Japan and The East China Sea Dispute

This article offers a closer examination of the way in which the 2010 crisis emerged between Japan and China. The debate that it sponsored within Japan suggests that a crisis management initiative between Beijing and Tokyo rather than an overall reconciliation agenda may be what is now needed. The author contents that greater predictability and transparency in these maritime interactions will go a long way to developing confidence in what has to date been a very uneasy and publicly sensitive aspect of the bilateral relationship.     

Happiness and Toska: An Essay in the History of Emotions in Pre-war Soviet Russia

This article examines the question of what can be gained from an investigation of people's emotions in Stalin's Russia. Such an investigation is inevitably limited by the type of sources available. However, the available sources on Soviet subjectivity provide some evidence of both "official" Soviet emotions (such as enthusiasm and righteous anger against enemies) and less officially prescribed, but widespread, emotions, such as fear, melancholy ( toska ), malice ( zlost' ) and personal happiness. This article focusses on accounts of happiness ( schast'e) and the yearning sadness known as toska , a frequently encountered counterpart of the former. The civic obligation to express public, collective happiness impinged on the capacity to express private happiness: grief and melancholy could be expressed, as long as they were not connected to complaints about the régime.     

Just Evidence: The Limits of Science in the Legal Process

Both opponents and proponents of the death penalty express faith in science and in DNA evidence to justify their positions. This article examines the production of forensic evidence as a social activity and suggests that tendencies toward bias and error may not apply symmetrically in inculpation and exoneration contexts.     

The maternity care needs of refugee and asylum seeking women in Ireland

This article presents some of the findings from the original research carried out with asylum seeking and refugee women in Ireland who were pregnant or who had recently given birth. The explosion in numbers in Ireland from 1998 onwards has been such that this group now comprises more than one in five of every birth in the country's three major maternity hospitals, all based in Dublin. The article explores the background reasons for the major increase in recent years of this group of women. It discusses the difficult circumstances encountered by women who must engage with a system of maternity care unused to such complex needs, amidst a general policy climate of uncertainty and even hostility towards asylum seekers. The research findings contribute to the feminist literature on maternity and challenge us to examine the way in which globalization is impacting on women as mothers and the need for challenging Western states anew on the development of a more coherent model of maternity care in response to the needs of such women.