What are the factors behind citizen support for the use of extralegal violence in Latin America? The prevailing argument is that, in countries overwhelmed by skyrocketing levels of criminal violence, ...people endorse the use of extralegal violence as a way to cope with insecurity. Other scholars believe that support for extralegal violence is the result of state withdrawal and failure. Few empirical studies, however, have tested any of these arguments. In this article, using regional data from the 2012 AmericasBarometer, we examine different explanations regarding citizen support for the utilization of extralegal violence in Latin America and the Caribbean. We developed a multi-item scale that gauges support for different forms of extralegal violence across the Americas, and we hypothesize that support for extralegal violence is higher not only in countries with extreme levels of violence but especially in countries in which people distrust the political system. Results indicate that support for extralegal violence is significantly higher in societies characterized by little support for the existing political system.
¿Cuáles son los factores que determinan el apoyo ciudadano al uso de la violencia extralegal en América Latina? El argumento predominante es que en países con niveles altos de violencia criminal, las personas apoyan el uso de la violencia extralegal como un mecanismo para hacer frente a la inseguridad. Otros trabajos consideran que el apoyo a la violencia extralegal es el resultado del fracaso o ausencia del Estado. Pocos estudios empíricos, sin embargo, han tratado de probar dichos argumentos. En este artículo, utilizando datos regionales de la encuesta de 2012 del Barómetro de las Américas, analizamos las diferentes explicaciones detrás del apoyo ciudadano al uso de la violencia extralegal en América Latina y el Caribe. Desarrollamos una escala que contiene múltiples ítems, la cual estima el apoyo a distintas formas de violencia ilegal en las Américas y planteamos la hipótesis de que el apoyo a la violencia extralegal no es solo alto en países con niveles de violencia extrema, sino que lo es especialmente en aquellos en los cuales las personas no creen en el sistema político. Los resultados obtenidos indican que el apoyo a la violencia extralegal es significativamente más alto en sociedades caracterizadas por bajos niveles de apoyo al sistema político existente.
Pacifism has been the cornerstone of Japan’s identity in the post-1945 era. In the light of its changing threat perception in the post-Cold War period, Japan has been increasingly pursuing autonomy ...in the security domain while stretching the limits of its pacifist identity. It has hence sought to build a strong technological base to support its latent military capabilities. This article attempts to contextualise Japan’s pursuit of autonomy in outer space amid growing security competition in the domain. It discusses the legal and organisational changes that have allowed for a growing involvement of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces in operating space assets. The potential counterspace applications of major technological capabilities shown by Japan in the civilian and commercial space sectors are assessed. The article surmises that Japan, which has a global reputation as a benign space power, can continue to refine its latent counterspace capabilities amidst a pursuit of autonomy, without straying much from its pacifist traditions.
In
Wrongs and Crimes
, Victor Tadros argues that wrongdoers acquire special duties to those they’ve wronged, and from there he generates wrongdoers’ duties to contribute to general deterrence by ...being punished. In support, he contends that my manipulation argument against compatibilism fails to show that causal determination is incompatible with the proposed duties wrongdoers owe to those they’ve wronged. I respond that I did not intend my manipulation argument to rule out a sense of moral responsibility that features such duties, and that I don’t believe it does. In fact, I’m willing to accept a restricted version of Tadros’s proposal, and I explain how this addition modifies the self-defense-based position on deterrence that I’ve defended in the past.
A popular informal argument suggests that statistics about the preponderance of criminal involvement among particular demographic groups partially justify others in making defensive mistakes against ...members of the group. One could worry that evidence-relative accounts of moral rights vindicate this argument. After constructing the strongest form of this objection, I offer several replies: (i) most demographic statistics face an unmet challenge from reference class problems, (ii) even those that meet it fail to ground non-negligible conditional probabilities, (iii) even if they did, they introduce new costs likely to cancel out any justificatory contribution of the statistic, but (iv) even if they didn’t, demographic facts are the wrong sort to make a moral difference to agents’ negative rights. I conclude that the popular argument should be rejected, and evidence-relative theories do not have the worrisome implication.
Contemporary discussions of the ethics of defensive harm typically focus on cases of self-defense, featuring two main characters: aggressors and their victims. The central question is to explain why ...victims are intuitively permitted to harm aggressors, given the usual prohibition on killing and injuring. The standard response is that, under certain conditions, individuals can render themselves liable to defensive harm and thereby lose their normal right not to be harmed. Debate centers on what the conditions for liability consist in. I will say almost nothing about liability here (in the cases I discuss, I assume the aggressor’s liability is uncontroversial). Instead, my topic is cases of other-defense. These feature an additional cast member: third-party rescuers, who are able to harm aggressors in defense of their victims.
WHAT IS SELF DEFENSE? Steinhoff, Uwe
Public affairs quarterly,
10/2015, Volume:
29, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This paper provides a conceptual analysis of the term "self-defense" and argues that, in contrast to the widespread "instrumentalist" account of self-defense, self-defense need not be aimed at ...averting or mitigating an attack, let alone the harm threatened by it. Instead, on the definition offered here, an act token is selfdefense if and only if (a) it is directed against an ongoing or imminent attack, and (b) the actor correctly believes that the act token is an effective form of resistance or the act token belongs to an act type that usually functions as a means to resist an attack. While resistance is effective in making the attack more difficult, it can often be overcome, and therefore does not necessarily stop or mitigate the attack. This concept of self-defense not only matches ordinary language use and plausible accounts of self-defense in the legal literature but also has important practical implications in helping to avoid confusions about necessity and proportionality. In particular, it avoids the notorious problem of the "knowingly helpless rape victim" whose futile struggle against the rapist (futile in terms of averting or mitigating harm) counterintuitively could not count as justified self-defense on an instrumentalist account.
Forty years have elapsed since the Iran hostage crisis, yet the question whether a state can lawfully resort to force in reaction to an attack against its diplomatic or consular mission remains ...unanswered. This issue is subject to contradictory scholarly interpretations, whereas self-defence as a justification regularly reappears in state practice. A recent example is provided by the US position regarding the killing of Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. This article revisits this controversial issue from an empirical perspective, focusing on extensive analysis of state practice based on 730 incidents. Both the empirical and the theoretical inquiry led the authors to call into question the possibility that states may lawfully rely on self-defence in such circumstances. Only one state has ever invoked self-defence regarding attacks against its embassies, and it only did so on five occasions, which were all contested by the international community. In all other 725 instances, the sending state and the international community reacted in ways other than the use of force. This research also analyses these various responses triggered by attacks against embassies. Moreover, it is virtually impossible to prove the fulfilment of the necessity and proportionality criteria of the action taken in self-defence in light of state practice over the last 70 years. Finally, this article also calls for a close re-reading of the Tehran Hostages judgment to challenge the judgment's widely accepted interpretation as recognizing self-defence in such situations.
The netted radar system (NRS) has been proved to possess unique advantages in anti-jamming and improving target tracking performance. Effective resource management can greatly ensure the combat ...capability of the NRS. In this paper, based on the netted collocated multiple input multiple output (C-MIMO) radar, an effective joint target assignment and power allocation (JTAPA) strategy for tracking multi-targets under self-defense blanket jamming is proposed. An architecture based on the distributed fusion is used in the radar network to estimate target state parameters. By deriving the predicted conditional Cramer-Rao lower bound (PC-CRLB) based on the obtained state estimation information, the objective function is formulated. To maximize the worst case tracking accuracy, the proposed JTAPA strategy implements an online target assignment and power allocation of all active nodes, subject to some resource constraints. Since the formulated JTAPA is non-convex, we propose an efficient two-step solution strategy. In terms of the simulation results, the proposed algorithm can effectively improve tracking performance in the worst case.
Since Shinzo Abe elected as the Prime Minister of Japan, he had concentrated his effort to change Japan to be a "normal" country by trying to change article nine of Japanese Constitution. But even if ...Shinzo Abe had tried since 2006 to change the constitution, this effort still opposed by the Japanese people. Mass media is one of the tools that could be used to communication through people. Gate : Jieitai Kano Chi te kaku tatakaeri, is one of Japanese anime that represent Japanese Self Defense Force in mass media. Through this research author will analyse the narration of Gate Jieitai Kano Chi te Kaku Tatakaeri, and show how have Japanese Self Defense Force have been represent in this anime in its relation to the Special Region, which I argue was the representation of the country that Japan had been invade during the world war II.
Les programmes de villagisation forcée mis en place durant la guerre froide globale permettent d’explorer le processus de « miliciarisation forcée » de la population civile regroupée dans ces ...villages. Si l’enrôlement de personnes déplacées dans des milices semble avoir été une constante dans le cadre de ces programmes, comment la villagisation forcée est-elle devenue tout à la fois un outil pour combattre la « menace communiste », un programme de « développement forcé » et un dispositif destiné à forcer la miliciarisation de la population déplacée? À partir de l’analyse de plusieurs cas en Amérique latine, et notamment celui de l’Argentine, nous voulons comprendre pourquoi le dispositif milicien n’a pas toujours eu le même degré de systématicité ni le même degré de confiance des armées locales vis-à-vis de la population à miliciariser. Cet article se veut avant tout une contribution critique à l’étude de l’appropriation locale d’une technique de contre-insurrection et de développement forcé ainsi qu’une réflexion sur les effets à long terme sur la population ayant subi un processus de miliciarisation forcée.
The forced villagization programs implemented during the global Cold War allow us to explore the process of “forced milicianization” of the civilian population gathered in these villages. If the recruitment of displaced persons into militias seems to have been a cornerstone of these programs, the question is then how forced villagization become at once a tool to combat the “communist threat,” a program of “forced development,” and a device to force the milicianization of the displaced population. Based on the analysis of several cases in Latin America and in particular that of Argentina, we explore why the militia apparatus has not always had the same degree of systematicity nor the same degree of trust amongst the local armies regarding the recruited population. Critically studying the local appropriation of a technique of counterinsurgency and forced development, this article also offers a reflection on the longterm effects on the population subject to forced milicianization.
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