China Is Solving Its Domestic Problems

I was fortunate to lead a 10-member Lebanese delegation composed of six female and four male young people to visit China from July 22 to 31 and take part in a summer camp held in beautiful Shandong Province. More than 600 youngsters from 19 countries were there.     

Do Victims of War Need International Law? Human Rights Education Programs in Authoritarian Sudan

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Sudan, this article illuminates the consequences of human rights educational workshops as a form of humanitarian assistance in war‐ravaged areas. These projects are built on flawed assumptions about Sudanese politics and about the likelihood that human rights education empowers the war‐ravaged poor. The beneficial impacts of human rights discourse stem from its side effects, which fulfill urgent and symbolic needs, and not from the core content of human rights. The case of an authoritarian regime exposes an alternative site of rights promotion, outside the established or struggling democracies where most literature on rights resides. Bridging the literature on rights in Western, democratic contexts and on human rights in Africa, this article argues that law is not enough—and is potentially dangerous—in the insecure and impoverished areas where the international aid community has been encouraging it to flourish.     

Anatomy of Failure: Bush's Decision-Making Process and the Iraq War

The Bush administration's decision-making process leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 has been singled out for its many shortcomings: failure of intelligence; lack of debate concerning options; an insufficient invading force; and poor postwar planning. Contrary to the administration's claim that no one foresaw the difficulties of waging a war in Iraq, many concerns about the challenges the United States would face were raised inside and outside of government. Yet, none of this information had a significant effect on the decision-making process. This paper develops a decision-making model that integrates elements from the individual to the organizational level and explains how important information was marginalized, leading to a poor policy outcome. The model illustrates how the combined effects of the president's formal management style, anticipatory compliance on the part of key players, bureaucratic politics, and the intervening variable of the 9/11 terrorist attacks contributed to a defective decision-making process.     

Work Rules: How International NGOs Build Law in War‐Torn Societies

Drawing on socio‐legal literature and fieldwork in South Sudan, this article argues that international aid groups operating in conflict settings create and impose a rules‐based order on the local people they hire and on the domestic organizations they fund. Civil society actors in these places experience law's soft power through their daily, tangible, and mundane contact with aid agencies. As employees they are subject to contracts and other rules of employment, work under management and finance teams, document routine activity, and abide by organizational constitutions. In analyzing how South Sudanese activists confront, understand, conform to, or resist these externally imposed legal techniques and workplace practices, this article decenters state institutions as sites for understanding law's power and exposes how aid organizations themselves become arenas of significant legal and political struggle in war‐torn societies.     

International Arbitration and Judicial Politics in Authoritarian States

This article uses the case of Sudan to show how authoritarian regimes benefit from embracing international arbitration, allowing them to maintain domestic control and attract foreign investment. International arbitration ensures that foreign‐investment disputes are resolved outside of domestic purview, obviating the need for nondemocratic states to create independent courts. Research on judicial politics in authoritarian regimes has largely overlooked those private and extra‐judicial pathways—international arbitration tribunals—that illiberal regimes have been taking. Similarly, research in international commercial law has neglected domestic politics, overlooking arbitration's consequences for domestic stakeholders. Promoting international arbitration without paying heed to its side effects can unwittingly help illiberal regimes, particularly in weak states, to continue to repress their judiciaries and curtail the development of domestic legal institutions and the rule of law.     

Relative prices and the international comparison of real agricultural output and productivity

This article reviews the different methods of constructing multilateral output and productivity indices for agriculture in cross‐country panel studies. We show that various multilateral output indices used by different researchers can have considerable disparities, thus rendering the comparison of the final results problematic. The production indices produced by the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) are increasingly used by researchers as a unique source of data for cross‐country panel studies. The article examines the properties of the FAO index, and finds them deficient in paying little attention to the problem of loss of characteristicity in a highly heterogeneous panel. It is shown that the FAO production indices lead to unacceptably large deviations from domestically based production indices in the case of low‐income countries. It is argued further that the use of the FAO production index can lead to spurious results in econometric studies of the links between productivity growth, per capita income, and price levels.     

Urban governance and service delivery in Nigeria

This article examines the inadequate delivery of social services by city governments in Nigeria. It identifies three problems: lack of transparency and accountability in governance; under-qualified staff and administration; and the tenuous relationship (an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dichotomy) between the urban residents and local governments. It can no longer be argued that lack of funds is the key constraint.     

Postal service markets: an international comparison analysis

This article contributes to the established strand of literature on post and postal service by providing a quadratic framework under which national postal markets are analyzed and compared from efficiency, profitability, and quality of service standpoints. Sample countries are grouped into four market models based on two attributes of market structure and ownership. The question of which governance‐operation postal model performs best is then answered. The policy insight offered by this paper expects to guide the advancement of national posts towards an optimal future design that best meets their specific needs and preferences. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.