The Rise of the “Resistance Axis”: Hezbollah and the Legacy of the Taif Agreement

Abstract

Hezbollah’s direct military presence in Syria and Iraq confirms that their actions transcend Lebanon as a political stage. But why can Hezbollah still not be contained within the boundaries of Lebanon? Exploring how the Taif Agreements both tamed Hezbollah’s rhetoric while simultaneously laying the conditions for transnational activities, this article argues that the conditions of the Taif Agreement have assisted in the rise of Hezbollah’s self-coined Resistance Axis. Post-Taif, Hezbollah has tended relationships with the external forces that helped broker the peace while unlocking the potential in the exceptional decision to allow Hezbollah to retain arms in the name of “resistance.”     

Juvenile Criminality And Semi-Criminality: Learning From Victorian Perceptions And Responses

This article focuses on media reportage of offensive juveniles, past and present, to elicit lessons that the twenty-first century can learn from the Victorian past in terms of diversionary responses. How to prevent vulnerable juveniles sliding into dangerous criminality is a continuing preoccupation: the issue explored in this article relates to the creation of the identity of the criminal juvenile. In utilising the concept of semi-criminality to label certain types of juvenile anti-social behaviour the Victorians avoided actual criminalisation of socially offensive but, in legal terms, minor behaviours. The reasons for and negative consequences of the abandonment of this concept by the modern age are explored, including the reconceptualisation of where responsibility for juvenile offending lies in the modern era.     

Liberal Equality, Exploitation, and the Case for an Unconditional Basic Income

This paper considers whether arguments presented in Philippe Van Parijs' Real Freedom for All: What (if Anything) Can Justify Capitalism? succeed in rebutting the objection that the introduction of a substantial unconditional basic income (UBI) would allow non-working citizens to free-ride on the efforts of, and so exploit, working citizens. It considers Van Parjis' 'external assets argument' for UBI, and finds that this argument does not succeed in reconciling payment of a substantial UBI with the reciprocity principle which underpins this 'exploitation objection'. It considers and rejects Van Parijs' implicit claim that the exploitation objection must be grounded in a distributive principle which contradicts the egalitarian commitment to prevent brute luck inequality. It concludes that Van Parjis has failed, thus far, to articulate a convincing response to the exploitation objection.     

Restoring accountability in pretrial release: the Philadelphia pretrial release supervision experiments

As drug arrests and jail overcrowding added pressure to increase pretrial release in localities during the 1980s and 1990s, the need to manage a larger and higher-risk pretrial population of defendants awaiting adjudication in the community became a high priority for justice agencies. In the late 1990s Philadelphia officials sought to discover the ingredients of a successful supervision strategy through four interlinked field experiments to provide an empirical basis for a major reform of the pretrial release system. The results of the linked randomized experiments question common assumptions about “supervision,” its impact and effectiveness, about the underlying nature of the noncompliant defendant, and deterrence implications. The study emphasizes the importance of interpreting the findings in the context of implementation of the policy reform. Findings suggest that facilitative notification strategies wield little influence on defendant behavior and that deterrent aims are undermined by the system's failure to deliver consequences for defendant noncompliance during pretrial release. The most significant contribution of the article is its illustration of a major evidence-based policy reform undertaken by a major court system.     

Juror decision making in the capital penalty trial

Two factors thought to influence jurors' penalty decisions in capital trials—the nature of the crime committed and the defense's portrayal of the convicted offender's character—were examined. Mock jurors were death-qualified and exposed to one of twelve simulated penalty trials. Each trial was comprised of one of three capital crimes and one of four defense strategies. Jurors were least punitive in robbery-murder conditions and most punitive in multiple murder conditions. A conceptual argument against capital punishment was the most effective defense; a mental illness defense was the least effective. Penalty decisions were mediated by three attributional variables: (a) juror perceptions of the defendant's volition, (b) juror perceptions of the defendant's future dangerousness, and (c) juror perceptions of the relative competency of the opposing attorneys.This article is based on the author's dissertation which received an Honorable Mention in the 1985 SPSSI Dissertation Prize competition. The research was made possible by grants from the University of California, Santa Cruz and Division 41 of the American Psychological Association. The author is indebted to Craig Haney, Elliot Aronson, and Dane Archer for their valuable suggestions and support.