Permanent Ocular Injury Following Paintball Pellet Hit: A Medicolegal Case

Paintball is a ubiquitous recreation, with severe and occasionally irreversible injuries. In this study, a rare medicolegal case of paintball‐related closed globe blunt ocular injury was described. An 18‐year‐old boy who was hit in his right eye by a paintball pellet presented with severe eye pain and blurred vision. Ophthalmologic examinations showed lid edema, conjunctival hyperemia, conjunctival laceration, subconjunctival hemorrhage, corneal edema, anterior vitreous hemorrhage, congested sclera, commotio retinae, vitreous hemorrhage, retinal hemorrhage, macular edema, and macular hole. After maximum medical improvement, the patient who sustained incurable maculopathy and decreased visual acuity was referred to the legal medicine center for appraisal of the impairment. AMA Guides was used to assess the impairment of the functional vision. Despite his monocular visual defect, the patient was rated in the range of mild vision loss namely AMA class 1 with 22 percentage visual system impairment.     

Globalization and extraterritorial application of economic regulation: crisis in international law and balancing interests

There are two developments the combination of which has led to new challenges to international law: the growth of economic regulations and globalisation. While the modern economies are associated with the proliferation of regulatory laws which are rooted in the national economic and social policies, the loosening of the national borders and globalisation has led to conflicts of economic regulations. Such developments have posed various risks of violations of national economic regulations by the economic actors and could lead to tension among national states which have jurisdiction over multinational enterprises in one way or another. The private parties involved in such a situation could somehow avoid such risks by their own initiatives and contractual arrangements but in most cases such measures do now work and the conflict has to be resolved through the cooperation between the countries involved. The paper investigates the potentials for public international law to come up with rules, principles and norms to resolve such complex disputes which touch up issues such as non-intervention, equality of sovereign states, state immunity, self-determination and other principles of international law. Unlike certain area of international law such as law of sea where a few factors involved and the disputes could be resolved by relying on simple facts and rules, the application of national economic regulations extraterritorially creates tensions among the nation states in respect of the demarcation of national jurisdictions. It is here that public international faces a new challenges and need to come up with new approaches such a balancing of interests of the states involved in the conflicts.     

Reframing Orientalism: Weber and Islam

In debates on the encounters of Middle Eastern societies with Western modernity, Max Weber's work is invariably seen as the classical statement of what may be called sociological Orientalism. Most 'Third Worldist' and other anti-Orientalist critics locate Weberian and neo-Weberian perspectives within Orientalism as a discourse of Western domination which has remained hegemonic since the mid-nineteenth century. In contrast, this paper argues that only with the victory of the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the subsequent consolidation of the Soviet bloc were conditions in place for the re-articulation of Orientalism as an ideological construct, a discourse of domination. Weber as well as Marx and other pre-Soviet thinkers are thus relocated outside the reach of the Orientalist/anti-Orientalist opposition, where they display significant differences from both. The essay then turns to reconsider W'eber's specific research programme and his views on Islam and shows their intrinsic limitations for the current debate over the rise and trajectory of militant Islamism. It concludes by outlining a still recognizably Weberian strategy for resolving this debate.     

The Forgotten Pirates: Iraqi and Iranian Pirates in the Arabian Gulf Who Have Never Been Reported to the International Maritime Bureau

If piracy attacks are unreported, a misleading impression is given of piracy situations in regions where there could be serious consequences for ships traveling in waterways on the assumption that they are piracy-free waters. However, sometimes not reporting piracy attacks could help to contain piracy before it expands, because reporting can lead to the media over-focusing on piratical incidents, and armed guards being deployed on ships, which causes pirates to use heavier arms and escalates the level of conflict. Piracy that took place during 2003–2012 in the north and the center of the Arabian Gulf has never been reported to the International Maritime Bureau. The present article examines this case of unreporting, and discusses its causes and consequences.     

Ethiopian female labor migration to the Gulf states: the case of Kuwait

ABSTRACT

International labor migration is one of the most salient features of the modern globalized world. However, the phenomenon has its roots in some earlier periods in human history. Africa is traditionally a sending continent of all types of migrations, voluntary or forced. This study examines the above-mentioned issues through the mounting phenomenon of migration of single independent women in search for better economic, social, or political conditions across the boundaries of their home countries. In the past, African women migrants were only spouses or dependent family members. But as modernity swept most African societies, with rising unemployment rates, there is evidence everywhere in Africa that women labor migration is a growing phenomenon that deserves to be understood in the context of current gender-related research. This work explores these issues further, focusing on the experience of Ethiopian women labor migrants to Kuwait, within Gulf Cooperation Council, an area with a shared socio-economic background. In addition to numerous difficulties already facing labor migrants, Ethiopian women suffered greater degrees of gender-based violence, underpayment, and trafficking, to mention only few aspects of human rights violations. This situation could be attributed to the fact that most of these women fall under the category of unskilled and/or illiterate migrants, as irregular migrants who are employed within the private sector, outside the purview any legal or labor regulatory authorities.     

Book reviews

Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict and Authority, edited by Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth. Basingstoke/New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's Press, 2000. Pp. xiv + 280. £47.50 (hardback). ISBN 0 333 67184/0 312 22592 X.

French Peasant Fascism: Henry Dorgeres's Creenshirts and the Crises of French Agriculture, 1929–1939, by Robert O. Paxton. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp.xii + 244. US$45 (hardback). ISBN 0 19 511188 5 and 89 3.

Intrahousehold Resource Allocation in Developing Countries: Models, Methods and Policy, edited by Lawrence Haddad, John Hoddinott and Harold Alderman. Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, on behalf of the International Food Policy Research Institute. Pp.xii + 341. US$66 (cloth). ISBN 0 8018 5572 1

The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy, by Neil Harvey. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 1998. Pp.xviii + 292. £34 (hardback): £11.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 8223 2209 9 and 2238 2

Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980–1995, edited by Steve J. Stern. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 1998. Pp.xiv +532 pages. £44 (hardback); £14.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 8223 2201 3 and 2217 X

Services and Quality of Life in Rural Villages in the Former Soviet Union: Data from 1991 and 1993, by David J. O'Brien, Valerie V. Patsiorkovski, Larry D. Dershem, Alessandro Bonanno and Charles Timberlake, Lanham, MD and Oxford: University Press of America, 1998. Pp.289. Hb. ISBN 0 7618 0954 6. No price.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James.C. Scott. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Pp.xiv + 445. US$35 (hardback). ISBN 0 300 07016 0

Kinship, Honour and Money in Pakistan: Subsistence Economy and the Effects of International Migration, by Alain Lefebvre. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999. Pp.xiv + 303. £40. ISBN 0 7007 0984 3

Controlling Misbehaviour in England, 1370–1600, by Marjorie Keniston McIntosh (Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp.xviii + 289. £40/US$59.95 (hardback). ISBN 0 521 62177 1     

Foreign ownership and export performance in the large corporate sector of India

This paper examines the impact of foreign ownership on export performance by the largest corporate firms in India, to analyse whether the ‘monopolistic advantages’ of multinationals survive in its highly restrictive and regulated environment. After controlling for industrial characteristics and export incentives, foreign ownership has a positive impact on export performance. The statistical significance of the result is not very strong, but the finding counters earlier works based on simple comparisons of exports at the firm level. The analysis also sheds light on other influences of policy significance on export performance.     

The Defeat of Shabina Begum in the House of Lords

The Court of Appeal last year delivered a well-publicised judgment declaring that now 17-year-old Shabina Begum had been unlawfully excluded from Denbigh High School when she insisted on wearing the Islamic ‘jilbab’ ([2005] EWCA Civ. 199; [2005] 1 W.L.R. 3372; [2005] 2 All E.R. 396 (Judgment of 2 March 2005); The Times, 4 March 2005, at p. 85. See also J. Gau, “Muslim Dress – School Exclusion – Human Rights”, Ecclesiastical Law Journal 8/37 (2005), pp. 239–240.). The dispute received huge national and international press coverage, but on Wednesday 22nd March 2006, in a remarkable u-turn, the House of Lords overturned the Court of Appeal’s decision on all counts (R (On the Application of Begum) v Headteacher and Governors of Denbigh High School [2006] UKHL 15 (Judgment of 22 March 2006); The Guardian, 23 March 2006, at p. 6; and The Independent, 23 March 2006, at p. 4. Members of the Appellate Committee were Lord Bingham of Cornhill; Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead; Lord Hoffmann; Lord Scott of Foscote and Baroness Hale of Richmond.). The reversal meant Shabina’s Article 9 right to manifest a belief had not been violated by the school. This analysis will briefly examine the reasoning behind their Lordship’s judgment and will provide a short commentary on the likely effect the decision will have on religious groups wishing to wear religious symbols in UK schools. LLB (Hons), LLM, Cert. Ed. Mohammad Idriss is Senior Lecturer in Public Law at Coventry University, United Kingdom and is a PhD Candidate at the University of Birmingham; M.Idriss@Coventry.ac.uk