Reviews

Prof. W. E. Butler (ed.). Russian Law: Historical and Political Perspectives. Leyden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1977, xi + 266 pp. Dfl. 76.00. $31.50

Peter H. Solomon, Jr., Soviet Criminologists and Criminal Policy. Specialists in Policy‐Making. London: Macmillan Press, 1978. x + 253 pp. £10.00.

Mawdsley, E. The Russian Revolution and the Baltic Fleet. War and Politics, February 1917—April 1918. London: Macmillan (in association with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies), 1978. xv + 213 pp., ill., map, bibl.

George Garvey, Money, Financial Flows and Credit in the Soviet Union. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1977 (published for the National Bureau of Economic Research Inc.). xii + 223 pp. £11.00.

Stanislaw J. Sawicki, Soviet Land and Housing Law, a Historical and Comparative Study, New York, London: Praeger Publishers, 1977. xxiii + 199 pp. £13.05.

Hélène Carrère d'Encausse: L'empire éclaté. Paris: Flammarion, 1978, 314 pp.

S. G. Solomon, The Soviet agrarian debate, a controversy in social science, 1923–1929. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1977. xvi + 309 pp. $15.25.

David Lane and Felicity O'Dell, The Soviet Industrial Worker: Social Class, Education and Control. Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1978. 167 pp. £7.95.     

Who Can Keep the Peace? Insurgent Organizational Control of Collective Violence

Every armed organization seeks the ability to turn violence on and off by getting fighters to fight when ordered and to stop fighting when similarly ordered. This ability is a defining feature of what makes organized violence, in fact, organized. While state militaries develop clear hierarchies and disciplinary procedures to accomplish this goal, the complexity of civil war makes the task more difficult for insurgent groups. I argue that the leaders of insurgent organizations are able to turn violence on and off when they have deliberately established resource control through the direct, and exclusive, distribution of resources to their followers and those followers are socially embedded, meaning that members are united by strong horizontal ties and group norms. In contrast to existing approaches, I argue that material and social endowments do not predetermine whether leaders can establish resource control or embeddedness. Further, laying out the precise organizational mechanisms that determine when organizations can turn violence on and off challenges the utility of conceptions such as “fragmentation” or “cohesion” for explaining insurgent behavior and conflict outcomes. I test the theory by examining variation in behavior over time in two organizations facing different structural contexts—Jaysh al-Mahdi in Iraq and the Viet Minh in Vietnam—and find strong support for my argument while casting doubt on existing explanations.     

idPAD: Paper Analytical Device for Presumptive Identification of Illicit Drugs

As drug overdose deaths across the United States continue to rise, there is increasing interest in field testing of illicit substances. This work discusses a paper-based analytical device (idPAD) that can run a library of 12 colorimetric tests at the same time, each detecting different chemical functional groups and materials found in illicit drugs, distractor substances, and cutting agents. The idPAD requires no electricity, costs less than $2 USD, and requires minimal training to operate. The results of the 12 tests form a color barcode which is “read” by comparison to standard images. The accuracy of the idPAD was assessed using samples of heroin, cocaine HCl, crack, and methamphetamine at concentrations of 25%–100% in a lactose matrix, as well as pure lactose. Based on 840 “reads” by three different users, the idPAD showed 95% sensitivity and 100% specificity for detecting these drugs; the most common error was mistaking cocaine HCl for crack or crack for cocaine HCl. In a second step, samples of heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine (n = 30) and distractor substances (pharmaceuticals, cutting agents, and other illicit drugs, n = 64) were tested by two readers, yielding a sensitivity of 100% and specificity of 97%. Targeted substances were detected reliably at 55–180 μg/lane, and the idPAD was found to be stable for at least 3 months when stored at room temperature. The library approach used in the idPAD may provide the accuracy and robustness necessary for a presumptive field drug test.     

Reversing delegation? Politicization,de-delegation,and non-majoritarian institutions

Elected governments and states have delegated extensive powers to non-majoritarian institutions (NMIs) such as independent central banks and regulatory agencies, courts, and international trade and investment organizations, which have become central actors in governance. But, far from having resolved the balance between political control and governing competence or removed certain issues from political debate, NMIs have faced challenges to their legitimacy by elected officials and sometimes attempts to reverse delegation through “de-delegation”. Our special issue studies the politicization of NMIs, and then whether, why and how it leads to de-delegation through reducing the formal powers of NMIs or increasing controls over them. In this article, we examine how to analyze de-delegation, how politicization of NMIs has developed, and how it has affected de-delegation. We underline not only institutional rules that constrain elected officials but also the actions of NMIs themselves and their relationships with other NMIs as part of multi-level governance systems. We find that politicization has varied, but even when strong, elected officials have not introduced widespread and long-lasting de-delegation; on the contrary, they have frequently widened the powers of NMIs. Insofar as elected politicians have sought to curb NMIs, they have often preferred to use existing controls and non-compliance. Finally, we consider the wider implications of the combination of politicization and lack of de-delegation for broader issues of governance such as the division of powers between the elected and unelected and democratic accountability.     

Azerbaijan after Heydar Aliev

G. Carter Bently. Ethnicity and Nationality: A Bibliographic Guide. Publications on Ethnicity of Nationality of the School of International Studies, No. 3. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981. Pp. xxii, 370. $37.00.

Stephen Steinberg. The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity and Class in America. New York: Atheneum, 1981. Pp. x, 277. $14.95.     

Netherlands East Indies: The Large Colonial Surplus of Indonesia, 1878‐1939

Surprisingly few previous contributions to estimates of Indonesia's colonial surplus have been made, all of them using the export surplus method. Having defined the colonial surplus, the export surplus method is rejected here as unnecessary and misleading. The Indies balance of payments data are used critically for the first time. Adding missing items and further analysing an odd but very big private item much larger estimates of the colonial surplus are produced. A comparison with the colonial surplus of British India is made. In all, the new colonial surplus for the Netherlands East Indies is estimated at almost 24 billion guilders, approximately US$10 billion or some US$156 billion in today's terms. Those figures are considered large indeed.     

Family as a commonsensical device and its place in law★

This paper is in five main parts. The first introduces membership categorisation analysis (MCA) as originally outlined by Harvey Sacks and, here, as a possible extension of semiotic analysis. MCA is broadly a contribution to discourse analysis in general and to conversation analysis in particular. The approach concerns membership categorisation devices such as family, the categories they can contain such as ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘child’, etc. and the category-bound activities or predicates commonsensically attachable to such categories. The second section looks at the legal background to family law in Australia and shows that its basic assumption is, by and large and with some exceptions, to work from categories (what people are) rather than from predicates (what they in fact do). In the third section, we examine a particular Family Court case (Re Patrick) which highlights the contestation between these approaches. Following this, we examine some recent shifts in the Australian states and territories towards more predicationally-based legislation and argue for their coherence in contemporary society and its increasingly flexible conceptions of what may constitute a family. Finally, we return to the question of semiotics generally and make a case for our MCA-based distinctions as contributions to a possible semiotics of law. In the beginning was the deed – Goethe