'Rule of Law and Politics of Anti-Corruption Campaigns in a Post-Authoritarian State- The Nigerian Case'

This article evaluates the anti-corruption campaign instituted in Nigeria following on the post-authoritarian transition in the country, with specific focus on political corruption. The anti-corruption campaign is being prosecuted within a context where law is as critical a factor as politics. This article examines whether the judiciary, in view of its accountability deficit, can offer legitimacy to the campaign. How has its questionable credentials impacted on its involvement in the campaign to sanitise public life? What has been the impact of the judicial role on the rule of law? These are some of the important questions this article seeks to answer. The inquiry in this article demonstrates how the guardian institution of the rule of law faces an uphill task in the performance of that role in a post-authoritarian context.

The Rule of the Land

A study of Ireland's border.

Thanking the Greeks: The Crisis of the Rule of Law in EU Enlargement Regulation

This paper showcases the weaknesses of EU enlargement law and demonstrates how one Member State – namely, Greece – is notable for abusing this weakness, for harming the candidate countries, the EU, and the institutions alike, for stripping the EU position of its predictability, and for undermining the EU Commission’s efforts. Accordingly, Greece has severely incapacitated the key procedural rule of law component of the EU’s enlargement regulation, turning it into a randomised political game and ignoring any long-term goals of stability, prosperity, and peace that the process is to stand for. Following a walk through Greece’s engagement throughout a number of enlargement rounds, the paper concludes that the duty of loyalty – which is presumably able to discipline Member States that undermine the common effort – should find a new meaning in the context of EU enlargement.

Christianity as a Vocation: The Rostrevor Benedictines and the Renewal of Faith in Ireland

This chapter explores how the Benedictine monks at Holy Cross Monastery in Rostrevor, Northern Ireland, have re-introduced the idea of vocation into the minds of a range of Christians on the island of Ireland. A picture of this new vision of the church in Ireland is painted through sections devoted to 'living ecumenism' and 'creating safe spaces'. The work of the Rostrevor Benedictines may seem limited because of the small scale of the changes among individuals. But Holy Cross is just one of multiple 'extra-institutional' spaces in Ireland's changing religious landscape. From their strategic positions on the margins, extra-institutional expressions of religion may prompt more significant changes in religious practice than initially seem possible.

Bridging Jeffrey's Rule, AGM Revision and Dempster Conditioning in the Theory of Evidence

Belief revision characterizes the process of revising an agent’s beliefs when receiving new evidence. In the field of artificial intelligence, revision strategies have been extensively studied in the context of logic-based formalisms and probability kinematics. However, so far there is not much literature on this topic in evidence theory. In contrast, combination rules proposed so far in the theory of evidence, especially Dempster rule, are symmetric. They rely on a basic assumption, that is, pieces of evidence being combined are considered to be on a par, i.e. play the same role. When one source of evidence is less reliable than another, it is possible to discount it and then a symmetric combination operation
is still used. In the case of revision, the idea is to let prior knowledge of an agent be altered by some input information. The change problem is thus intrinsically asymmetric. Assuming the input information is reliable, it should be retained whilst the prior information should be changed minimally to that effect. To deal with this issue, this paper defines the notion of revision for the theory of evidence in such a way as to bring together probabilistic and logical views. Several revision rules previously proposed are reviewed and we advocate one of them as better corresponding to the idea of revision. It is extended to cope with inconsistency between prior and input information. It reduces to Dempster
rule of combination, just like revision in the sense of Alchourron, Gardenfors, and Makinson (AGM) reduces to expansion, when the input is strongly consistent with the prior belief function. Properties of this revision rule are also investigated and it is shown to generalize Jeffrey’s rule of updating, Dempster rule of conditioning and a form of AGM revision.

The Combination of Multiple Classifiers Using an Evidential Reasoning Approach

In many domains when we have several competing classifiers available we want to synthesize them or some of them to get a more accurate classifier by a combination function. In this paper we propose a ‘class-indifferent’ method for combining classifier decisions represented by evidential structures called triplet and quartet, using Dempster's rule of combination. This method is unique in that it distinguishes important elements from the trivial ones in representing classifier decisions, makes use of more information than others in calculating the support for class labels and provides a practical way to apply the theoretically appealing Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence to the problem of ensemble learning. We present a formalism for modelling classifier decisions as triplet mass functions and we establish a range of formulae for combining these mass functions in order to arrive at a consensus decision. In addition we carry out a comparative study with the alternatives of simplet and dichotomous structure and also compare two combination methods, Dempster's rule and majority voting, over the UCI benchmark data, to demonstrate the advantage our approach offers. (A continuation of the work in this area that was published in IEEE Trans on KDE, and conferences)

'Democratic Transition, Judicial Accountability and Judicialisation of Politics in Africa: The Nigerian Experience'

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the growing incidence of judicialisation of politics in Nigeria’s democratisation experience against the backdrop of questionable judicial accountability. Design/methodology/approach – The article draws on legal and political theory as well as comparative law perspectives. Findings – The judiciary faces a daunting task in deepening democracy and (re) instituting the rule of law. The formidable challenges derive in part from structural problems within the judiciary, deficient accountability credentials and the complexities of a troubled transition. Practical implications – Effective judicial mediation of political transition requires a transformed and accountable judiciary. Originality/value – The article calls attention to the need for judicial accountability as a cardinal and integral part of political transitions. Keywords Democracy, Politics, Law, Nigeria, Africa Paper type Viewpoint