When all you have is a hammer ...: RCTs and hegemony in science

People diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) deserve the same respect as any other person and should be free to benefit from scientific research that can help them achieve skills which enable them to reach their full potential. Over the past 40 years Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) has utilised inductive, natural science methods to investigate techniques for the analysis and augmentation of socially significant behaviours. Unfortunately, many individuals with ASD in the UK cannot avail of these techniques because of an obdurate reliance on randomised controlled trials (RCTs) as the single most respectable measure of effectiveness of interventions. In this paper we focus on how the debate about RCTs is played out in the ‘autism wars’.

A Socio-Legal Analysis of Jihad

Since many offensive and defensive wars or acts of terrorism, such as the atrocities of 11 September in the United States and the July 2005 bombings in London, are committed under the banner of Islam and the duty of jihad, it is important to shed some light upon the Islamic laws of war in general, and the controversial concept of jihad in particular. This article traces the origins of, and rationale for, the use of force within the Islamic tradition, and assesses the meaning and evolution of the contentious concept of jihad within its historical context. Following an analysis of the opposing doctrinal views on the potential implications of jihad, the study argues that the concept of jihad should not be interpreted literally, but be adjusted in accordance with new historical and international conditions, and conducted by peaceful means, rather than by the sword.

Right to War in the Islamic Tradition:Jihad and its Compatibility with Modern International Law (will be submitted to the publisher in April 2014)

In the last century, Islam drew the world’s attention though such phenomena as the Islamic revolution in Iran, the fierce Muslim resistance against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the assassination of Egypt’s President Sadat by a radical Islamic group. But it was when Osama Bin Laden and his organization Al Qaeda were established to have been behind the 11 September attacks in the US, the age-old images of Islam, the fanatical and belligerent religion threatening what the Western world stands for, were revitalized. The impact of 9/11 attacks was so great that even balanced portrayals of Islam were eclipsed by stereotypical images of a fundamental, anti-Western and warmongering religion that bore the hallmarks of medieval prejudices and rhetoric. The popular image tailored for the Western audience reflected Islam as monolithic, intrinsically aggressive, and determined to engage in religious wars against the interests and values of the Western civilisation.
This book intends to help reduce, at least to a reasonable degree, the impact of sweeping, and at times tendentious, generalisations about Islamic laws of warfare. The main purpose of this book is to place the legal, cultural and historical practices of Islamic wars in their broader socio-political contexts, thereby establishing that there has been no undisputed understanding of what defensive or aggressive warfare entails in Islam, whether in doctrine or in practice.

The Economics of Total War and Reconstruction, 1914-1922

This chapter features a discussion of the economy and mobilization for the First World War. The authors analyse the implications and cost of total war, concluding with an examination of its contradictory legacies. In studying the war’s impact on Germany in particular, the chapter provides an in-depth look at the consequences of war on Europe’s strongest pre-war economy, without the complications of separating out the issues of a developing country, which can mimic those faced in wartime. The economic challenges that warring parties faced during the war included mobilization, warfare, labour shortage, impaired domestic economic activity, restricted international trade, a systematic redistribution of resources towards the war economy, food rationing, the predictable emergence of black markets, and a drop in living standards. The authors also discuss strategies to meet the significant financial demands associated with the war, and its tumultuous economic and political aftermath.

‘The Violence of History: Rosa Chacel’s Memorias de Leticia Valle’

Leticia Valle, the eleven-year-old narrator and protagonist of Rosa Chacel’s 1945 novel Memorias de Leticia Valle seduces and destroys her history teacher, Daniel. Here, I argue that Daniel represents traditionalist, right-wing interpretations of Spanish history while also recalling the importance of the colonial wars in Morocco in the build up to the Civil War, and the Nationalists’ use of Moroccan conscripts and recruits within the peninsula. Written at a time when history was being used to justify an armed rebellion, a civil war, and the imposition of a brutal dictatorship, Chacel’s novel depends on ellipses and absence to question historiographical principles. Furthermore, it combines continued reference to Spanish history with the use of violent and militant language. The most devastating conflict of all is between Leticia and Daniel: she silences and dehumanizes him, though she is not able to fully explain what happened. Writing from Switzerland, Chacel’s narrator takes possession of Spanish history at a time when dissent within Spain was being silenced by the Francoist regime.

John Thompson: Seeing through China

In 1848, Karl Marx predicted that a flow of cheap commodities would be the heavy artillery which would batter down all Chinese walls and open up the country to the west (Marx, 1978, p. 477). The Scottish photographer John Thomson (1837-1921) was both chronicler of and participant in the early moments of this process. Thomson was a commercial photographer who first arrived in the Far East in 1862. He earned the moniker of 'China' in a decade-long stay during which he photographed what he considered to be the key aspects of its culture and landscape. In this body of work, Illustrations of China and its People (first published in 1874) is perhaps the most comprehensive. It explores, through two hundred photographs and accompanying texts, a series of phenomena from the macro-scale of landscape, infrastructure and industry to the smaller scales of streetscapes, domestic spaces, individual portraits, and other details of everyday life. Despite his own description of the volumes as encyclopedic, Illustrations is geographically quite limited. Thomson's explorations into the hinterland proceed up the country’s principal rivers from those coastal ports which had already been wrested into western hands during the Opium Wars (of the 1840s) and subsequently opened up to trade. This is perhaps one of the reasons why Illustrations has been described as an explicitly colonial text, a guide-book for the prospective settler whose content offered the strategic knowledge of land, culture and natural resources necessary if the territorial advantages of the coastal periphery were to extended to the interior (Jeffrey, 1981, p. 64). It can also be argued, however, that Thomson’s volume offered justification for a potential colonial presence. Faced with a civilization whose history was as sophisticated as the west, it depicts a culture that is static and moribund, its addiction to traditional values an impediment to progress. While this is perhaps most explicit in the texts of Illustrations of China, it can also be seen in the images whose uniform chemical rendering also serves to make an essentially diverse culture seem homogenous. Yet it is these images that distinguish Illustrations from previous attempts to collate China’s culture and landscape. Here, the mechanical precision of his camera captures a reality that often subverts the colonial narrative, confounding stereotypes as Thomson’s mass-produced images allow another China to emerge.

Polybius’ ‘previous landslide’: Proof that Hannibal’s invasion route crossed the col de la traversette

Both Polybius and Livy described a landslide/landslip that blocked the Punic Army’s exfiltration from a high col on the water divide in the Western Alps. The landslide, more aptly termed rockfall, has been a source of contention amongst classicists for centuries despite the fact that only two cols—Clapier and Traversette—exhibit rockfall debris on the lee side of the Alps. While the Clapier rockfall is too small and too young to have provided blockage, the Traversette debris is nearly as Polybius described it when he retraced the invasion route some 60 years after the event. His ‘two-tier’ description of the deposit, a doublet of younger and older rock rubble, including measurements of width and volume are close to modern measurements and prove that he knew, in advance, the route Hannibal had followed. It would take a practiced eye to correctly identify the stratigraphic complexity inherent in the Traversette Rockfall. Here we present weathering ratios, soil stratigraphic, mineral, chemical and microbiological evidence in support of Polybius’ observations as a considerable background database for future geoarchaeological exploration.

The Evolution of Extreme Cooperation via Shared Dysphoric Experiences

Willingness to lay down one’s life for a group of non-kin, well documented in the
historical and ethnographic records, represents an evolutionary puzzle. Here we
present a novel explanation for the willingness to fight and die for a group, combining evolutionary theorizing with empirical evidence from real-world human groups. Building on research in social psychology, we develop a mathematical model showing how conditioning cooperation on previous shared experience can allow extreme (i.e., life-threatening) pro-social behavior to evolve. The model generates a series of predictions that we then test empirically in a range of special sample populations (including military veterans, college fraternity/sorority members, football fans, martial arts practitioners, and twins). Our results show that sharing painful experiences produces “identity fusion” – a visceral sense of oneness – more so even than bonds of kinship, in turn motivating extreme pro-group behavior, including willingness to fight and die for the group. These findings have theoretical and practical relevance. Theoretically, our results speak to the origins of human cooperation, as we offer an explanation of extremely costly actions left unexplained by existing models.
Practically, our account of how shared dysphoric experiences produce identity fusion, which produces a willingness to fight and die for a non-kin group, helps us better understand such pressing social issues as suicide terrorism, holy wars, sectarian violence, gang-related violence, and other forms of intergroup conflict.

Size Matters: The Effect of the Size of Ethnic Groups on Development

The share of ethnic groups is one of the most important features of African politics. It affects civil wars, representation in government positions, distributive and allocative policies. In this paper we use the partition of ethnic groups as a natural experiment in order to estimate the effect of the share of these ethnic groups on development. We show that larger groups have an advantage in terms of development and that the partition in itself does not matter for development. This result is explained by the fact that the partition matters only when the resulting groups are relatively small, since their lack of political representation may weaken support for institutions, may bias policies and the provision of ethnic/regional public goods.

What Moved Share Prices in the Nineteenth-Century London Stock Market?

Using a new weekly blue-chip index, this paper investigates the causes of stock price movements on the London market between 1823 and 1870. We find that economic fundamentals explain about 15 per cent of weekly and 34 per cent of monthly variation in share prices. Contemporary press reporting from the London Stock Exchange is used to ascertain what market participants thought were causing the largest movements on the market. The vast majority of large movements were attributed by the press to geopolitical, monetary, railway-sector, and financial-crisis news. Investigating the stock price changes on an independent list of events reaffirms these findings, suggesting that the most important specific events which moved markets were wars involving European powers.

Biostratigraphic Evidence Relating to the Age-Old Question of Hannibal's Invasion of Italy, I: History and Geological Reconstruction

Controversy over the alpine route that Hannibal of Carthage followed from the Rhône Basin into Italia has raged amongst classicists and ancient historians for over two millennia. The motivation for identifying the route taken by the Punic Army through the Alps lies in its potential for identifying sites of historical archaeological significance and for the resolution of one of history's most enduring quandaries. Here, we present stratigraphic, geochemical and microbiological evidence recovered from an alluvial floodplain mire located below the Col de la Traversette (~3000 m asl-above sea level) on the French/Italian border that potentially identifies the invasion route as the one originally proposed by Sir Gavin de Beer (de Beer 1974). The dated layer is termed the MAD bed (mass animal deposition) based on disrupted bedding, greatly increased organic carbon and key/specialized biological components/compounds, the latter reported in Part II of this paper. We propose that the highly abnormal churned up (bioturbated) bed was contaminated by the passage of Hannibal's animals, possibly thousands, feeding and watering at the site, during the early stage of Hannibal's invasion of Italia (218 bc).