The coloniality of abridgment: afterlives of mass violence in Cambodia and the US

Abstract

This article examines processes of knowledge production around mass violence in 1970s Cambodia including media reportage and coeval scholarly debate, developing a conceptualisation of colonial abridgment. It assesses operations by which Cambodia as a country is violently essentialised, the occurrence of mass violence taking on metonymic grandeur that works to deny imperial legacies, entomb modern Cambodia in a hermetically sealed past and thereby maintain global order within existing racial-colonial logics.     

Why Be Just? The Problem of Motivation in Hegel and Rawls

At the heart of any theoretical problem of justice lies the problem of motivation: Even if we could conceive of a way to develop a comprehensive system of just laws, and even if we could rationally believe in the justice of these laws, how could we ever ensure that we—or anyone else—would be motivated to abide by them? By unearthing how the problem of motivation sways canonical discussions of justice, the article brings forth intrinsic similarities and differences in these discussions that are often overlooked in the literature. In particular, the article highlights intrinsic similarities in the analysis of the concept of justice in two central works that belong to the continental and the analytic tradition respectively and are otherwise rarely discussed together: Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right and Rawls’s Theory of Justice .     

Evaluation of Degradation in DNA from Males with a Quantitative Gender Typing,Endpoint PCR Multiplex

Evidentiary samples submitted to a forensic DNA laboratory occasionally yield DNA that is degraded. Samples of intact chromosomal DNA (both nuclear and mitochondrial) were subjected to a heating protocol to induce DNA degradation. The DNAs were then analyzed using a multiplex PCR assay that amplifies targets of low and high molecular weight on the X/Y and mitochondrial chromosomes. If degradation is random, the amplification of larger DNA targets should be more adversely affected by degradation than smaller targets. In nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from a male donor, exhibiting degradation, DNA quantity estimates based upon higher molecular weight amplicons (HMW) are significantly lower than estimates made using low molecular weight (LMW) Q‐TAT amplicons. DNA degradation estimated using this approach correlated well with actual fluorescence associated with HMW and LMW STR alleles amplified from the same genomic DNA templates. Q‐TAT is thus useful not only as a quantitation tool, but also as an indicator of template degradation.