Deadly Words: State Power and the Entanglement of Speech and Violence in Hate Crime

Any analysis of hate crime that attempts to separate speech from action, language from violence, faces epistemological difficulties that limit the range of conversations about laws responding to identity-based injury in the United States. Active debates have raged over the implications of bias crime sentence enhancement laws for the protection of ‘freespeech’, thus addressing the inextricability of language and meaning from hate crime. Those in favor of legal responses to identity-based injury tend toward essentialist claims which assume the stability of identity and of meanings inherent in words or actions. Those opposed assert the impossibility of codifying the meaning of words or actions in the law, and/or they worry about the reification of (victimized) identities accompanying bias crime statutes. This article argues that the focus on language and speech in these debates simultaneously enables an evasion of discussion about the law's response to bias-related violence, and misleadingly assumes too much stability in the functions of law and the nature of state power. Interviews conducted by the author with individuals involved in a 1992 racist hate crime are used to show the diverse elements of state power suffusing the incident and its aftermath. An analysis of the crime's investigation and prosecution under a Maryland hate crime statute suggests that law enforcement officers are primarily using hate crime laws as public relations tools in a fight against community perceptions that they are themselves bigots. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Solving the legal challenges of trustworthy online identity

Digital identity management is fundamental to the further development of the Internet economy. It is a foundational requirement for most substantive e-commerce transactions and other online activities.     

社会转型期执政党政治认同：内涵维度、现状特征及其建设路径

在长期的、复杂的、严峻的国内外环境中,作为执政党的中国共产党获取长久的政治认同是抗拒执政风险并长期领导中国现代化建设事业的关键所在。政党执政权威性与执政公信度构成了执政党政治认同的两大维度。前者表现为政党意识形态的科学性、政党制度的稳定性、政党执政绩效的持续性,后者则包含执政党的忠诚度、参政党的信任度以及普通民众的认可度等三个层次。据此考察作为执政党的中国共产党的政治认同特征并提出相应的建设路径。     

迁徙自由权演进之比较及其对我国的启示

迁徙自由权作为公民的一项基本权利,其内涵随着时代背景的变迁而不断地丰富和发展着,文章拟通过对各国宪法迁徙自由权规定之演进及相关社会背景的解析,归纳出迁徙自由权内涵的演变规律,进而从这一规律中得出我国迁徙立法的启示。     

The reduction of male abusiveness as a result of treatment: Reality or myth?

A 6-month outpatient treatment program for male abusers emphasized honesty, shame reduction, and group support for change. Ratings on the Abusive Behavior Inventory (ABI) obtained before and immediately after treatment demonstrated a significant decrease in physical and psychological abuse as rated by both the abusers and their female partners. This decrease in male abusiveness was maintained 6 months and two years after completion of treatment for those couples who cooperated in followup. No decrease in male abusiveness was observed during treatment, however, for those couples who did not cooperate in the followup. The authors suggest that the noncooperative female partners may have been afraid to rate their partners because of continued abuse. Therefore, the selective attrition of subjects who did not improve is a major problem in evaluating the apparent long-term success of treatment.     

论刑事案件犯罪嫌疑人、被告人自报身份问题研究

刑事犯罪中犯罪嫌疑人、被告人自报身份表现形式多样,原因各异。犯罪嫌疑人、被告人自报身份带来一系列危害,如,司法公正无法得到保障,犯罪嫌疑人、被告人正当权益无法得到保护等。针对犯罪嫌疑人、被告人自报身份问题带来的危害,应采取相应措施予以完善对犯罪嫌疑人、被告人身份的审查制度。     

Whatever Became of the British?

Much of the debate about ‘being British’ is driven by the politics of the constitutional future of the United Kingdom. This has led to assertions about the declining impact of Britishness, and how, in the interests of the Union, it might be revived. Data from British and Scottish Social Attitudes surveys show that ‘Britain’ remains an important and meaningful frame of reference, even though people in England and Scotland may not define their prime national identity as British. The relationship between national identity and constitutional preferences is complex. Being ‘strongly Scottish’ is a weak predictor of constitutional preferences because almost all Scots are at the ‘strong’ end of the Scottish scale, whereas saying you are ‘British’ (or not) is a better guide. It is not a matter of choosing to be Scottish or English over being British, but recognising the complexity and inter‐relationships of diverse territorial identities.     

Full employment

The recent civic revival has been largely carried out in the register of contemporary political philosophy, with its characteristic division between liberal and communitarian visions of a transcendental moral subject. This article argues that such an approach, with its affiliations to Rousseau's pathbreaking recuperation of the classical civic tradition, tends to bypass the question of what concrete attributes have been required of citizens, and how citizens have historically acquired the attributes to function as responsible civic-minded individuals. As a result its demaraction of ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ models of historical citizenship is unworldly and unhelpful. I conclude by sketching in a tentative outline of a history of modern citizen self-discipline in the early modern period, when citizen status expanded from the city environment to the populations of the territorial states. And I suggest, following Foucault, that these techniques still form the foundations of modern citize-formation.     

The politics of being a human being in Soweto: Identity as a social capital ‘Everything not forbidden is compulsory’ (T.H. White)

In this paper, the concept of social capital is redefined in the context of identity politics within contemporary South Africa. A case is made against the fetishism of identity dogmas that thrive upon closed historicity. Any narrative of subjective formation that is beckoned upon closed historicity is a predisposition towards identity ‘commoditisation’. As the term suggests, commoditisation implies that human subjectivity is ‘wholly’ dependent and measured ‘only’ through the compass of social capital. Commoditisation of identity means that human subjectivity is no longer transcendental but an object of possession – I am what I have or where I come from. This fixation on subjective acquisition and ‘possesivisms’ as an ethno-subjective repertoire for our overall subjective formation is identity fundamentalism. Although the notion of social capital in South Africa's context is a residue of South Africa's history of racialist capitalism, its present pervasiveness has generated a peculiar pattern of identity fundamentalism in which competition over economic resources has become construed as a threat to subjectivity. A reflexive understanding of this problem induces awareness for a healthy humanism.     

新生代农民工社会适应研究——基于浙江省杭州市的调查

当前,新生代农民工逐渐成为流动人口群体的主力,其社会适应程度不仅关系到农民工个体的生存质量和发展可能,也关系到城乡居民之间的关系,甚至还牵涉到整个社会和谐与稳定程度。本研究对在浙江省杭州市务工的新生代农民工的社会适应展开了调查。调查发现新生代农民工在心理认同上有一定的趋同性,社会交往上呈现封闭性,而经济生存上有着明显的脆弱性。增强新生代农民工社会适应要积极推进户籍改革,要继续增强新生代农民工的心理适应,要逐步加强新生代农民工的社会交往,要努力促进新生代农民工的经济适应。