Kriangsak Kittichaisaree: International Human Rights Law and Diplomacy

Liverpool Law Review -     

Housing Choice Vouchers and Crime in Charlotte,NC

Recent media attention and research have focused on the effect of housing vouchers on crime, with different conclusions. The purpose of this study is to bring further evidence to the voucher–crime debate, using annual data from 2000 to 2009 for Charlotte-Mecklenburg County. We study the relationship between crime counts and housing vouchers with quantile regression models with year and census tract fixed effects. We found that voucher households are associated with increased crime, controlling for past crime levels. Estimates vary, however, with the concentration of vouchers in the neighborhood, with little impact in areas with low concentrations. Estimates also vary with the neighborhood crime level. We extend the literature by examining the effect of different voucher family types, finding no evidence that elderly households or nonelderly households without disabilities and without children are associated with more crime. However, we found a very significant positive association for nonelderly households without disabilities with children. Our results indicate that significant crime reductions could be accomplished by focusing U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, local housing agency, and criminal justice resources on the types of places and voucher families most at risk for crime problems when a family uses a voucher to move into a new neighborhood.     

Fantasy machine: philanthrocapitalism as an ideological formation

Philanthrocapitalism is promoted as a form of development funding that infuses philanthropy with the dynamism and innovation of capitalist enterprise. Millennium Promise is a philanthrocapitalist organisation based in New York, which finances the Millennium Villages Project (mvp) across 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. At the level of its discursive articulation Millennium Promise appears as a Foucauldian ‘anti-politics machine’: a mechanism of transnational governmentality devoted to the biopolitical production of entrepreneurial subjects organised in self-disciplining communities. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and field research conducted in Uganda, I argue that philanthrocapitalism is better understood as an ideological formation, which mobilises a disavowed enjoyment of global inequality. In the case of Millennium Promise this enjoyment is structured by specific social fantasies: cause-related marketing campaigns invite Western consumers to enjoy their imagined distance from ‘African’ suffering; the mvp functions as a narcissistic mirror, which offers a reflection of capitalist society cleansed of its class antagonism; and, through the staging of messianic rituals, the mvp mobilises a shared enjoyment of pseudo-colonial relations of domination. I conclude that philanthrocapitalism is not an anti-politics machine but a fantasy machine, which demonstrates the limitations of Foucauldian critique, and forces us to confront our own relations to enjoyment.     

Literary Reviews

Tyranny and redemption. Anthills of the Savannah. Chinua Achebe. London: William Heinemann. 1987. 233pp. £10.95hb

Suffering with stoicism: Kenyan histories. Coming to Birth. Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye. London: Virago Press. 1986. 150pp. £3.95pb

The Present Moment. Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye. London: Heinemann. 1987. 155pp. £10.95hb

The politics of the soul. Search Sweet Country. B Kojo Laing. London: Picador. 1987. 318pp. £3.95pb

Images of Istanbul. The Sea‐Crossed Fisherman. Yashar Kemal. Translated from the Turkish by Thilda Kemal. London: Methuen. 1986. 289pp. £3.95pb

The Birds Have Also Gone. Yashar Kemal. Translated from the Turkish by Thilda Kemal. London: Collins Harvill. 1987. 122pp. £8.95hb

Enemies within. War in the Land of Egypt. Yusuf al Qa'id. Translated from the Arabic by Olive and Lome Kenny and Christopher Tingley. London: Al Saqi. 1986. 192pp. £4.95pb

Frustrated fantasies. Heartbreak Tango: A Serial. Manuel Puig. Translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine London: Arean. 1987. 224pp. £2.95pb

Pubis Angelical. Manuel Puig. Translated from the Spanish by Elena Brunet. London: Faber and Faber. 1987. 236pp. £9.95hb

Tending towards one voice. Faces and Masks. Eduardo Galeano. Translated from the Spanish by Cedric Belfrage. London: Quartet. 1987. 304pp. £14.95hb

Land of riches. Cuzcatlan. Manlio Axgueta. Translated from the Spanish by Clark Hansen. London: Chatto and Windus. 1987. 255pp. £11.95hb

Autobiography of the age. The Infinite Rehearsal. Wilson Harris. London: Faber and Faber. 1987. 88pp. £8.95hb

Caribbean childhoods. Summer Lightning and Other Stories. Olive Senior. Harlow, England: Longman. 1986. 134pp. £2.95pb

Whole of a Morning Sky. Grace Nichols. London: Virago. 1987. 156pp. £3.50pb

Traumas of partition. Kingdom's End and Other Stories. Saadat Hasan Manto. Translated from the Urdu by Khalid Hasan. London/New York: Verso. 1987. 257pp. £U.95/S18.95hb

Mirroring Pakistan: reflections and distortions. The Thirteenth House. Adam Zameenzad. London: Fourth Estate. 1987. 202pp. £10.95hb

Black Mirrors. Farooq Khalid. Translated from the Urdu by Eric Cyprian. London: Jonathan Cape. 1987. 285pp. £10.95hb

Christopher Shackle. School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Prize poetry. Under Another Sky: An Anthology of Commonwealth Poetry Prize Winners. Edited by Alastair Niven. Manchester and New York: Carcanet. 1987. 103pp. £6.96/S10.95pb     

Towards an Acceptable Level of Violence: Institutional Lessons From Northern Ireland

Institutional and economic development has recently returned to the forefront of economic analysis. The use of case studies (both historical and contemporary) has been important in this revival. Likewise, it has been argued recently by economic methodologists that historical context provides a kind of “laboratory” for the researcher interested in real world economic phenomena. Counterterrorism economics, in contrast with much of the rest of the literature on terrorism, has all too rarely drawn upon detailed contextual case studies. This article seeks to help remedy this problem. Archival evidence, including previously unpublished material on the DeLorean case, is an important feature of this article. The article examines how an inter-related strategy, which traded-off economic, security, and political considerations, operated during the Troubles. Economic repercussions of this strategy are discussed. An economic analysis of technical and organizational change within paramilitarism is also presented. A number of institutional lessons are discussed including: the optimal balance between carrot versus stick, centralization relative to decentralization, the economics of intelligence operations, and tit-for-tat violence. While existing economic models are arguably correct in identifying benefits from politico-economic decentralization, they downplay the element highlighted by institutional analysis.     

Yeager,M. P. and Carter,C. (Eds) (2012). Pacts and Alliances in History. Diplomatic Strategy and the Politics of Coalitions

This article disputes the assertions of the new Reagan literature. Drawing upon radio broadcasts, speeches, correspondences, and documents from his presidential library, as well as recently published diaries from his White House years, it argues that Ronald Reagan had no grand strategy in the years 1976–1984. Indeed, throughout this period, he possessed two less-than-grand strategies I label “peace through strength” and “a crusade for freedom.” Each of these contained its own respective set of goals and employed its own corresponding set of tactics. Yet there was no grand strategy for ending the Cold War.     

Contested or established? A comparison of legislative powers across regimes

In research on authoritarian institutions, legislatures are portrayed as capable of resolving dilemmas between the leader and opposition members. Nevertheless, repeated interactions between a leader and their ruling coalition can lead to both contested dictatorships, in which institutions constrain the leader, and established dictatorships, in which the leader exercises near-complete control. To date, however, no one has examined the patterns by which powers vary across legislatures in different settings and over time. Using data from the Varieties of Democracy Project on legislative powers between 1900 and 2017, we conceptualize changes in the powers afforded to the national congress to characterize the development of regimes in either direction. The study expounds on the content of legislatures across regimes and the ways in which they change, encouraging scholars to further consider the relationship between regime dynamics and legislative institutionalization.