The Shi'a of Saudi Arabia: a minority in search of cultural authenticity

This article focuses on the transformation of Saudi Shi'a resistance from one which centred on military confrontation in the 1980s to one which invokes searching for cultural authenticity (al‐asala al‐shi'iyya) in the 1990s. Today the struggle of the Shi'a for equal status among the Sunni majority draws attention to the attempts of Shi'a intellectuals to write their own regional history. Shi'a intellectuals and opposition leaders deconstruct official representations of themselves and provide alternative historical narratives which anchor their community in Saudi history and society, thus dismissing suggestions that they are a non‐indigenous community. This article examines Shi'a historical narratives in an attempt to understand the transformation in their struggle against discrimination in Saudi Arabia.     

Risk management for targeting customs controls in developing countries: a risky venture for revenue performance?

Customs authorities in developing countries are often reluctant to forget systematic inspections for fear of risking revenue loss. Such physical inspections however, impede rather than facilitate trade. Control selectivity is therefore a key issue in customs administration reform. This paper shows how a sophisticated risk management method can facilitate trade by automatically and rationally selecting transactions, with the end result of actually enhancing revenue performance. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

首都社会治安整体防控理论述评

首都社会治安整体防控理论的主要内容包括:整体防控的战略部署,四张网络的立体架构,防范控制的精确指导,专业力量的精确打击,队伍建设的全面推进.首都社会治安整体防控理论的科学价值在于:它建立了一套特定的概念体系,提出了一系列科学的判断,解答了新时期社会治安工作面临的系列难题.该理论对治安情况复杂地区的社会治安防控体系建设工作具有普遍的指导意义.     

Demographic change and industrialization in germany, 1815–1914

This article analyzes demographic change in Bremen 1815–1914 against the background of changing employment opportunities. Within the pre-industrial employment structure, which still prevailed in the decades after 1850, in-migrants were particularly disadvantaged. When modern industries developed, the situation changed. At the beginning of the twentieth century both male and female in-migrants benefited from a higher life expectancy than the city-born population had. The strong sectoral changes in employment opportunities in Bremen at the turn of the century reinforced the trends towards family limitation. More skilled in-migrants felt the need to adapt their reproductive behavior to facilitate upward social mobility. The article argues for a wider use of archival data, like those used in their study, to explore issues relating to urban demographic change in German cities during industrialization.     

“王朝案”中的证据法难题及其破解

"王朝案"的发生引发了三个证据法上的疑难问题:一是证据的合法性问题,主要涉及侦查人员无管辖权取证的效力问题;二是瑕疵证据的补正和合理解释"度"问题;三是证据采信的公正性问题,尤其是特殊侦查措施所获证据应否公开质证的问题。从证据法理上讲,侦查机关虽然违反管辖权而取证,但若并未侵犯被追诉人公正审判权,所获证据自无排除之必要;瑕疵证据的补正或合理解释"度",以确证瑕疵证据的客观性和真实性为已足;特殊侦查措施所获的证据材料,虽然可以不向公众公开,即实行不公开审理,但却必须向辩方公开特殊侦查的结果,并允许辩护人参与该证据的质证过程。     

Money,Mortgages, and the Conquest of America

In colonial America, land acquired new liquidity when it became liable for debts. Though English property law maintained a firm distinction between land and chattel for centuries, in the American colonies, the boundary between the categories of real and personal property began to disintegrate. There, the novelty of easy foreclosure and consequent easy alienation of land made it possible for colonists to obtain credit, using land as a security. However, scholars have neglected the first instances in which a newly unconstrained practice of mortgage foreclosure appeared—the transactions through which colonists acquired land from indigenous people in the first place. In this article, I explore these early transactions for land, which took place across fundamental differences between colonists’ and native communities’ conceptions of money, land, and exchange itself. I describe how difference and dependence propelled the growth of the early American contact economy to make land into real estate, or the fungible commodity on the speculative market that it remains today.     

Contesting Legality in Authoritarian Contexts: Food Safety,Rule of Law and China's Networked Public Sphere

Since the introduction of the Internet, China's networked public sphere has become a critical site in which various actors compete to shape public opinion and promote or forestall legal and political change. This paper examines how members of an online public, the Tianya Forum, conceptualized and discussed law in relation to a specific event, the 2008 Sanlu milk scandal. Whereas previous studies suggest the Chinese state effectively controls citizens' legal consciousness via propaganda, this analysis shows that the construction of legality by the Tianya public was not a top‐down process, but a complex negotiation involving multiple parties. The Chinese state had to compete with lawyers and outspoken media to frame and interpret the scandal for the Tianya public and it was not always successful in doing so. Data show further how the online public framed the food safety incident as indicative of fundamental problems rooted in China's political regime and critiqued the state's instrumental use of law.