Sex-selective Abortions and Infant Mortality in India: The Role of Parents’ Stated Son Preference

In India, millions of female foetuses have been aborted since the 1980s alongside an abnormally high infant girl mortality rate; this has generated a vast literature exploring the root causes of son preference. The literature is sparse, however, on how the decisions to abort or neglect girls are made. This paper examines mothers’ and fathers’ respective roles behind those decisions. Using the third National Family and Health Survey (NFHS-3) data, we show that sex-selective abortions are most commonly used if both spouses or if only the fathers prefer sons, while sex-selective neglect is used if only the mothers prefer sons.     

CHINA AND THE UN AT 50

China was one of the architects of the UN. The country was the first signa-tory of the UN Charter in San Francisco in 1945. Yet it was only in October 1971, with the Chinese delegation led by then Vice Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua, that the People's Republic of China's representa-tion in the UN was resumed. Since that time, the UN has had the great privilege of witnessing and support-ing China in achieving one of the greatest periods of socioeconomic progress in world history.     

Text and terrain: mapping sexuality and law

This article is concerned with the intersections of law, texts and sexuality. Drawing on recent work in theoretical cartography, this article seeks to argue that a cartographical reading of law can be usefully brought to bear on the legal analysis of sexuality. This article considers how looking to contemporary theoretical and critical cartography can help to reveal law as a process of mapping; how sexuality is mapped both within and without the law through cultural texts, and how law’s encounters with the terrains mapped out by those texts might be enriched and diversified. This article seeks to consider how legal mappings of the terrains of sexuality might be sufficiently contextualised and located within a wider socio-political context, and how a specifically cartographical interpretation might reveal the potential for the law to accommodate the complexity of gendered and sexualised identities that do not easily conform to singular positionings. In order to navigate the texts and terrains of law and sexuality, we must first learn to become cartographers, and through this process, perhaps open up radical and alternative mappings.

Legality of Anti-Satellites Under the Space Law Regime

The term anti-satellite, or in short ASAT, is used to refer to a system designed to destroy or damage satellites. The heightened tendency among the spacefaring nations to develop ASAT technology in the recent past has led to widespread debates as to the legality of ASAT deployment under the space law regime. In this context, I have endeavored to make a detailed analysis of the international legal provisions to find if there is any legal basis at all for the deployment of such ASATs. I have concluded that none of the existing legal provisions in space law, as well as public international law, have sufficient force and clarity to bring about a blanket ban on ASAT weapons. Therefore, the research suggests a slew of reforms to overcome this anomaly. Examples of such proposed reforms include, inter alia, an amendment of the Outer Space Treaty and an enhanced role and influence of the United Nations in treaty making coupled with active diplomatic initiatives.     

Impossible Hosting: D’lo Sets an Undomesticated Stage for South Asian Youth Artists

At the center of this article is D'Lo, a Sri Lankan American hip hop performance artist, as the host of YouthWallah, a performance in Los Angeles, which features the work of South Asian youth artists. The focus of the article is on the possibility of an undomesticated stage that D'Lo creates for community youth artists as a female, yet unmistakably masculine host who translates female masculinity to a primarily straight South Asian audience as herself and, in drag, embodying her mother. D'Lo's performance includes autobiographical narratives of being gay and South Asian, which she uses to ground her politics in her experience. D'Lo does not perform the “exclusion” of a queer subject from a diasporic home. On the contrary D'Lo, as the host of this article home of YouthWallah 2004, provides an important undomesticated stage for the emergence of South Asian diasporic youth artists' voices and their alternative imaginations of diaspora. Therefore it becomes necessary to rethink the common conflation of notions of home and notions of domesticity, as a colonially inflected version of the home, which reproduces a colonial and gendered relation of power and thereby precludes the imagination of a decolonized community.     

Automation in firearms identification: DCM microsystem 1121 as a caliber finder

The development is reported of a computerized system for determining the possible caliber designation(s) of the parent cartridge from the diameter/weight of a fired bullet. The proposed system has an in-built flexibility for future expansion by way of addition of data relating to new cartridges. It is also found to be amenable to easy, fast and automated search. The practicability of the entire project has been demonstrated with the help of the handgun projectile data compiled by Munhall using the DCM Microsystem 1121 facility available in the Central Forensic Science Laboratory, Calcutta.