Dealing with the Aftermath of Japan’s Triple Disaster: Building Social Capital Through Crime Prevention

After the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster that struck Japan in March 2011, overall rates of reported crime, already low in international comparative terms, went further down. A relative absence of crime was accompanied, however, by a great awareness of the possibility of crime—as illustrated by emergency policies and numerous crime prevention initiatives and activities by both the police and groups of (local) volunteers. This article will show that the large scale and persistence of crime prevention campaigns and activities can be understood against the background of more general, persistent preoccupations with, and concerns about crime. Based on statistics, media reports, and interviews with (former) inhabitants of the struck Tōhoku area as well as members of NGO’s, it will furthermore show that crime prevention activities, that up until now have received hardly any scholarly attention, were purposely employed to strengthen community ties, as well as to bring about ties between members of communities torn apart by the disasters. Focusing on crime and crime prevention activities after March 11, 2011 in Miyagi prefecture and specifically the town of Ishinomaki, this article will show that amidst overwhelming loss and uncertainty crime constituted and constitutes an opportunity for the (re-)building of social capital.     

Newspaper Theft,Self-Preservation and the Dimensions of Censorship

One of the most common yet understudied means of suppressing free expression on college and university campuses is the theft of freely distributed student publications, particularly newspapers. This study examines news accounts of nearly 300 newspaper theft incidents at colleges and universities between 1995 and 2008 in order to identify the manifestations and consequences of this peculiar form of censorship, and to augment existing research on censorship and tolerance by looking, not at what people say about free expression, but at what they do when they have the power of censorship in their hands. Among the key findings is that men commit nearly 70% of newspaper thefts, which is inconsistent with much of the existing research on censorship and gender, and that those who censor college newspapers are far more concerned with their own self-preservation than with shaping public dialog on controversial social or political issues.     

Hague Case Law — Latest Developments

Netherlands International Law Review -     

Federal politics and market reform in the developing world

Prior research on the politics of market reform in developing nations has generally ignored the significant role of federal political and economic arrangements in shaping adjustment processes. In contrast, this research develops a model of macroeconomic reform that accounts for the significance of subnational economic policy in the developing world’s nine major federations. I examine five hypotheses which are expected to influence the capacity of developing federations to conduct polity consistent with the exigencies of market pressures. With the use of a cross-sectional time-series analysis of fiscal and monetary policies, I show that the policy divergence between levels of government shrinks when provincial governments have greater fiscal power and there are high degrees of party centralization across levels of government. These findings have important implications for the political economy of market reform, the widespread move toward fiscal decentralization, and the design of regional supranational institutions. This research is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant SBR-9809211. I would like to thank Karen Remmer, Ken Roberts, Wendy Hansen, Alok Bohara, and excellent reviewers for helpful comments.     

The British official mind and the Lausanne conference, 1922-23

From the collapse of the Ottoman empire in 1918 until the Lausanne Conference in 1923 Britain attempted to establish itself as the dominant power in the Aegean, largely in order to control its strengths. This would see the British occupation of Constantinople, the collapse of Allied cooperation, the Chanak crisis, and the final resolution at Lausanne.     

Reflections on Stein Rokkan's Conceptual Map of Europe*

Among the leading scholars studying nation-building and national development Stein Rokkan (1921–1979) has had an unique position because of his ability to combine different approaches, to focus on both the general and the unique, and to use both quantitative measurement and qualitative data. Among his most enduring and original contributions is his conceptual map of Europe. It is an elaborate but in principle open typology or system of classification accounting for the main principles of geopolitical differentiation in Western Europe. Despite its theoretical character it clearly shows the spatial order and structure in the development of national states in Europe. This paper analyses both the content of the main dimensions in Rokkan's conceptual map and its nature as a heuristic frame of reference and large-scale research program. References are made to the recent ethnic revival which seems to be hard to explain and understand without considering many distinctions and concepts presented in Rokkan's conceptual map.