Regulatory Competition: A Private International Law Approach

This article analyzes the regulatory competition model (RCM) from a private international law perspective. This perspective helps us identify and resolve two gaps in the standard explanation of the RCM. According to the standard explanation, two conditions must be fulfilled for the market of legal products to function well: (1) free movement of resources (persons, capital, and goods); (2) the absences of cross-border externalities. In relation to this second condition, the standard model argues that a uniform material rule is necessary to overcome cross-border externalities. The main thesis of this article is that a private international law approach can complete this model by adding two ideas. First, a smooth functioning of the market-of-legal products requires, not only the free movement of resources, but also a uniform private international law system which guarantees the autonomy of the parties (free choice of law) and the procedural implementation of this autonomy (free choice of forum and free movement of judgments). And second, a uniform material law, which wipes out the regulatory market, is not essential to deal with the externality problem; rather a uniform conflict-of-laws rule, which leads to the internalization of cross-border externalities by states, can correct at least some of the externalities problem and also maintains the regulatory market.     

Power,Resistance and Development in the Global South: Notes Towards a Critical Research Agenda

This article engages with radical critiques of the Eurocentric grammar of development discourses. I start from a position of considerable sympathy with their appreciation of the discursive dimensions of power that attach to the idiom of development and their solidarity with the oppositional projects of subaltern groups. However, this sympathy combines with a considerable degree of disagreement in terms of how the discursive power of development is understood and how the dynamics of popular resistance are theorised. As an alternative to the relatively crude postulation of development as a discursive regime that enables the West to exercise power over the Rest, I develop an argument that emphasises the multivalent character of the idiom of development and trace this multivalence to situated contestations that take place between opposing political projects that strive to shape the form and direction of social change in specific ways. Furthermore, I will argue that this contentious dynamic becomes particularly evident in those world-historical conjunctures when subaltern groups mobilize around social movement projects that destabilise hegemonic power relations in the capitalist world-system. To illustrate this point, I will provide a broad-brushed outline of three distinct ‘development regimes’ that have shaped North–South relations from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century and discuss the ways in which these regimes have been destabilised by the articulation of oppositional meanings of development articulated from below by progressive social movement projects. Finally, I draw on my own fieldwork experiences to reflect on how critical scholars can engage with movement projects that challenge the dominant directions and meanings of development in ways that can contribute to democratic deliberations within social movements.     

False positive reaction for carboxyhemoglobin in blood from liver tissue

On spectrophotometric determination of carboxyhemoglobin in blood collected from the liver of three bodies at three days post-mortem, false positive results were found (5 – 15 per cent saturation), since samples of heart blood collected a few hours after death did not contain carboxyhemoglobin.     

Subalterns and the State in the Longue Durée: Notes from “The Rebellious Century” in the Bhil Heartland

Abstract

Focusing on recent debates over the ways in which subaltern groups engage with the state in India, the article proposes that it is imperative to historicise our conceptions of subaltern politics in India. More specifically, the argument is made that it is imperative to recognise that subaltern appropriations of the institutions and discourses of the state have a longer historical lineage than what is often proposed in critical work on popular resistance in rural India. The article presents a detailed analysis of Adivasi rebellions in colonial western India and argues that these took the form of a contentious negotiation of the incorporation of tribal communities into an emergent “colonial state space.” The conclusion presents a sketch of a Gramscian approach to the study of how subaltern politics proceeds in and through determinate state–society relations.