Crime is the Problem: Homicide,Acquisitive Crime,and Economic Conditions

A question that emerges from recent research on the relationship between economic conditions and street crimes committed for monetary gain concerns the effect of changing economic conditions on violent crime. I propose that the economy stimulates violent crime indirectly through its effect on acquisitive crime. This hypothesis is evaluated in fixed-effects panel models of change in acquisitive crime and homicide rates between 1970 and 2006. The analysis indicates that collective perceptions of economic conditions have a significant effect on an index of acquisitive crime and an indirect effect, through acquisitive crime, on homicide. Consistent with this result, the effect of collective economic perceptions is stronger for felony than argument-related homicides. A promising focus for future research is the role of underground markets in the production of both property and violent crime.

所有权的观念性——近代私法上所有权的历史性格

所有权的观念性即所有权所体现的对物的观念上的支配,这种支配通过他人对所有权的尊重而得以实现,即使物不在所有人的现实控制之下。这种具有观念性的所有权在近代私法上亦可称为绝对所有权。所有权的观念性在不断变动的社会状况下并不总是一致和全面的。观念性作为近代私法所有权的历史性格的特征总是伴随着所有权现实性的修正而变化。     

Spatializing the future: financial expectations,EU convergence and the Eastern European Forex mortgage crisis

Existing accounts of failure to predict the financial crisis focus on the complexity of the financial system, and are less useful for understanding crises in non-securitized markets. We examine the roots of optimism leading up to the Eastern European mortgage crisis through the case of Hungary, and use recent theories of expectations, which understand them as both pragmatic and fictional practices that commonly incorporate narratives. Based on archival research and interviews with bankers, regulators and legislators, we demonstrate how the EU convergence narrative was central in forming optimistic expectations. Fusing the underspecified convergence process with an orientalist geographical imaginary, this narrative and its associated measures translated growing indebtedness as ‘catching up’ with Europe, de-emphasized exchange rate risk through a belief in European convergence and precluded crisis scenarios originating in the European Union. Our findings contribute to theories of how economic expectations are formed, stabilized and maintained by developing the concept of ‘spatializing the future’, denoting practices that handle uncertainty by charting the future as movement in concrete geographical or abstract space, along externally verifiable pathways.     

Reflections of the nexus between justice and peacebuilding

This commentary reflects on eight articles recently published in this journal as part of a special issue on the nexus between transitional justice and statebuilding (Volume 10, Issue 3, 2016). It positions the special issue within an emerging ‘fourth phase’ literature on transitional justice that draws on critiques of liberal peacebuilding to urge an expansion of its boundaries to embrace socio-economic issues. It is argued that the type of analysis found in the special issue, characterized by in-depth, on-the-ground empirical analysis of complex domestic politics of material accumulation and ideological contestation, marks a significant and welcome advance in a literature which to this point has been largely de-contextualized, exhortatory and over-reliant on tired binaries of the ‘international and the local’ or the ‘liberal and legitimate’.     

The myopic Foucauldian gaze: discourse,knowledge and the authoritarian peace

ABSTRACT

The discourse of liberal peacebuilding has often been characterized by critics as a hegemonic discourse, in which power and knowledge are co-constitutive. Influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, an important strand of the literature has demonstrated how epistemic communities have produced knowledge that supports this discourse, while marginalizing other, contrary voices. A ‘local turn’ has sought to uncover what Foucault termed ‘subjugated knowledges’, peripheral voices that were seen as potentially contributing to a more emancipatory peace. This article, in contrast, argues that the explicit and implicit Foucauldian framing of discourse and knowledge is no longer adequate to conceptualize the contested nature of peace and conflict in a rapidly changing international system. In a period of significant geopolitical shifts away from a Western-centric international order, post-Foucauldian discourse theories offer a more productive analytical perspective that makes visible the multiple, competing discourses that attempt to achieve closure in defining meanings of peace and conflict. A theoretical framework that emphasizes discursive contestation rather than unitary domination allows serious consideration of alternative conceptualizations of peacemaking. In particular, theoretical frameworks that highlight contestation make visible an authoritarian, illiberal approach to managing conflict that challenges both liberal and emancipatory conceptualizations of peace and conflict, but is occluded in the current debate over post-liberal peace.     

‘Peace-building as state-building’? Rethinking liberal interventionism in contexts of emerging states

Contemporary policy-making guided by the ‘liberal peace’ holds that peace is necessary for states to emerge, and that peace-building and state-building do not only go in tandem, but are mutually reinforcing. Yet, in view of both the historical record of state-making and empirical evidence provided by liberal interventionism, this proposition appears questionable. While scholars have shown that state-making has, historically, been as much associated with war than with peace, cases from Afghanistan to Somalia suggest that state-making is inherently conflictive, frequently upsetting nascent peace. In order to shed light on the reasons underpinning the relationship between prevailing peace-building practices and the fundamental exigencies of state-making, this article pursues a theoretical argument. It proposes that while peace-building is principally about creating a situation of non-violent co-existence despite prevailing differences and, thus, essentially geared at accepting and enshrining institutional and identity pluralism, state-making is vitally aimed at replacing institutional and identity multiplicity with greater degrees of rule hegemony and standardisation. Applying the prism of ‘rule standardisation’ to the nexus of peace-building and state-making, this paper seeks to advance existing debates on this delicate relationship.     

Women's rights in democratic transitions: A global sequence analysis, 1900–2012

What determines countries’ successful transition to democracy? This article explores the impact of granting civil rights in authoritarian regimes and especially the gendered aspect of this process. It argues that both men's and women's liberal rights are essential conditions for democratisation to take place: providing both women and men rights reduces an inequality that affects half of the population, thus increasing the costs of repression and enabling the formation of women's organising – historically important to spark protests in initial phases of democratisation. This argument is tested empirically using data that cover 173 countries over the years 1900–2012 and contain more nuanced measures than commonly used. Through novel sequence analysis methods, the results suggest that in order to gain electoral democracy a country first needs to furnish civil liberties to both women and men.     

就业权内容探析

就业权是一种以自由权主导兼具社会权性质的复合权利.将这一性质作为分析就业权内容的前提和工具,运用理论分析为主,兼采文献与历史研究方法,就会得出:就业权是一权利系统,从逻辑结构上看,自由权性质层面的自由择业权和平等就业权是主导,社会权性质层面的工作获得权是补充,二者相辅相成,相得益彰.     

Liberal International Theory and Imagining the End of the Cold War

Liberal international theory foresaw neither the end of the east–west rivalry nor the fall of the Soviet Union. However, from the 1960s up through the 1980s, several liberal international theorists put forward insightful analyses of the evolution of the cold war, its changing importance in world affairs and the problems that increasingly confronted the Soviet Union. Well before the fall of the Berlin Wall, several liberal international writers sensed that the cold war was abating, that this abatement was important for world politics and that the Soviet Union was having serious problems in maintaining its status as a superpower with an Eastern European empire.