Political Science Commons^™

Camera War, Again, Sharon Sliwinski

Data and Test Instruments

The war in Iraq has undoubtedly produced some of the most dreadful entries in the history of camera war.

When Does Deliberating Improve Decisionmaking?, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Daniel B. Rodriguez

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Utilitarianism And Beyond: Contemporary Analytical Political Theory, David Miller, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

In this chapter we sketch a body of political thought that became predominant in the second half of the twentieth century among academic political philosophers, primarily in the English-speaking world, but increasingly elsewhere, too. To call this type of political thought ‘analytical’ may not be particularly revealing, but no other term better describes the movement in question. Sometimes ‘liberal political theory’ is used, and there is indeed a close connection between analytical theory and liberalism. But that label is in one way too broad and in another too narrow for this kind of political thinking: too broad because liberalism has …

Freedom And Rights, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

Liberalism, of course, is quite a capacious theory, with room for liberals to debate quite vigorously among themselves, as well as with others, the meaning and significance of freedom, rights and other concepts. It is also capacious enough to allow for a rethinking of these concepts at a time of pressing environmental problems. Such a rethmking, I shall argue, should lead us to conceive of freedom and rights less as barriers or shields that protect individuals against interference - as forms of independence - and more as matters of organic growth and connection, or interdependence. Indeed, we must conceive …

What Do We Owe Each Other In The Global Economic Order?: Constructivist And Contractualist Accounts, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

No legal system deserving of continued support can exist without an adequate theory of justice. A world trade constitution cannot credibly exist without a clear notion of justice upon which to base a consensus. This paper examines two accounts of fairness found in moral philosophy, those of John Rawls and Tim Scanlon. The Rawlsian theory of justice is well-known to legal scholars. Scanlon's contractualist account may be less well-known. The aim of the paper is to start the discussion as to how fairness theories can be used to develop the tools for examining international economic policies and institutions. After elaborating …

Commodification And Contract Formation: Placing The Consideration Doctrine On Stronger Foundations, David Gamage, Allon Kedem

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Under the traditional consideration doctrine, a promise is only legally enforceable if it is made in exchange for something of value. This doctrine lies at the heart of contract law, yet it lacks a sound theoretical justification a fact that has confounded generations of scholars and created a mess of case law.

This article argues that the failure of traditional justifications for the doctrine comes from two mistaken assumptions. First, previous scholars have assumed that anyone can back a promise with nominal consideration if they wish to do so. We show how social norms against commodification limit the availability of …

Recognizing Victimhood, Christine Wilke

Studio for Law and Culture

The category of victimhood resonates deeply with many contemporary struggles for recognition without, however, receiving similar attention by political theories of recognition. Many “struggles for recognition” are fought with explicit reference to massive injustice that have ceased without having been publicly recognized as injustices. The state responses to claims for the recognition of victimhood mirror, I will argue, the state’s dominant conceptions of justice and injustice. In many cases, the state affirms its conceptions of injustice and moral innocence through the selective recognition of victims. For example, the U.S. government has granted Japanese-Americans interned during the Second World War an …

[Introduction To] America And Enlightenment Constitutionalism, Gary L. Mcdowell, Johnathan O'Neill

Bookshelf

America and Enlightenment Constitutionalism shows in detail the Enlightenment origin of the U.S. Constitution. It provides vivid analysis of how the Enlightenment's basic ideas were reformulated in the context of America. It is particularly successful in bringing out the competing strains of Enlightenment thought and of articulating crucial Enlightenment concepts of public opinion, equality, public reason, legislature and judiciary, revolution, law, and the people in their American context. The collection is timely given contemporary debates between republicans and liberals about constitutional interpretation which are addressed throughout.

Book Review. When All Else Fails: Government As The Ultimate Risk Manager By David A. Moss, Ajay K. Mehrotra

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Cold War Games And Postwar Art, Claudia Mesch

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

During the Cold War both “superpowers” used games, particularly chess, in order to construct an ideology of complete conflict and irreconcilable division between East and West. This essay focuses on the broad cultural challenge to divisive Cold War zero-sum mentality issued by a number of artists—André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Öyvind Fahlström, and Fluxus artists George Maciunas, George Brecht, Robert Watts, Takako Saito and Yoko Ono. These artists, in a second wave of game-focused art, returned to the concerns of surrealist art practice and to earlier cultural game theory. Even conceptual art production was impacted by the predetermined structure of …

The Mirage Of Global Justice, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The political pursuit of global justice is not a worthy goal, and our aims in establishing international legal and political institutions should be more modest. The pursuit of justice in the international order is dangerous to the extent that it requires the establishment of powerful supranational agencies, or legitimizes greater and more frequent exercise of political, economic, and military power by strong states or coalitions. The primary concern in the establishment and design of all legal and political institutions should be not to secure justice but to limit power. It is a mistake to think that a distinction can be …

Rights Of Culture, Rights Of Conscience, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this contribution I take up a particularly troubling issue in the theory of human rights. It is the issue of intervention to defend or uphold — or re-assert and re-establish — human rights. The issue is a troubling one because intervention in the affairs of others is always something we should be wary of, not least because history is full of unhappy episodes of intervention, from the Spanish in the Americas to the Chinese in Tibet. Indeed, so difficult and complex are the issues raised that one might be tempted in a discussion of human rights simply to separate …

Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics (Book Review), Donna A. Cristo

WCBT Faculty Publications

Book review by Donna A. Christo.

Nye, Joseph S. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. ISBN 9781586482251; 9781586483067 (pbk.)

The Politic 2005 Fall, The Politic, Inc.

The Politic

No abstract provided.

Wacana Kearifan Kapitalis Dalam Dunia Postmodern: Tinjauan Atas Kampanye One/Live 8, Musa Maliki

Global: Jurnal Politik Internasional

The tension of postmodern condition creates two distinctive grand-narrative discourses in seeing poverty: modernist and anti-modernist. Even though the discourse of the postmodern condition remains within the regime of grand narrative discourses, there is a little narrative called the wisdom of capitalist discourse. It has been successful in the constructive active and non-violence resistance to make poverty history by ONE/Live 8 campaign. By the discourse's scheme, this study argues that the existence of poverty text is not the epistemological problem that can be solved exogenously by problem solving theory (grand theory), but it is the ontological problem that can be …

Emilian Kavalski On The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory Of Diversity And Freedom By Chandran Kukathas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 292pp., Emilian Kavalski

Human Rights & Human Welfare

No abstract provided.

The Politic 2005 Summer, The Politic, Inc.

The Politic

No abstract provided.

On Cadava And Levy's Cities Without Citizens, Matthew Wolf-Meyer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

What, the editors of this collection ask in their introduction, is the nature of the relationship between cities and the people who inhabit them? And how do the historical situation of cities and their citizens limit the potentiality of new modes of subjectification? These are surely evocative questions, and as the editors remark, increasingly necessary ones, as the city is quickly becoming the organizing principle for global flows (of bodies, capital, law, etc.), but, in the collection that follows, the contributing authors barely scratch the surface of these issues, nor do they properly problematize such latter-day master narratives …

A New Agenda For The Cultural Study Of Law: Taking On The Technicalities, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article urges humanistic legal studies to take the technical dimensions of law as a central focus of inquiry. Using archival and ethnographic investigations into developments in American Conflict of Laws doctrines as an example, and building on insights in the anthropology of knowledge and in science and technology studies that focus on technical practices in scientific and engineering domains, it aims to show that the technologies of law - an ideology that law is a tool and an accompanying technical aesthetic of legal knowledge - are far more central and far more interesting dimensions of legal practice than humanists …

Monitoring And Evaluation In Egypt, Reham Nabil Abdel Hamid

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Whatever Happened To The State?: A Preliminary Analysis Of The Role Of State And Civil Society In Development Discourse, Corrie Blankenbeckler

Archived Theses and Dissertations

The basic research problem of this thesis lies in the conflicting nature of the policies of the international financial system and of non-government organizations with regard to the state. Contemporary discourse in the international aid community manifests a deep mistrust of state institutions' ability to effectively manage developments reforms, but lacks the theoretical foundations and organizational methodologies that would be necessary to develop strategies to build up the state so that it might better perform its duties and minimize corruption.

An Evaluation Of Two Community Based Initiatives, Salma Abdel Rahman Sabri

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Land Value Taxation: Persuasive Theory But Practically Difficult, Tom Dunne

Articles

While the theoretical case for Land Value Taxation is regarded as being very persuasive, most people looking closely at the idea form the view that the practical difficulties of introducing it into an established modern economy are compelling. Nevertheless, in Europe and America the ideas put forward by George continue to influence many people discussing issues around land use planning, urban development and methods of funding infrastructure and local government.

The Politic 2005 Spring, The Politic, Inc.

The Politic

No abstract provided.

Grand Strategy Analysis: A Proto-Theoretical Approach, Patrick Magee

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

International relations scholarship begins and ends with assumptions—about human nature; about human interaction; about starting points, relative information, and outcomes. Such assumptions are necessary to further the intellectual coherence and development of scholarly work. However, they restrict the applicability of scholarly research to those situations that parallel the work's underlying assumptions.

This work argues the body of international relations scholarship as a whole would benefit from the development of a pre-theory state, absent any assumptions about international relations, from which observers can identify those works of scholarship that are most effective in explaining perceptive states and the strategic decisions taken …

Hijacked Justice: Domestic Appropriation Of International Norms, Jelena Subotić

Human Rights & Human Welfare

This paper explores the domestic politics of international norm diffusion, using the global transmission of transitional justice norms as the empirical context of the research. Applying sociological institutionalism as the principal theoretical framework, I argue that the motivation of states to adopt international models of transitional justice has changed over time. The transitional justice norm - that posits that war crimes and massive human rights abuses must be dealt with in a proper legal setting and not through “victors’ justice” or impunity - was institutionalized in large part as the result of a strong domestic demand for transitional justice in …

International Humanitarianism In The Contemporary World: Forms And Issues, David P. Forsythe

Human Rights & Human Welfare

© 2004 David P. Forsythe. All rights reserved.

This paper was commissioned by the U.S. Social Science Research Council and the United Nations University, for a research project on multilateralism starting Fall 2004.

The paper may not be quoted or referred to in any reference without the written permission of the author. Suggested revisions are welcomed by the author via his email address. This paper may be freely circulated in electronic or hard copy provided it is not modified in any way, the rights of the author not infringed, and the paper is not quoted or cited without express permission …

Fire And Dust, Peter Mclaren

Education Faculty Articles and Research

Drawing upon a Hegelian-Marxist critique of political economy that underscores the fundamental importance of developing a philosophy of praxis, the author theorizes a revolutionary Freireian critical pedagogy which seeks forms of organization that best enable the pursuit of doing critical philosophy as a way of life. The authors argues that the revolutionary critical pedagogy operates from an understanding that the basis of education is political and that spaces need to be created where students can imagine a different world outside of capitalism’s law of value (i.e., social form of labor), where alternatives to capitalism and capitalist institutions can be discussed …

Foucault And Habermas, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The article is a comprehensive comparison of Foucault and Habermas which focuses on their distinctive styles of critical theory. The article maintains that Foucault's virtue ethical understanding of aesthetic self-realization as a form of resistance to normalizing practices provides counterpoint to Habermas's more juridical approach to institutional justice and the critique of ideology. The article contains an extensive discussion of their respective treatments of speech action, both strategic and communicative, and concludes by addressing Foucault's understanding of parrhesia as a non-discursive form of truth-telling.

Conscientious Communities: The Question Of The Government Legislation Of Morality, Lindsay Nicole Jenkins

Honors Program Theses

Clearly, the issue of government legislation of morality is a relevant issue in American society today. It is a complicated issue, to be sure, but it is a question that is deserving of time and contemplation. In this paper, I will argue that not only should the government be allowed to legislate morality, but that it is imperative that it does. Additionally, I will refute common disputes against this stance, as well as delve into the intricacies of the implementation of this policy. Finally, I will paint a picture of how a modem United States would function while allowing the …