutory notice to quit. Terms such as ‘landlord’ and ‘tenant’ are not as simple as they appear, especially considering the statutory definitions given to them by some of the tenancy statutes in Nigeria – particular attention is given in this regard to Tenancy Law of Lagos State 2011. This paper considers the intricacies of the definition of and relationship between the landlord and the tenant as provided in statutes and as interpreted by overtime by courts in Nigeria. The paper analyses the nature of the relationship between the landlord and the tenant as may be conceived and disambiguates the scope of law of a landlord and tenant relationship in Nigeria.     

Estimating Individual Contributions to Complex DNA SNP Mixtures.,

High‐throughput sequencing (HTS) of large panels of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) provides an alternative or complimentary approach to short tandem repeats (STRs) panels for the analysis of complex DNA mixture forensic samples. For STRs, methods to estimate individual contribution concentrations compare capillary electrophoresis peak heights, peak areas, or HTS allele read counts within a mixture. This article introduces three approaches (mean, median, and slope methods) for estimating individual DNA contributions to forensic mixtures for HTS/massively parallel sequencing (MPS) SNP panels. For SNPs, the major:minor allele ratios or counts, unique to each contributor, were compared to estimate contributor proportion within the mixture using the mean, median, and slope intercept for these alleles. The estimates for these three methods were typically within 5% of planned experimental contributions for defined mixtures.     

Flexibility or Stability? Analyzing Proposals to Reform the Separation of Powers

The social welfare effects of legislatures in presidential systems, such as the U.S. Congress, are frequently lamented. In response, there are proposals to reform the separation of powers system by giving presidents control of the legislative agenda and weakening rules such as the filibuster. We provide a game-theoretic analysis of the policy and social welfare consequences of a more executive-centric system. Integrating standard assumptions about legislative and executive incentives into a dynamic model of decision making with private investment, we show there are a variety of conditions under which stronger executives do not produce better outcomes. Moreover, we characterize how these conditions depend on factors such as the stability of the policymaking environment or investment fundamentals. Our findings are robust and consistent with empirical observations that U.S. policy outputs are not necessarily worse than those of nations with stronger executives, which more closely approximate prominent proposals by populist-oriented reformers.     

Civilian victimization and international military intervention in civil wars

Civil wars are particularly destructive and asymmetric in nature. As a result, humanitarian crises and episodes of one-sided violence against civilians are likely to emerge. In the post-Cold War era, human rights norms have been strengthened by a global commitment stating that nations have a responsibility to protect people against war crimes. Although the doctrine does not require military responses, as episodes of one-sided violence increase dramatically in the midst of civil conflict, we would expect those cases to experience relatively swift foreign response, including military intervention; a growing trend of at least purportedly humanitarian interventions should be observable. Expectations relating to the responsibility to protect are tested on all civil conflicts occurring between 1989 and 2006. Findings indicate that there is little evidence that one-sided violence leads to military intervention, suggesting that the internationally community does not use its most powerful tool to protect civilians in trouble.