Finding stability in change

Asia is facing a period of great change as we head toward the twenty‐first century. It is vitally important that Asian nations find stability within this change, not simply for its own sake, but in order to increase the prosperity and well‐being of citizens, says Anthony Lake, former National Security Advisor for President Clinton. He argues that common, globally‐accepted “rules of the road” must be adopted in order to ensure a peaceful stability in the Asia‐Pacific region and in the world. This is a revised version of a speech Lake gave to the Symposium of the Global Forum on 19 September 1997 at International House of Japan in Tokyo.     

Television TV by Barney Daniels Tjungurrayi

This paper examines the alliance that Derrida makes between his notion of justice as undeconstructible and a certain spirit of Marx's emancipatory promise. By following some of the precautions that Derrida undertakes in distinguishing the undeconstructibility of justice from the deconstructible justice should not be viewed as a contradiction in terms. I also argue that while the themes of justice, ethics, and politics can be rendered self‐present. Rather, Derrida's response to the injunctions of Marx suggests that it is precisely because justice and the emancipatory promise cannot be given over to the present that they are situated as undeconstructible. As such, taking responsibility for the heritage of Marxism involves working and sorting through the many spectres of Marx that inhabit the same injunction, where the promise remains as that yet to come.     

Simulating Emotional Responses in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: An fMRI Study

This study tested the extent to which coached participants can simulate the neural responses of participants with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when they are presented with signals of fear. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to study blood oxygenation level-dependent signal during the presentations of fearful and neutral faces under both conscious and nonconscious (masked) conditions. Participants comprised 12 patients with PTSD and 12 trauma-exposed controls who were instructed to simulate PTSD. During conscious fear processing, simulators showed greater activation in the left amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) than PTSD participants. By contrast, during nonconscious processing, PTSD participants had greater MPFC activation than simulators. These findings suggest that coached simulators produce a profile of ‘over-responding’ to fear when controlled conscious processing is possible, but are not able to simulate the exaggerated medial prefrontal responses observed in PTSD participants under conditions of nonconscious processing.     

Anonymous Speakers and Confidential Sources: Using Shield Laws When They Overlap Online

The development of the Internet as a mass medium has created new tensions between the rights to speak anonymously and to be protected against defamation. Some courts have developed balancing tests to determine when anonymous speakers should be unmasked, the most popular of which generally require some initial showing of prima facie evidence. Other times, shield laws have been used to protect the anonymous when comments have been posted on news organization Web sites. However, news organizations should be cautious when using shield laws to protect anonymity, and judges should evaluate privilege claims as they always have. In other instances, anonymity appears to be adequately protected by summary judgment balancing tests. An approach in which news organizations focus on the type of comment and its potential journalistic contribution in deciding how to protect commenters’ identities could help ensure that anonymous speech is properly protected without harming shield laws.     

New Philosophical Foundations for International Law: From an Order of Fear to One of Respect

The international legal order is dominated by a concern for security, whether national or individual, an explicit fear of the Other, towards whom one exists in no moral relation. This is not a recent phenomenon but goes back to the origin of modernity in a Hobbesian rejection of classical and medieval natural law. This fear is not marginal to liberalism; rather, the amorality vacuum affecting personal relations is integral to liberal contractarianism. This fear-inducing vacuum has to be countered through a phenomenology of the person in community, following Paul Ricouer, which restores the ethical dimension of society. At the same time, a critical phenomenology can expose the pathologies of fear, the use of force to dominate, and the consequences of the absence of respect. The whole subject-matter of international law is inherently vulnerable to these negative contradictions, and not just recent tragedies, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States and Britain. An exit strategy from a world of fear to one of respect has still to recognise the limits imposed not so much by the difference of the Other, as by the perplexity of one's own opaqueness. The destructiveness of fear remains at this initial stage. However, one can never completely overcome it by coming out of the modernity of the isolated self. We are equally opaque to one another.     

Peasant federations and rural development policies in the Andes

This chapter focuses on a special type of structural social capital embedded in second-tier indigenous peasant federations in the Andean countries. It first examines the manifestations of this social capital and then goes on to analyze the strategies of the various social actors for its use, mainly to further the interests of poor and oppressed members, but often in the service of broader societal or narrower partisan purposes. Cases are presented to illustrate how such a social capital resource, once created, can be used or transformed for other than the original purposes. Sometimes these spillovers are socially beneficial, confirming the mutability thesis of Hirschman (1984); but in other cases the diversions can be harmful and disempowering. The authors conclude that even considering these varied uses, meso-level peasant federations, when incorporated into rural development policies, can help to achieve equity and sustainability.