Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This article concerns the concepts of employee harm and harm avoidance within the liability framework for hostile work environment sexual harassment. To date, the law’s crediting of women employees’ actions to avoid harm and the reality that women employees use a variety of methods to avoid the multiple harms resulting from sexual harassment has been underexplored. Specifically, this article focuses on women employees’ responses to sexual harassment: the ways in which they are harmed by sexual harassment, beyond the act of sexual harassment itself, and the ways in which they avoid that harm, beyond simply reporting the sexual harassment. This article relies on legal and social science research to explore the harms and harm avoidance actions. This article hopes to reframe the discussion of employees’ actions in response to sexual harassment from one of failures to report to one of actions taken to minimize employees’ job-related and personal injuries from the sexual harassment. There are at least two benefits from this reframing. First, a more inclusive depiction of women employees’ injuries from and responses to sexual harassment would far better inform liability determinations. As a result, the determinations can fulfill the legislative intent to encourage employees’ efforts to “avoid harm.” Second, through this process, there is an opportunity to reveal the existing reality that highlights women’s agency but often is obscured with the dominant picture of a sexual harassment victim as “suffering in silence.”

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper compared and contrasted the regulation of child pornography in the United States and France. It was found that both countries strictly regulate child pornography, Indeed, the laws of both countries were similar until United States Supreme Court rulings in Reno v. ACLU and Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, essentially made American law different from French law in terms of criminalization of certain aspects of child pornography. While France has tightened its child pornography laws considerably in recent years, the ruling in Ashcroft has given rise to a potential conflict of laws when it comes to international action against child pornography. Furthermore, there is a potential for producers of of virtual or computer-generated child pornography around the world to move their virtual “wares” to servers in the United States because of this country’s greater protection of free speech, including virtual or computer-generated child pornography that is unlawful in other jurisdictions.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: What determines the policy of Great Powers towards Persistent Agents of Transnational Harm (PATHs)? A PATH is defined here as a nonstate group, organization, or network that inflicts or projects harm across state borders. Harm is understood in this project as material damage and injury to persons' bodies and/or property done intentionally or as a result of a conscious disregard of a formal international prohibition to engage in a certain practice. Harm can be propagated through the application of designated means such as weapons, but it can also come in the form of collateral damage. The persistency dimension in the definition of the harmful actor relates to the fact that the actor will not stop doing harm due to intrinsic considerations. That is, persistent harmful actors cease doing harm only when extrinsic considerations and factors compel them to change or abandon their practice, as, for example increasing material costs or diminishing rewards. Great Power policy towards PATHs varies on a spectrum that consists of accommodation efforts (e.g., bargaining, buying-off), law enforcement efforts, limited military strikes against their territorial bases, and full-blown military campaigns including occupation of the PATHs bases. However, the thesis of this project is that Great Power counter-policy against PATHs does not depend solely on the material harm as such caused by the harmful actor, but also depends to a great extent on the challenge the PATHs pose to Great Power authority. PATHs that are perceived by the Great Powers as destructive to their authority in world politics (predators of authority) are dealt in harsher means than harmful actors that do not directly challenge the authority of the Great Powers. The latter type of PATHs is seen merely as a problem of control and as having an abusive nature (parasites of authority), and therefore state response tends to be less coercive and destructive. As opposed to the conventional wisdom in International Relations theory, which posits that world politics is an anarchic environment because it lacks central and legal authority, this paper argues that structures of authority and hierarchy are present in world politics. There are many other forms of authority and the lack of central and legal authority does not necessarily imply anarchy. Hierarchy can exist even in the absence of central-legal authority, as sociologists and political theorists argue. In the case of the international system, hierarchy is an outcome of the institution of sovereignty, which constructs a cartel of states, in which the Great Powers play the role of gatekeepers by establishing and enforcing norms of security. Transnational harm is defined as a threat to Great Power authority when it is propagated in open defiance of the existing norms of security in world politics. Thus, drug trafficking, although responsible for the death of more than 200,000 Americans since 1980, is seen a lesser threat by the US in comparison to terrorism - mainly because the drug traffickers do not openly challenge the structure of authority and hierarchy in world politics within which the US consider itself and is defined by other states as a superpower. Therefore, the US avoided occupying states like Colombia that serve as territorial bases for drug networks, while it occupied Afghanistan, al Qaeda's home-base. Similarly, the Barbary pirates of North Africa were not perceived as a threat in the early 17th century by the dominant European powers: despite the fact that the pirates kidnapped and killed tens of thousands of Spanish, English, French, Italian, and Dutch nationals during the first four decades of the century, the European powers saw the corsairs as merely parasites because there were no norms of security which the latter defied and challenged. The Great Powers of the time refrained from any significant attack on the Barbary city-states that served as the territorial bases of the transnational community of pirates. On the other hand, in the early 19th century, the same pirates were considered by Britain as a threat to her authority as a Great Power because the pirate city-state of Algiers openly defied Britain's authority in the context of the British campaign against slavery. Thus, Britain inflicted on Algiers a deadly naval attack in 1816.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: I have argued elsewhere that institutions in the sense of formal organizations can be understood to be moral agents, and therefore bearers of duties, in international relations. Identifying both the internal features that allow an institution to qualify as a moral agent and the external conditions that are conducive to its discharging particular duties is of critical importance. Only then can one effectively consider how duties might be distributed in international relations and how blame might be apportioned if these responsibilities are unmet. However, even more daunting than determining which institutions in international relations can be assigned responsibilities and burdened with blame (and in what circumstances) is the task of responding to the ?delinquent? institution once it has been blamed for a particular act of omission or commission. Especially problematic is judging how (and if) an institution can be ?punished? in a way that does not punish its constituents as individuals. The central aim of this paper is to address this question by exploring the coherence of punishing ?delinquent? states through, for example, extracting reparations, imposing sanctions, and resorting to military intervention. An ancillary aim of this paper will be to question the implications of the ?delinquent? state having a democratic form of government for both identifying the relevant moral agent in questions of accountability (i.e., is it the government or the state as a whole that is to be held to account?) and distinguishing between individual and institutional responsibility.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this study we seek to capture a deeper relationship between US military aid and the levels of violence in the world, what we term as “instability.” There have been numerous studies done in analyzing this relationship when military aid acts as a dependent variable. However, very few studies treat military aid as an independent variable, and thus even if human rights and democracy are a concern for who receives military aid from the United States, it does not assess the effect that aid has on such incidents like human rights repression and conflict. In this study, we analyze the causal direction by employing a simultaneous equation model between US military aid and domestic stability to better understand the relationship between the two. After running 2-stage least squares to test the model we find that US military aid has a stronger positive effect on domestic instability than the positive effect of domestic instability on US military aid.