Iliac cancellous bone in drug addicts: a histomorphometric study

Histomorphometry was used to determine structural bone changes in drug addicts. Iliac crest bone biopsies were obtained at autopsy from 28 subjects (21 male, 7 female, aged 18 to 45 years) who had a history of drug abuse and had died due to overdose of illicit drugs. For histomorphometry, undecalcified sections were investigated using the Merz grid. The following histomorphometric indices were measured and calculated: BV/TV, BS/BV, Tb.Th, Tb.N, Tb.Sp, OV/TV, OS/BS, Ob.S/BS, O.Th, ES/BS, Oc.S/BS, and N.Oc/T.A. In 28 controls (24 male, 4 female, aged 17 to 47 years) trabecular bone specimens were investigated in the same way. The parameters in drug addicts did not show any correlation to age, body weight, height or sex differences. Trabecular bone volume and trabecular thickness were slightly but not significantly increased (BV/TV: 23.37 +/- 5.77% (mean, SD), controls 22.23 +/- 5.08%, p = 0.434; Tb.Th: 172.67 +/- 36.83 mcm, controls 169.73 +/- 36.13 mcm, p = 0.764). Only the eroded surface was significantly different to the controls (ES/BS: 8.16 +/- 2.04%, controls 6.96 +/- 2.17%, p = 0.038). We conclude that the incidence of metabolic bone disease in drug addicts is low.     

Power Politics and Wars without States

In order to evaluate the applicability of power politics theories of war and international stability to interactions among nonstate actors, I test hypotheses from power transition theory and from neorealist arguments about systemic polarity against the behavior of 20 state and nonstate actors in nineteenth‐century South America. I find considerable support for two of the three hypotheses tested and conclude that existing IR theory has more explanatory power within the empirical domain of nonstate relations than critics of such theory claim.     

Neoliberalismus, Staat und Selbsttechnologien. Ein kritischer Überblick über die governmentality studies

While the reception of Foucault’s work in Germany is still dominated by highly polarized philosophical and academic debattes, his concepts and ideas inspired many studies in the social and political sciences in the Anglo-Saxon world. Part of this general theoretical interest are the so called governmentality studies refering to the notion of governmentality coined by Foucault. This articles begins with an outline of the theoretical principles underpinning this research framework. Foucault uses the concept of government in a comprehensive sense adumbrating the close link between forms of knowledge, power techniques and processes of subjectivation. In the second part follows a brief presentation of some subsequent work inspired by Foucault’s account. By confronting Ulrich Beck’s notion of risk society with the governmentality approach it will be demonstrated that this kind of theoretical perspective could be very useful for a critical analysis of neo-liberal modes of regulation. It links political rationalities to the micro-techniques of every day life and explores the field of the government which ranges from “governing the self” to “governing others” encompassing the state and civil society. Yet, there still remain unsolved problems and ambiguities, especially the role of the state and the question of resistance in the governmentality studies. These points are taken up in the third part of the text.     

Opposites Do Not Attract: The Impact of Domestic Institutions, Power, and Prior Commitments on Alignment Choices

States that choose to involve themselves in an ongoing dispute do so by choosing to align with or against one of the original disputants. What factors lead states to prefer to help one side over the other? We consider the effect of the disputants' power, political and economic institutional similarities between each disputant and the aligning state, and formal alliance commitments between each disputant and the aligning state on these alignment choices. We evaluate these expectations empirically by examining the alignment choices of states that joined with one side or another in a Militarized Interstate Dispute during the period of 1816 to 1986. The results indicate that regardless of regime type, institutional similarities matter to the aligning state's decision. We also find that power concerns matter only to autocracies; democracies do not seem to base their alignment choices on the power of the sides in the dispute. Finally, the evidence indicates that the alignment choices of democracies cannot be anticipated by their prior alliance commitments, although the alignment choices of autocracies can. These results suggest interesting implications for research on the democratic peace, the determinants of threat in the international system, and the impact of selection effects. The consistent empirical evidence that institutional similarity affects alignment decisions also increases our confidence that future investigations of institutional similarity generally, rather than an exclusive focus on joint democracy, will prove fruitful.     

'The birth of bio-politics': Michel Foucault's lecture at the Collège de France on neo-liberal governmentality

This paper focuses on Foucault's analysis of two forms of neo-liberalism in his lecture of 1979 at the Collège de France: German post-War liberalism and the liberalism of the Chicago School. Since the course is available only on audio-tapes at the Foucault archive in Paris, the larger part of the text presents a comprehensive reconstruction of the main line of argumentation, citing previously unpublished source material. The final section offers a short discussion of the methodological and theoretical principles underlying the concept of governmentality and the critical political angle it provides for an analysis of contemporary neo-liberalism.     

Morphologic and clinical aspects of alveolitis

Non-infectious "pneumonias" are said to occur more frequently, among other things as a result of increasing environmental pollution. There is still no final systematizations of these pathogenetic complex diseases that is universally accepted; they are mainly defined according to pathomorphological criteria and are summarily termed "alveolitis" because of their localization in the acini of the lung. On the basis of a forensic expert's opinion, the problems are demonstrated.