(05 June 2012)William Dobson

History of Political Thought (2012), pp. 209-230
Most scholars suggest that Plato's academy served as a training ground for future statesmen in order that philosophy might influence politics. Yet scholars deny that later Platonic academies maintained this same political focus. It is assumed that they transformed into monastic asylums, allowing philosophers to escape worldly affairs. This article challenges the conventional reading through an interpretation of a commentary on Plato's Gorgias, written by an Alexandrian Neoplatonist who upholds his predecessor's political focus. He argues that the philosopher must be concerned with the health of regimes and should accomplish this task by teaching statesmen, who can either advise those in power or pursue their own political ambitions.Jeremiah Russell

History of Political Thought (2012), pp. 280-304
This article treats the political thought of Simón Bolívar, a leading figure in South America's struggle for independence. It describes Bolívar's ideas by reference to both their broadly Atlantic origins and their specifically American concerns, arguing that they comprise a theory of `republican imperialism', paradoxically proposing an essentially imperial project as a means of winning and consolidating independence from European rule. This basic tension is traced through Bolívar's discussions of revolution, constitutions, and territorial unification, and then used to frame a comparison with the founders of the United States. It suggests, in closing, that contextual similarities amongst the American revolutions make them particularly apt subjects for comparative study of the history of political thought.Joshua Simon

The Economic Journal, Vol. 115, No. 504. (June 2005), pp. F193-F210, doi:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2005.01001.x
The computational complexity of two classes of market mechanisms is compared. First the Walrasian interpretation in which prices are centrally computed by an auctioneer. Recent results on the computational complexity are reviewed. The non-polynomial complexity of these algorithms makes Walrasian general equilibrium an implausible conception. Second, a decentralised picture of market processes is described, involving concurrent exchange within transient coalitions of agents. These processes feature price dispersion, yield allocations that are not in the core, modify the distribution of wealth, are always stable, but path-dependent. Replacing the Walrasian framing of markets requires substantial revision of conventional wisdom concerning markets.Robert Axtell

(04 March 2012)Michael Ross

Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 10, No. 02. (2012), pp. 285-305, doi:10.1017/S1537592712000679
What is the relationship between civil war and terrorism? Most current research on these topics either explicitly or implicitly separates the two, in spite of compelling reasons to consider them together. In this paper, we examine the extent to which terrorism and civil war overlap and then unpack various temporal and spatial patterns. To accomplish this, we use newly geo-referenced terror event data to offer a global overview of where and when terrorist events happen and whether they occur inside or outside of civil war zones. Furthermore, we conduct an exploratory analysis of six separate cases that have elements of comparability but also occur in unique contexts, which illustrate some of the patterns in terrorism and civil war. The data show a high degree of overlap between terrorism and ongoing civil war and, further, indicate that a substantial amount of terrorism occurs prior to civil wars in Latin America, but yet follows civil war in other regions of the world. While the study of terrorism and of civil war mostly occurs in separate scholarly communities, we argue for more work that incorporates insights from each research program and we offer a possibility for future research by considering how geo-referenced terror and civil war data may be utilized together. More generally, we expect these results to apply to a wide variety of attitudes and behaviors in contentious politics.Michael Findley, Joseph Young

Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 10, No. 02. (2012), pp. 425-427, doi:10.1017/S1537592712000643
Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe. By Monika Nalepa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 328p. $88.00 cloth, $27.00 paper.In the not-too-distant past, systematic transitional justice research was a rarity. Normative treatises on various aspects of the justice of transitions have long been a staple of the human rights literature, but empirical and analytical inquiries into the causes and consequences of efforts to deal with the past have not.James Gibson

Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 10, No. 02. (2012), pp. 429-431, doi:10.1017/S1537592712000631
Overcoming Historical Injustices: Land Reconciliation in South Africa. By James L. Gibson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 328p. $92.00.All three of James Gibson's books on transitional justice in South Africa focus on showing that the politics of reconciliation with the Apartheid regime are less related to economic âself-interestâ than to âsociotropic fairness.â On close examination, Gibson concludes that an individual's preferences about land reconciliation are not a direct function of egocentric instrumentalism. Rather, in his view, they are shaped by conceptions of whether one's group has been fairly treated.Monika Nalepa

Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 10, No. 02. (2012), pp. 363-383, doi:10.1017/S1537592712000710
How does the everyday politics behind scientific inquiry impact what we come to know about the world? Here I consider this question in the context of my own fieldwork on the human rights response to children born of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. First, I reflect on how the academy functions to direct researchers' attention and skill sets to certain types of human rights problems in certain ways, inevitably affecting what we can know about our subject matter. Second, I consider the practical politics by which human rights scholars interface with policy-makers, the media, and the public, and the extent to which members of the human rights scholarly community constitute nodes in the wider networks we are studying.Charli Carpenter

Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 10, No. 02. (2012), pp. 307-321, doi:10.1017/S1537592712000680
Over the past two decades, scholars have generated a large and sophisticated literature on genocide. Nevertheless, there are still several research areas that require further work. This article outlines a research agenda that analyzes the conditions under which genocide is likely to occur, the multilevel processes of violent escalation and de-escalation, and the ways in which these processes are shaped by, connect to, reinforce, accelerate and impede one another. I argue that scholars should 1) model elite and follower radicalization processes by disaggregating genocidal âintentâ over time and space, and exploring how intent emerges rather than taking it as pre-given. Doing so will permit researchers to 2) situate genocide research within a broader context of political violence in order to understand how they are related temporally and spatially, and to decenter analytical domains beyond the standard country level and single victim group in order to gain insight into the dynamics of genocide, including how perpetrator policies vary by group; 3) draw on recent advances in microanalyses of civil war to theorize about subnational patterns of violence diffusion; 4) move beyond problematic contrasts between ideology and rationality to analyze how ideologies frame the strategic choices âavailableâ to genocidal elites.Ernesto Verdeja

Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 10, No. 02. (2012), pp. 343-362, doi:10.1017/S1537592712000709
The research problem driving this paper is the absence of a strong theory that accounts for variation among cases that have similar probabilities of escalating to genocide and similar forms of organized (usually state-led) mass violence against civilians. Much of the existing theory on genocide focuses on explaining under what conditions and by what processes regimes commit large-scale violence against civilians. I argue that a critical missing dimension to studies of genocide, but also more generally to the study of political violence, is a methodological recognition of negative cases and a theoretical recognition of the dynamics of restraint that helps to explain such negative cases. That is, in addition to asking what causes leaders to choose to escalate violence, I argue that scholars should emphasize conditions that prompt moderation, de-escalation, or non-escalation. I propose an alternative framework for how to conceptualize the process of political violence and review the literature to identify key restraint mechanisms at micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis. I further articulate a provisional theory of genocide using this new analytical framework. I illustrate my argument with an empirical analysis of mass violence cases in Sub-Saharan Africa since independence, and with a more in-depth analysis of comparable crises in Rwanda and Côte d'Ivoire, where the trajectories of violence differed significantly. While this paper draws on extensive empirical research, my primary purpose is not to advance a developed new theory or to test particular hypotheses, but rather to outline a research agenda that promises to draw from and contribute to recent work on the comparative politics of violence.Scott Straus

Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 10, No. 02. (2012), pp. 323-341, doi:10.1017/S1537592712000692
The substantial literature on mass violence, from ethnic cleansing to civil wars, has paid surprisingly little attention to the largest instance of mass violence in human history: the Holocaust. When political scientists have approached the subject, the trend has been to treat the Holocaust as a single case, comparing itâsometimes controversiallyâwith other instances of genocide such as Rwanda or Cambodia. But historically grounded work on the destruction of European Jewry can help illuminate the microfoundations of violent politics, unpack the relationship between a ubiquitous violence-inducing ideology (antisemitism) and highly variable murder, and recast old questions about the origins and evolution of the Holocaust itself. After reviewing new trends in history-writing, I highlight opportunities for social-scientifically oriented research centered on the interaction of state power, local communities, and violent mobilization in five areas: military occupation, repertoires of violence, alliance politics, genocidal policymaking, and resistance. My conclusion addresses thorny issues of comparison, morality, and memory.Charles King

Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 10, No. 02. (2012), pp. 235-241, doi:10.1017/S1537592712000783
In his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker draws upon a wealth of data to argue that the modern world, especially since 1945, has experienced a dramatic and probably irreversible decline in organized violence. The book has received much critical attention (which will indeed be the topic of future discussion in Perspectives). It is undeniably true that recent decades have seen a decrease in the incidence of, and casualties related to, classic forms of interstate violence, and that in recent years there has been a decline in organized civil war violence as well. At the same time, it is equally true that violenceâits threat, its use, its many often-unpredictable consequencesâremains an ever-present part of the political landscape throughout the world. The Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development's recent report, The Global Burden of Armed Violence 2011, estimates that since 2004 âmore than 526,000 people are killed each year as a result of lethal violence.â The report estimates that only around one tenth of these killingsâapproximately 55,000 per yearâare caused by âdirect armed conflict,â i.e., in organized wars, whether interstate or civil. But it also estimates that hundreds of thousands more are related to gang violence, drug trafficking, transnational organized crime, and other activities that take place in a netherworld beyond law and order, and between âwarâ and âpeace.â And it observes that while the categories typically used by governments, multilateral agencies, and NGOs to classify violenceâorganized vs. interpersonal, conflict-related vs. criminalâserve certain practical purposes, âthese distinctions give the misleading impression that different forms and incidents of violence fit into neat and separate categories,â whereas in fact these forms of violence are not so neatly distinguished. And beyond the sphere of lethal violence lays a much broader domain of destruction, fear, insecurity, vulnerability, and harm.Jeffrey Isaac