OUT OF THE WHITE BOX

The authors enjoin professionals and service delivery systems for mediation to look at the current and future demographics and specialized needs and responses of Hispanics and other groups, suggesting that, with certain changes, mediation can become more available to these important segments of our society.     

A contribution to the conceptualization of political resources utilized in corporate political action

• This paper is an attempt at improving existing conceptualizations of corporate political resources. I contend that existing typologies are too vague, simplistic and incomplete on several points. This is why I firstly suggest a new typology and then offer some thoughts on the main characteristics of these resources. Lastly, I apply the idea of resource combination (or bundle) to political resources, showing that they can play three different roles in implementing two generic political strategies.

Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Time efficiency as a measure of court performance: evidence from the Court of Justice of the European Union

European Journal of Law and Economics - This work proposes an alternative measure of court performance, namely, time efficiency, which is equal to the length of a verdict divided by the time needed...     

The encomienda and the optimizing imperialist: an interpretation of Spanish imperialism in the Americas

During the conquest and early administration of Spain’s American colonies the most controversial policy was the granting of temporary encomiendas, or temporary rights to collect tribute from Indians, as a reward for conquest. The contribution of the encomienda to the destruction of Indian populations was recognized by Spanish authorities at the time, yet the Crown persisted in introducing the most destructive form of the institution during the early stage of each colonial venture for over 200 years. Because the Crown financed the defense of its colonial possessions against other European imperialists, an addition to colonial capital, by increasing the return to an aggressor, imposed a defense-cost externality on the Crown. Since the cost of defending additional assets was higher in the Americas than in Spain, an efficient policy would have been to encourage the rapid transformation of human services into durable assets that could be transported to Spain. According to our defense-externality argument, the temporary encomienda and its parallel modification in each colonial episode becomes a rational Crown policy. The administration of Spain’s distant colonial possessions, especially the adjustments in the restrictions on encomiendas, required information about the local conditions, and we argue that the Church, as designated “protector of the Indians,” may have played an unwitting role in the communication of information.     

On an entrepreneurial criminology of mass political violence

This article examines an entrepreneurial criminology of mass political violencewithin the broader set of criminological communications on this theme, and identifies some troubling dimensions of the criminological closures on which the enterprise rests. The criminological enterprise over mass political violence testifies to ambitions of external expansion at the expense of other social scientific analyses, that are represented as ill-qualified for the study of this particular object, while evacuating from its conception of criminology intellectual traditions averse to the promotion of criminalization as a means to constitute and respond to troubling events. The normative values advanced in enterprising calls seem to have led to a failure to submit certain assumptions to rigorous intellectual (and political) critique. The result is an analytic conservatism that, perhaps unwittingly, reinforces dominant assumptions about crime, as well as an uncritical adoption of liberal internationalism and western cultural dominance.     

Rumeur sur Brazzaville: de la rue à l’écriture

The documentary material here examined comes from the independent press of Brazzaville in the 1990s. The author contends that a major part of press coverage claimed to be based on urban rumors. The names of some newspapers even proclaimed the closeness of their information to urban hearsay, presented as truer, or at least more relevant, than the written word in general, itself understood as wholly subservient to the political power in place. The author then systematically analyzes texts from the most important such newspapers to show how the discourse in them has been constructed on the basis of the discourse of Brazzaville political rumor.     

The Fungibility of Health Aid Reconsidered

This article draws further attention to the importance of taking into account off-budget aid when estimating the degree of foreign aid fungibility. It does so by re-evaluating the results of a recent, influential paper which concluded that health aid is fully fungible in the long run. Allowing for the presence of off-budget aid indicates that the degree of fungibility of health aid is much more uncertain than at first blush appears. Under plausible assumptions about the role of off-budget aid, the conclusion of full fungibility is overturned and at most only a limited degree of fungibility is found.     

The European Union and Mercosur: A case of inter-regionalism

The article reviews the relation between two regional integration arrangements, the European Union and Mercosur, under three aspects: trade and investment, international negotiations and the institutional dimension. Tracing the agenda and issues dealt with between the two, leading to a project of a transatlantic free trade area, reveals that trade issues, one of two 'pillars' of reference, are important. However, the most influential results have stemmed so far from the other 'pillar', the political one. These results may be seen in the EU's role as a 'road map' for Mercosur's institutional trajectory, and second, as a signal for the private sector in furthering industrial networks within the ongoing world economic restructuring. The objective, thus, is to highlight how the relationship may interact with two encompassing processes: the shaping of regionalism/s, in particular the Mercosur case, and the so-called globalisation process.