Legal Issues in the United Nations Compensation Commission on Iraq
This article is a comprehensive interrogation of the legality or otherwise of the United Nations Compensation Commission  (UNCC) on Iraq; its establishment, operations and manifestations as the very first war reparation facility adopted by the Security Council on the basis of Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, and making it binding on an aggressor State. The paper argued that the UNCC, which is an interesting example of the institutionalisation of the United Nations compensation mechanism, is unprecedented in the UN’s compensation experience, in many respect. Although the design of the UNCC, however, fell within the tradition of war reparation facilities, in some respect, its operations, particularly subjecting the whole economy of Iraq to international control violated Iraq’s sovereignty. The paper concludes that despite the lacuna, the design of the UNCC would serve as a model for future compensation schemes. Keywords: Iraq, Compensation, Reparation, United Nations, UNCC, International Law.
Lever of Empire: The International Gold Standard and the Crisis of Liberalism in Prewar Japan
List of Illustrations List of Tables Preface Acknowledgments Notes on Terms Part One: Global Money and Empire Prologue: London, 1898 1. Japan and the British Gold Standard, ca. 1715--1885 2. Gold and Empire, 1885--1903 3. The Sinews of War, 1904--1914 4. The "Positive" and "Negative" Policies 5. "Divine Providence," 1914--1918 Part Two: Global Money and the Doctrine of Induced Depression 6. The Great Divide, 1918--1921 7. "The Contractionary Tide," 1921--1926 8. The Theory and Practice of Induced Depression 9. "The Two-Party Principle," 1927--1929 Part Three: The Crisis of Liberalism 10. The Liberal Triumph, 1929--1930 11. Opening the Door to a Hurricane, 1930--1931 12. Capitalist Recovery in One Country, 1932--1936 Epilogue: Money and Hegemony Appendix: Reference Information Notes Bibliography Index
Strategy and Manipulation in Medieval Elections
There are many goals in developing electoral protocols, including a desire for a system which is transparent, in that it is clear what the rule or procedure to follow is; nonmanipulable, in that it is not in a person’s best interest to misrepresent their preferences; honest, in the sense that it elects the ‘right’ candidate; and not open to strategizing, i.e., bribery or collusion. However, these desiderata are in tension with each other: Often, transparent electoral procedures are the least strategy resistant, and many honest procedures encourage manipulation. Thus a balance between these different goals must be sought. In modern times, since the seminal result on vote manipulation, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem [5, 6], much attention has been devoted to developing voting rules where manipulation is never in the best interest of the voters [4] or which are computationally too complex for the average bounded agent to be able to manipulate [1]. This focus on computational aspects of electoral methods is one of the hallmarks of modern studies on voting. But pursuit of these goals is not restricted to modern times: Those participating in elections in the Middle Ages also sought transparency, non-manipulability, honesty, and strategyproofness in so far as these properties can be consistently expressed in a single procedure. However, given the lack of computational sophistication in the Middle Ages, alternate approaches were needed in order to promote honesty, discourage strategizing, etc. These approaches can be classified as either external (constraints introduced outside of the electoral procedure, such as incentives for coming to consensus quickly) or internal (constraints introduced within the electoral procedure, such as voting rules which cannot be manipulated without adverse effects, or which are too difficult for the average bounded agent to manipulate). Surveying examples of both approaches in the context of medieval ecclesiastical and secular elections provides an interesting comparison to modern electoral procedures. Elections in the Middle Ages were used for the same reasons that they are today: To select suitable candidate(s) for a particular office, duty, or obligation. However, it is important to note that the term electio was used in the Middle Ages in a broader sense than our modern ‘election’. Its primary sense was ‘selection’ or ‘choice’, and only secondarily ‘election’ in the modern sense. Thus, many records which purportedly discuss elections are not discussing elections of the type which interests us. We can identify four categories of medieval electoral processes: (1) Election by an external authority having no direct interest in the election; (2) Indirect election, where electors name other electors who then select or elect the officials; (3) Election by lot; and (4) Election by ballot. Elections of the first and third types are generally computationally uninteresting; the first type corresponds to dictatorial voting rules, and the third type collapses to probability theory. In general, interesting voting methods are found only in the fourth type, election by ballot, though they can also occur in indirect election.