Confidence in Institutions in Post-Communist Societies: The Case of the Baltic States

The transition from totalitarian to democratic rule in the Baltic states raises the question of conditions for regime legitimacy and stability. The article focuses on the level of confidence people have in institutions after change of regime. The confidence in political and social institutions is at a surprisingly low level. The data suggest that people have more confidence in institutions producing symbols than they have in policy-making and implementing institutions. There is also evidence to show that leaders are more trusted than institutions as such. A survey of the potential background variables shows that people with higher education have lower confidence in institutions than the less well educated. But low confidence in institutions does not necessarily spell gloomy prospects for procedural democratic development, as long as the elites do have some popular support and the capacity for consensual integration.     

Unilateral Versus Multilateral International Sanctions: A Public Choice Perspective

Multilateral economic sanctions can be expected to impose greaterterms-of-trade effects on a target nation than unilateral sanctions. Yet despite their potential for greater economic damage, multilateral sanctions often are less effective in bringing about desired political results in the target. An interest-group model of endogenous policy suggests that multilateral sanctions can undermine the political effectiveness of opposition groups in the targetcountry, or strengthen those groups supporting the objectionable policy of the ruling regime. Such perverse effects are due in part to the inability of multilateral coalitions to enforce cooperation among members, and to the appropriation of sanctions rents in the target country. Unilateral sanctions, however, imposed by a country with close ties to the target, are ofteneffective in achieving their intended political objectives.     

Thinking the law with and against Luhmann,Legendre, Agamben

After the failure of all enterprises in legal ontology, and after the success of all enterprises in legal system internal theodicy, the field of legal theory is now open to receive a range of more complex, less universalist, less politicised, but also more personally shaped, more fragile suggestions. My article focusses on three such ways of dealing with the law question: the work of Pierre Legendre, a French psychoanalyst and specialist of the history of administrative law and Christian religion, the work of Niklas Luhmann, the recently deceased founder of a new German schoolof sociological systems theory, and that of Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher whose re-opening of the discussion on the Benjaminian notion of bare life and its relationship to law has provoked worldwide attention. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Means of production versus means of coercion: can Russian business limit the violence of a predatory state?

In their most recent works, North and his coauthors (North, D. C., J. J. Wallis, S. Webb, and B. R. Weingast. 2012. In the Shadow of Violence: Politics, Economics, and the Problems of Development. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press; North, D.C., J. J. Wallis, and B. R. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press) name the formation of organizations capable of effectively restricting violence in society as a necessary condition for transition from developing societies to societies with sustainable economic growth. However, the mechanisms of emergence and conditions for the operation of such organizations in contemporary developing countries remain unclear. We follow the logic of formation of such organizations using the case study of collective actions of the Russian business community aimed at restricting “state violence” against business. We seek to identify the conditions leading to a shift in the choice of strategies from attempts at informal agreements with extortionists controlling means of coercion to cooperation of businessmen and trace the further evolution of organized forms of collective action. Finally, we assess to what extent the created organizations can be efficient and self-supporting in the long term.     

A Quandary Concerning Immanence

A stationary eddy that constantly re-forms in the riverbed of the evolution of Western normative institutions, Legal Critique dates back, beyond modernity, to the beginning of the so-called Common Era. But critique also shapes the historical review of earlier phases of this evolution, and this not only as a method of the examination of sources, but also as a transferential displacement that tends to project into history the divides and aporias which define a present political situation. Unsurprisingly, this proceeding betrays more about current conceptions than it reveals about those of the past. The fate of the philosophical topic of immanence and transcendence and that of the proto-modern politics inaugurated by the distinction of God’s absolute versus ordered power offer a significant case in point. Certain critical orientations find in the long and complex history of these divides merely their own anticipated echo. Yet, the split between the adepts of an Aristotelian universe rooted in the being of the good and the followers of Spinoza, accustomed to absolute power and immanent causality, resists such simplifications and warrants a new examination.     

Rethinking the Roots of Terrorism: Beyond Orthodox Terrorism Theory—A Critical Research Agenda∗

The orthodox understanding of terrorism does not seem to provide adequate means for explaining the root causes of terrorism. This study is an attempt to critically rethink the roots of terrorism by relocating the study of terrorism into a conceptual space in which it can gain access to the tools provided by conflict studies. As a result this work addresses a gap in the field of terrorism studies and provides an explanation and clarification of the existence of orthodox terrorism discourse and the creation of an alternative theoretical framework for rethinking the roots of terrorism.