Suchergebnisse

The CIRI Human Rights Data Project provides information about government respect for a broad array of human rights in nearly every country in the world. Covering twenty-six years, fifteen separate human rights practices, and 195 countries, it is one of the largest human rights data sets in the world. This essay provides an overview of the CIRI project and our response to some critiques of the CIRI physical integrity rights index. Compared to the Political Terror Scale (PTS), the CIRI physical integrity rights index is focused on government human rights practices , can be disaggregated, is more transparent in its construction, and is more replicable because of the transparency of our coding rules. Furthermore, unlike the PTS, the unidimensionality of the CIRI index has been demonstrated empirically. For these reasons, the CIRI index is a more valid index of physical integrity rights.

By directly affecting democratization, globalization, domestic conflict, and interstate conflict, the end of the Cold War was hypothesized to exert an indirect effect on the propensity of governments to respect the human rights of their citizens. The findings for a sample of 79 countries showed that torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings continued at about the same rate even after the Cold War ended. However, after the end of the Cold War, there was significant improvement in government respect for the right against political imprisonment. Contrary to expectations, it was found that governments that decreased their involvement in interstate conflict or experienced decreased domestic conflict did not tend to increase respect for the right against political imprisonment. As hypothesized, it was found that governments that became more democratic or increased their participation in the global economy after the end of the Cold War tended to manifest higher levels of respect for the right of their citizens not to be politically imprisoned. However, a closer look at several recent examples of democratization in Africa suggests that any human rights improvements resulting from post-Cold War democratization may be short-lived. In the cases examined, improved government respect for the right against political imprisonment resulted from short-term manipulations by the leaders of `illiberal' or `demonstration' democracies who were not committed to democratization or to the advancement of the human rights of their citizens.

AbstractIn 1982, the Congress authorized $11 billion to modernize the nation's air traffic control system—one of the largest infrastructure investments since the building of the interstate highway system. Although this investment appears to offer a large and robust return, the economic results depend strongly on productivity gains through system consolidation. It is uncertain what balance the Congress will strike between the long‐term, widely shared benefits of greater productivity and the immediate job losses from system consolidation. This risk can be included in the calculus of expected return through Monte Carlo analysis. When this is done, the expected return drops very close to the 10% hurdle rate that the government often uses for such projects. This method of integrating political risk can be applied to any investment, public or private, for which political action joins the customary economic and technical uncertainties in affecting the outcome.

Introduction: Continuities and discontinuities in the formation of a transoceanic diaspora, 1391-1789 / David Graizbord -- Who were the Jews of the pre-modern siaspora? / Jonathan Ray -- Ḥayei ha-Torah (The Life of Torah): rabbinic culture and the pre-modern heritage preserved and adapted / David Graizbord -- Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel): the homeland, its Jews, and their orienting influence / David Graizbord -- 'Umot ha-'Olam (The Nations of the Earth): relations with the other(s) -- Iberian Watersheds: the crisis of judeoconversos and the evolution of anti-Jewish bigotry / David Graizbord -- Iberian judeoconversos and Jews in medieval and early modern Iberian polemical tracts / Axel Kaplan-Szyld -- Jews and their non-Jewish hosts in an evolving diaspora / David Graizbord -- Kol Yisrael 'Arevim Zeh la-Zeh ("All Israel are Mutually Responsible"): self-government, economy, and the rise of new diasporic centers -- The Jews of the Italian Peninsula / Serena di Nepi -- The rise of new diasporic centers / Jessica Vance Roitman -- Tsena u-Re'ena (Go Out and See): the world of Jewish books / Noam Sienna -- Ḳabalah (Tradition): early modern Jewish mysticism as a devotional matrix of Jewish life / Roni Weinstein -- Minhagim: a window on popular culture / Yaron Nisenholz -- 'Erev Rav (A Mixed Multitude): class, gender, and ideological cleavages / Stanley Mirvis -- Ḥasidut and Haskalah (Pietism and Enlightenment): toward the watershed of modernity / Stanley Mirvis