Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACTThis essay seeks to explain the premisses of the communitarian movement in the USA, and to respond to some of its principal critics. At the heart of the debate is the fundamental question of the proper balance between individual liberty and commitment to the common good. The solution to this could be a form of 'responsive' communitarianism which in some situations (such as the present‐day USA) may argue for more community, and in others (such as contemporary China) may press for a better anchoring of individual rights. In his examination of the centrifugal forces which can be unleashed by the search for ever‐more‐exclusive forms of community, Etzioni argues that excessive insistence on self‐determination can weaken countries seeking to establish democratic government and threaten democracy in countries which have already attained it.

It is contended that certain nations' and international organizations' inconsistent adherence to United Nations Security Council resolutions possesses deleterious consequences for existing international law and order. The US is strongly critiqued for invoking various Security Council resolutions to defend the US-led attacks against Iraq; indeed, several difficulties with the US's interpretation of Security Council resolutions and the United Nations Charter are highlighted. The question of whether the absence of Security Council support for the US-led attacks against Iraq illuminates the body's incapacity to promote security or exemplifies its position on the attacks is then considered. Attention is subsequently directed toward exploring the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's and the US-led coalition's contention that developments that require humanitarian intervention or pre-emptive self-defense should override Security Council resolutions and United Nations Charter; it is asserted that such situations require international attention but that international law should not be abandoned in addressing humanitarian crises or justifying self-defense. Consequently, the formation and observance of universally accepted international law are stressed.

This article discusses a recently developed Mathematica tool -QPolynomial- a collection of functions for manipulating, evaluating and factoring quaternionic polynomials. QPolynomial relies on the package QuaternionAnalysis, which is available for download at w3.math.uminho.pt/QuaternionAnalysis. ; Research at the Centre of Mathematics at the University of Minho was financed by Portuguese Funds through FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within the Project UID/MAT/00013/2013. Research at the Economics Politics Research Unit was carried out within the funding with COMPETE reference number POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006683 (UID/ECO/03182/2013), with the FCT/MEC's (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P.) financial support through national funding and by the European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme on "Competitiveness and Internationalization - COMPETE 2020" under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement. ...

ABSTRACTPolitical science takes pride in objective and methodologically rigorous research. This should be reflected in a clear and concise writing style that convinces readers by the content of the research, not by the language used to report about it. This article demonstrates that this is true but only to a limited extent. It shows that—similar to recent findings from natural-sciences research—the frequency of positive words that political scientists use to describe their research has increased markedly in recent decades. At the same time, however, the magnitude of this increase is much less pronounced. The article discusses and analyzes potential explanations for this trend. We suspect that it can be attributed at least partly to changing norms in the discipline, in which research framed in a positive way is more likely to be published.