Detecting Gunshot Residue from Sellier & Bellot Nontox Heavy Metal‐free Primer by in situ Cathodoluminescence

Gunshot residue (GSR) from the discharge of ammunition can provide crucial information in reconstructing criminal cases. Traditional primers create particles of heavy metals such as lead, barium, and antimony. In forensic laboratories, automatic inorganic particle detection is performed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), using the backscattered electron signal to search for bright residues among the many darker environmental particles, due to higher electron density of the former. Some innovative primers, indicated as heavy metal‐free (HMF), produce a residue of elements with atomic numbers below 21, urgently demanding new detecting solutions. For the first time, residues from Sellier & Bellot Nontox HMF primer are demonstrated to emit visible light under electron beam stimulation in a SEM. Cathodoluminescence is then proposed as a promising tool to both detect and characterize residues in forensic cases involving HMF primers, with minor changes to traditional analytical apparatus used for inorganic GSR analysis.     

The Postcapitalist Transition: Policy Implications for the Left

The postcapitalism thesis asserts that open source and collaborative non-profit organisations represent a new, non-market sector in which the profit motive and monetary exchange no longer drive economic activity; in Marxist political economy terms, they are a new means for suppressing the law of value . Information technology has produced four systemic dysfunctions, limiting capitalism’s ability to function as a complex adaptive system: the zero marginal cost effect, the tendency to delink work from wages, positive network effects, and information asymmetries. In response, in addition to the traditional remedies of social democracy for a stagnant neoliberal economic model, left parties must adopt a programme of transition: aggressively breaking up technological monopolies; promoting universal basic income and basic service solutions; outlawing rent-seeking business models; and promoting data democracy.     

Be Careful What You Wish For: Security Challenges Facing the Korean Peninsula During a Potential Unification Process

There is a lacuna in the literature analyzing the mid-term (6-24 months) period after a DPRK contingency that results in the Pyongyang regime’s relatively sudden and unmanaged fall. This article helps fill that gap, particularly with respect to security issues that would challenge Korean unification efforts during such a period. Following an Introduction, Section I first makes the case for a DPRK contingency being the most plausible end to the Pyongyang regime. Assuming the scenarios from Section I, Section II addresses the question of what critical issues a unifying Korea will face over the mid-term, and how dealing with these challenges will condition the type of end-state that a unified Korea will embody. In particular we examine three challenges: (a) mid-term security provision related to potential weapons proliferation, cyber-security, organized criminality, and human security; (b) the foundations of institution-building through measures dealing with issues of transitional justice, disputed land title claims, and generating broad domestic stakeholder buy-in in a unifying Korea; (c) the disposition of Korea’s strategic alignment in a Northeast Asia that will have undergone a major alteration of the regional system. Section III concludes with policy recommendations concerning what efforts should be made now to prepare for the situations described in Sections I and II.     

Advancing Health Rights in a Globalized World: Responding to Globalization through a Collective Human Right to Public Health

The right to health was codified in Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as an individual right, focusing on individual health services at the expense of public health systems. This article assesses the ways in which the individual human right to health has evolved to meet collective threats to the public's health. Despite its repeated expansions, the individual right to health remains normatively incapable of addressing the injurious societal ramifcations of economic globalization, advancing individual rights to alleviate collective inequalities in underlying determinants of health. By examining modern changes to underlying determinants of health, this article concludes that responding to globalized health threats necessitates a collective right to public health.     

China’s impact on the landscape of African International Relations: implications for dependency theory

Since China began enhancing its economic relationship with key African oil exporters from the early 1990s, the effect this has had on the International Relations (IR) of Africa has remained largely unknown. This paper delves into African IR theory and finds that, rather than representing an alternative pole for African states to bandwagon with, China’s limited interest in Africa and its international socialisation, along with a possible growth of the middle class in Africa, is likely to give many African states few alternatives than those which have existed thus far in the postcolonial period. More development options are found to lie in sub-regional integration.