Psychopathology and world politics

The relationship between psychopathology and world politics can be considered firstly from the world politics perspective. This means examining the dysfunctional forms of human behaviour manifest there—both individual and collective/communal. It means examining how such behaviour can be described and explained in psychiatric or psychological/psychoanalytical terms. The relationship between psychopathology and world politics can also be considered from the psychopathology perspective. This means examining some of the key psychopathological concepts that are of relevance to world affairs. It means examining paranoia or narcissism, for example, and the way understanding syndromes like these helps further our understanding of world affairs.     

Power and morality: a misleading dichotomy

This article critically addresses E H Carr's dichotomy of power and morality by demonstrating that all analytical languages used to articulate world affairs systematically refer to both power and morality, albeit in a different manner. The distinction between the two concepts is an analytical one, rather than a dichotomy of the kind that Carr constructs. Although Carr's dichotomy has recently resurfaced as a distinction between ‘communitarianism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’, such an interpretation of his work remains problematic. This is demonstrated through a case study of President Jimmy Carter—whose policies manifest both realist and liberal approaches and combine power-centred concerns with moralistic ones. Therefore, in practical world affairs, there is no power-morality dichotomy; there are only different accounts of what both power and morality entail.     

Exploring the relationship between sentencing and the legitimacy of trial justice

This paper argues that recent sustained criticism of judicial sentencing in England and Wales reflects a much deeper malaise afflicting the legitimacy of punishment in the late post-modern era. It suggests that this phenomenon not only threatens the liberal-consensus view of the judiciary as pivotal to the rule of law, but also undermines the rationality which underpins conventional paradigms of criminal justice more generally. The paper goes on to argue that there are important lessons to be learned from engaging with the debates about punishment and sentencing which are taking place on the international stage, suggesting that the crisis in domestic sentencing is really symptomatic of a more fundamental crisis in penal legitimacy affecting the whole of civil society; one that touches upon the role of punishment in the governance of so-called democratic states. The paper concludes that the time may have come to modify the predominant neo-liberal paradigm prevalent in western democracies by developing notions of punishment and sentencing as relational contexts which provide meaningful links between trial outcomes and aspirations for justice.