In the shadow of the constitutional council: The ‘juridicisation’ of the legislative process in France

This study examines, first, why and how the French Parliament was ‘juridicised’, that, is, gradually placed under the tutelage of the Constitutional Council, and, secondly, the influence of past Council jurisprudence and the threat of future censure on the legislation of the 1986 parliamentary sessions. This influence is greater than has been heretofore acknowledged ‐ indeed, one simply cannot assess the legislative process without understanding the role, direct and indirect, of the Council. Assessment of the legislative effects of Council control of legislation shows that the controversy surrounding the legitimacy of judicial review in France, and the extent to which the Council functions as a gouvernement des juges, is understandable and probably permanent.     

Transcending the Means Principle

A robust, if not absolute, prohibition on treating people merely as a means seems to sit at the core of common sense deontological morality. But the principle prohibiting such treatment, the ‘means principle’ (MP), has been notoriously hard to defend: both the subjective, intention-focused and the objective, causal-role-focused interpretations of what it means to use someone as a means face potent objections. In this paper, my goal is not to defend the MP, but to articulate and defend a new principle, which I call the Restricting Claims Principle (RCP), that explains why a person’s causal role is morally significant. The RCP broadens the basic frame of relevant considerations from the MP’s concern with the dyadic relationship between agent and patient to a global balance of patient-claims on an agent. It distinguishes two kinds of patient-claims that weigh in that balance: restricting and non-restricting. In most cases, these can be distinguished as follows: Restricting claims, if respected as rights, would restrict an agent from doing what she could otherwise permissibly do if the claimant (or his property) were absent; non-restricting claims, if respected as rights, would not in that way restrict an agent. Only restricting claims press to make others worse off than if the claimant were absent. The RCP holds that restricting claims must therefore be substantially weaker than non-restricting ones. The claims of those who would be used as a means are non-restricting, while the claims of those who would be harmed as a side effect are restricting. Thus the RCP can account for the same cases (mostly) as the MP, without having to rely on the MP to do so.     

Improvised Explosive Devices in Southern Afghanistan and Western Pakistan, 2002–2009

Homemade bombs or improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are staple weapons of conflicts in South Asia and especially Southern Afghanistan and Western Pakistan, where the Taliban, their affiliates, and other armed groups use them to undermine recognized governments and policies. This study establishes IED trends in the Afghanistan provinces of Helmand, Kandahar, and Nimroz and the Pakistani province of Balochistan between 2002 and mid-2009, using geo-referenced open source IED event information and statistical or geospatial analysis techniques. This study also furnishes assessments of specific IED technologies, techniques, and procedures (TTPs; like explosively formed projectiles or radio-controlled “spider devices”) as well as discussions of their potential causes and observable effects. There are several major trends observed: a continuous increase in volume and lethality of attacks, more expansive geographic distribution of attacks, and multiple bombing campaigns overlapping in Quetta, Balochistan province, that are perpetrated by groups with different means, tactics, and objectives. The most IED-related violence occurred in Kandahar province from 2002–2008; however, Helmand province was the leading location of bomb events by early 2009. Although large population centers—such as the cities of Kandahar, Quetta, and Lashkar Gah in Helmand province—commonly experienced effective bombings, the trans-border routes through Zaranj in Nimroz province and Spin Boldak in Kandahar province were also prone to many lethal attacks. In particular, this study both confirms and scrutinizes the so-called Iraq effect, the phenomenon of knowledge-sharing between fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even though fighters who gained experience in the Iraq insurgency provided assistance and training to Taliban fighters, the evidence indicates that some developments in IEDs predated the Iraq conflict or were original to South Asia or other conflicts in history. This evidence provides support for a more generalized and global phenomenon here called “TTP acceleration,” whereby insurgent and terrorist advances in IED capabilities take progressively shorter periods of time to develop and transfer among groups, usually as a result of increased information-sharing opportunities and coincidental alignment of group objectives.     

Towards a model of asian plantation systems

This article is about the Shan opium-heroin problem which figures largely in many journalistic and academic accounts of political events in Burma, but which has, paradoxically, been neglected. Rather, it has been “hollywoodized” with images of “opium” armies, heroin “empires,” colorful drug “kings,” and warlord-princes, etc., to the extent that it has more or less become but a dramatic backdrop, an “exotic unknowable.” This article is a more mundane account of the opium-heroin phenomenon. I will deal with it from the economic-political perspective, with particular focus on the basic mechanism of the Shan opium-heroin industry. Specifically, I will deal with the actors involved and their role in what is the only viable and integrated (locally and internationally) industry to emerge from Burma in the over three decades of military rule. My contention, in sum, is that the Shan opium-heroin issue constitutes only a part of the regional and global informal complex of investment, trade, and profit, in which are involved a host of non-Shan actors, whose interests are primarily economic; that basically, it is a transnational/global agro-business, no different, in substance and dynamics, from any other lucrative agro-business; and that Shan peasants, and to some extent, rebel armies, cannot be in any way regarded as “winners” in, or the main beneficiaries of, the “illegal” and “unregulated” informal economy of investment, trade, and profit, that spans borders, regions, and oceans.