Pathways to human experimentation, 1933-1945: Germany, Japan and the United States

The history of human experimentation in the twelve years between Hitler's rise to power and the end of the Second World War is notorious in the annals of the twen- tieth century. The horrific experiments conducted at Dachau, Auschwitz, Ravens- brueck, Birkenau, and other National Socialist concentration camps reflected an extreme indifference to human life and human suffering. Unfortunately, they do not reflect the extent and complexity of the human experiments undertaken in the years between 1933 and 1945. Following the prosecution of twenty-three high-ranking National Socialist physicians and medical administrators for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg Medical Trial (United States v. Karl Brandt et al.), scholars have rightly focused attention on the nightmarish researches con- ducted by a small group of investigators on concentration camp inmates. Less well known are alternative pathways that brought investigators to undertake human ex- perimentation in other laboratories, settings, and nations.

Liberal Democracy and the Inferior 'Other'Other’: Could the peace liberal democracy promises to bring not extend to ‘Others’?

Advocates of liberal democracy argue that its principles and practices contribute directly to peace (at both inter-state and domestic levels). They rely on ideals such as the rule of law, institutional checks and balances on power, an ethos of tolerance, and free market economics to deliver the liberal peace. Liberals, however, overlook three important features embedded in the construction of liberal democracy which can serve to facilitate political violence: 1) the fixed and thus non-negotiable nature of liberal democracy’s core principles, 2) the inferior manner in which it conceives ‘Other’ social orders that do not share its core principles, and 3) the urge to proselytise Others. Together, these constitutive qualities can facilitate moves by leaders of Other groups to argue that liberal democracy threatens ‘their’ preferred identity, and thus its promised peaceful outcomes can be put in doubt.

Handing over the keys : Contingency, power and resistance in the context of section 3LA of the Australian Crimes Act 1914

Using the work and ideas of French theorist Michel Foucault the writer examines s 3LA of the Crimes Act, which provides law enforcement officers with power to compel a person to reveal their private encryption keys and other personal information, and concludes that such a section creates fear, redirects flow of power between law enforcement agencies and citizens, and creates resistance.

US hegemony and Southeast Asia - The impact of, and limits to, US power and influence

The United States has exerted a major influence on Southeast Asia, especially since World War II. As both a promoter of neoliberal reform and as the key strategic actor in the wider East Asian region, the impact of U.S. power has been immense. But both the Asian economic crisis and its aftermath, and the more recent war on terror, have highlighted the contradictory impact of evolving U.S. foreign policy and intervention in the region. At both an elite and a mass level there is evidence of resentment about, and hostility toward, U.S. policy and its perceived negative effects. This article outlines how U.S. foreign policy has impacted the region in the economic, political, and security spheres, and argues that not only has it frequently not achieved its goals, but it may in fact be undermining both America's long-term hegemonic position in the region and any prospects for political liberalization.

The patrol officers and Tom Kabu: power and prestige in the Purari Delta

In 1946, Tom Kabu returned to the Gulf of Papua determined to reinvent the communities of the Purari Delta. A man of quiet determination, in the first few years he and his followers resisted the assistance of the Australian Administration in Palma and New Guinea. Kabu's popularity in the villages of the Purari, coupled with his independent stance, caused resentment within the local expatriate community. The field staff working for the Department of District Services and Native Affairs especially felt threatened by Kabu's influence and sought to regain government control by opposing his ventures. Through the study of patrol reports written by these officers, this paper seeks to examine the reasons for this resentment and the methods employed by the officers to crush Kabu's company.

A scalarization technique for computing the power and exponential moments of gaussian random matrices

We consider the problems of computing the power and exponential moments EXs and EetX of square Gaussian random matrices X=A+BWC for positive integer s and real t, where W is a standard normal random vector and A, B, C are appropriately dimensioned constant matrices. We solve the problems by a matrix product scalarization technique and interpret the solutions in system-theoretic terms. The results of the paper are applicable to Bayesian prediction in multivariate autoregressive time series and mean-reverting diffusion processes.