Biting the Land that Feeds You: North Korea and the United States in the Cold War and Beyond

Throughout the Cold War, the United States struggled to understand the principles that underlay North Korean behavior in the international arena. In the post-Korean War years, American policymakers saw Pyongyang as simply a communist puppet, a servile pawn directed by Moscow and Peking. That framework was shattered when the Cold War ended but American officials still sought simplistic answers to explain DPRK behavior, usually concluding that their leaders were deranged, evil, and simply incomprehensible. However, newly released communist materials suggest that there is more than irrationality at work in Pyongyang. Instead, one can discern a basic pattern at the heart of DPRK policy, one that has internal developments at its core. Put simply, this interpretation suggests that North Korean behavior towards the West becomes more provocative when the nation is at its weakest in certain domestic areas, primarily economic development and political stability, and attributes this correlation to the dominant role of the ideology of juche (self-reliance) that virtually defines this society. Understanding this relationship between internal dynamics, ideological paradigms, and DPRK foreign relations would be a beneficial step in formulating policy towards North Korea; instead, however, American policymakers have clung to interpretations that, while easily comprehensible and politically appealing, have hindered their diplomatic efforts towards the nation since the 1950s.     

Carbon democracy

Abstract

States that depend upon oil revenues appear to be less democratic than other states. Yet oil presents a much larger problem for democracy: faced with the threats of oil depletion and catastrophic climate change, the democratic machineries that emerged to govern the age of carbon energy seem to be unable to address the processes that may end it. This article explores these multiple dimensions of carbon democracy, by examining the intersecting histories of coal, oil and democracy in the twentieth century. Following closely the methods by which fossil fuels were produced, distributed and converted into other forms of socio-technical organization, financial circulation and political power, the article traces ways in which the concentration and control of energy flows could open up democratic possibilities or close them down; how connections were engineered in the post-war period between the flow of oil and the flows of international finance, on which democratic stability was thought to depend; how these same circulations made possible the emergence of the economy and its unlimited growth as the main object of democratic politics; and how the relations among forms of energy, finance, economic knowledge, democracy and violence were transformed in the 1967–74 oil–dollar Middle East crises.     

Intergenerational Mapping and the Cultural Politics of Memory

A key objective of the paper is to rejuvenate our understanding of time. The focus is on how the knowledge and memories of times past are transmitted collectively and intergenerationally, and why this is important for children's political formation. The objective is pursued through a short philosophical discussion of time, memory and forgetting, drawing primarily on the work of Bernard Stiegler and others investigating these questions with an emphasis on contemporary technologies. The study and philosophical framing also engage a larger geo-economic and historical context in which all subjects, including children, are faced with critical challenges related to the recent development of new technologies of control; these formulate drives and/or a temporal consciousness of 'hyper' attention that renders deep attention and the formation of long-term desire increasingly difficult. In the face of this historical moment, the paper calls attention to the importance of thinking about time holistically as well as historically in terms of the intergenerational transfer and transformation of collective memory. Using material from two years of research with children, the claim is made that intergenerational education, involving the technics of mapping and writing and drawing on the archives of the past, can enable a critical relearning of history, thus laying the groundwork for imaginings of alternative futures.     

Non-random Study Attrition: Assessing Correction Techniques and the Magnitude of Bias in a Longitudinal Study of Reentry from Prison

Journal of Quantitative Criminology - Longitudinal data offer many advantages to criminological research yet suffer from attrition, namely in the form of sample selection bias. Attrition may...     

A partial assessment of South Carolina's Project Safe Neighborhoods strategy: Evidence from a sample of supervised offenders

Since 2001, the federal Project Safe Neighborhoods initiative has instituted a comprehensive effort to reduce gun crimes in local communities across the United States. In South Carolina, the United States Attorney's Office for the District of South Carolina established Project CeaseFire, a localized response to reduce the prevalence of gun crime through targeted prosecution and increased public education. One element of Project CeaseFire was carried out by the South Carolina Department of Probation, Parole, and Pardon Services. The current study utilized a quasi-experimental design to compare firearm-related incidents among a random sample of offenders under community supervision prior to and after the implementation of the SCDPPPS CeaseFire program. Although incidents involving a firearm were rare, the current results did not indicate a reduction in firearm-related incidents among offenders entering supervision after the SCDPPPS CeaseFire program was implemented. Instead, an increase in firearm incidents was observed after CeaseFire implementation. Possible explanations for the observed results are offered along with limitations to the study and policy implications.     

Sadat Peace Lecture: Negotiating Hard Cases

Senator Mitchell is a former member (D-ME) and majority leader of the U.S. Senate. The following is the text of his lecture sponsored by the Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland on June 13, 2001. (The text of the "Mitchell Report" is reprinted in this journal.)     

Democracy and Human Rights in the Mexican States: Elections or Social Capital?

Why does the relationship between a government and its citizens deteriorate to violence? Large-N cross-national quantitative analyses of human rights violations have found an inverse relationship between democracy and violations. These analyses, however, have not been able to address the central finding of an influential subnational analysis of democracy that stresses the importance of a single dimension of democracy, social capital. In this article we combine these two streams of research with fresh data from the Mexican states to investigate how and why democracy inhibits violations. Theoretically, we connect a policy interest in protecting human rights to politicians' office-seeking goals and to the level of social capital. Empirically, our data allow us to disentangle two principal components of democracy, elections and social capital, and include important control variables, notably ethnic diversity, which have been largely left out of the cross-national analyses. Our central finding is that the electoral components rather than social capital produce important consequences for the protection of citizens' human rights.     

The Logic of Transnational Action: The Good Corporation and the Global Compact

This article examines corporate participation in the UN Global Compact programme. Using data on the world's 2,000 largest companies, we address the question of why companies voluntarily assume the programme's responsibilities and promote the rights of 'global citizenship'. Our analytic approach is to view transnational corporate political behaviour as a result of firm-level decisions shaped by country-level variation in political audience effects. Drawing on earlier research on more conventional forms of corporate political activity, we expect factors influential in the standard model of firm political activity to determine participation in the Global Compact. In addition, we argue that this highly visible, less instrumental dimension of a firm's political behaviour is driven by efforts to build a good environmental and human rights reputation with its audience of external actors. The importance of environmental and human rights concerns depends on the substance of the firm's business activities, the availability of investment and 'exit' options, and the home audience's bias towards the UN and human and environmental rights. We find support for political factors as well as firm and industry-level characteristics influencing the decision to participate in the Global Compact.