Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper attempts to explain Aristotle’s important statement at the beginning of Book 7, ch 11 when Aristotle says “the one who philosophizes about politics is the master craftsman.” The paper investigates the question of how and to what extent the rational capacity of techne is used by the philosopher. To this end, the paper discusses and tries to explain Aristotle’s crucial distinction between techne and prudence.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Terrorism and drug trafficking are specialized activities that require knowledge and skills that must be taught and practiced. Terrorists and traffickers learn the practices and procedures of their professions through formal training programs and informal apprenticeships. Many of the skills involved in these illegal activities are best acquired through direct experience or learning by doing. For this reason, terrorists and traffickers often complement their formal training with practical know-how and skills that come from performing their day-to-day activities in local environments. Among the skills required for terrorism and drug trafficking is the ability to adapt quickly and well to unpredictable events and capricious environments, what James C. Scott refers to as mētis in Seeing Like a State. While illegal behavior is not the subject of Scott's penetrating analysis, the ability to shape the behavior of partners and opponents and outfox one's adversaries, defining qualities of mētis, are essential to terrorism and drug trafficking. Drawing on primary and secondary source material, the author examines how terrorists and drug traffickers acquire the technical knowledge and mētis-laden skills that allow them to perform their jobs effectively. The paper highlights the ability of terrorists and traffickers to use these skills to outfox their state adversaries and discusses the policy implications of this phenomenon for homeland security and counter-drug law enforcement.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Rule of Law Defined, Received and Resisted
Session Tracking Number: 29388

The stock critique of legal technical assistance to the fSU is that is miscalculated and miscalibrated—a cultural critique of the propriety of legal models and transplants first elaborated by Trubek and Galanter. An ideological and theoretical critique looks to their political rationale, and the larger ideological uses of law both by domestic actors in post-Soviet contexts (politicians and “reformers”, bureaucrats, commercial interests, NGOs and CSOs, academics, legal system professionals) as well as foreign interveners. ‘Reception’ is emphatically a political process, rather than (primarily) a cultural or technical one.

Legal transition theory and practice has in large measure been based on an excessive valorisation of private law rules in disdain for their distributional consequence and an uncritical, positivist, formalist and pre-realist conception of the law/economics nexus—both reflective of ideology of the funding agencies—of the politics behind the policies.

The politics of law reform/restriction are every bit as charged internally as they are externally. The famous gap between law on the books and law in practice in Russia and elsewhere in CIS, the messy, chaotic, “unrationalised” state of legislation, the susceptibility of legal processes to various sorts of manipulation and instrumentalisation, instead of an accident, or an index of legal underdevelopment, can be interpreted as a preferred state of affairs, which serves the interest of dominant economic and social interests, and which has subtended the emergence of a political economy of oligarchy accommodated (encouraged) by global capital.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: The experience of editing film or video has turned a large digital corner. Becoming a digital editor involves developing a relationship with one’s technology. Author examines how the culture of technology textures a digital editing pedagogy.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This essay examines Kazuo Ishiguro’s portrayal of a late-twentieth century society that has produced human clones to serve as organ donors to the non-cloned human beings. Strikingly, it is the human clones who develop genuine friendship and attachment for one another. The clones seem to have a sense of eros, whereas the non-clones, by contrast, seem devoid of eros, attachment and empathy. The non-clones’ preoccupation with bodily perfectibility leads them to treat the clones in purely instrumental terms. Ishiguro’s novel wrestles with the consequences for humanity of seeking the bodily perfectibility that modern natural science appears to promise.