International law as primitive accumulation: Or, the secret of systematic colonization

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website at the link below. Copyright © The Author, 2012.This article aims to bring the category of ‘primitive accumulation’ into the vocabulary of critical and Marxist international legal theory. It does so by first elaborating the critique of international law that has recently developed through the lens of colonialism, by bringing to bear on the issue Marx’s thinking about colonization and thus his arguments concerning accumulation. In so doing the article also seeks to be an immanent critique of critical international legal theory itself, by suggesting that critical international legal theory is limited by its failure to properly use and think through what Marx might offer. The bulk of the article involves some historical claims, but the central argument is theoretical: offering a category to consolidate the connections that have been made among capital, colonization and international law. This requires a revelation of the secret of Marx’s Capital; the secret of capital and the secret of systematic colonization, all of which takes us to the secret of international law

‘O effeminacy! Effeminacy!’ War, masculinity and the myth of liberal peace

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website at the link below. Copyright @ 2011 The Author.This article challenges a received wisdom in the liberal peace thesis, namely that the roots of the conjunction of liberalism and peace can be traced back to the idea of an essentially pacific commercial civil society in the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment. The article instead shows that the Scottish Enlightenment was committed to the idea of military virtue. Textual analysis of the work of Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson reveals a deep and abiding commitment to martial values. The article explores this commitment via an account of the rise of concerns over ‘effeminacy’ in the 18th century, understood as a threat to both military virtue and masculine strength. In exploring these ideas the article claims that IR has helped perpetuate one of today’s key political myths: that liberalism is committed to peace

The Fascist Moment: Security, Exclusion, Extermination

Security is cultivated and mobilized by enacting exclusionary practices, and exclusion is cultivated and realized on security grounds. This article explores the political dangers that lie in this connection, dangers which open the door to a fascist mobilization in the name of security. To do so the article first asks: what happens to our understanding of fascism if we view it through the lens of security? But then a far more interesting question emerges: what happens to our understanding of security if we view it through the lens of fascism? Out of these questions it is suggested that the central issue might be less a question of “security and exclusion” and much more a question of “security and extermination.

State, power, administration: Marxist and Foucauldian perspectives on state development in Britain, 1832-1918

This thesis seeks to contribute an original account of state power by reconceptualising the state-civil society distinction through the category of political administration. Through an analysis of the development of the state in Britain between 1832 and 1918 it seeks to show why such a reconceptualisation is necessary and the features which distinguish it from other accounts. This task is performed via an immanent critique of the work of Hegel, Marx and Foucault. It is argued that historical materialism has lost the recognition of the constitutive power of the state found in Hegel and Marx, a recognition which needs to be recuperated in order for an adequate theoretical account of state power to be sustained. From 1832 in Britain this constitutive power was expressed in the development of new administrative mechanisms through which the state ordered and structured civil society. The threefold function of political administration - the fashioning of labour power, the subsumption of struggle and the constitution of legal subjects - place it with law at the heart of the operation of state power, and it is this that political theory in general, and historical materialist theory in particular, need to recognise. The category of political administration is developed through a critique of Foucault's account of administration which, it is argued, lacks an understanding of the political. It is argued that political administration emerges as a response to class struggle and that from 1832 the British state was shaped through this struggle; this use of struggle is counterposed to Foucault's category of resistance

Design philosophy issues of fiber reinforced polymer reinforced concrete structures

The conventional design philosophy for reinforced concrete (RC) relies heavily on the ductile properties of steel. These ductile properties are used as a "fuse" and conceal the large uncertainty in the determination of modes of failure caused directly by concrete. Current design guidelines for fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) RC structures have inappropriately adopted the same design philosophy used for steel RC, leading either to the adoption of conservative safety factors or reduced structural reliability. A reliability-based analysis of FRP RC beams shows that the current, very conservative partial safety factors for FRP reinforcement on their own do not influence the structural safety of overreinforced concrete elements. Proposals are made for the modification of the material partial safety factors to achieve target safety levels

Failure-mode-hierarchy-based design for reinforced concrete structures

Innovations in concrete construction can be held back by the inability of codes of practice to accommodate new materials. The current design and safety philosophy (DSP) of reinforced concrete relies heavily on the properties of steel reinforcement. The need to embrace new materials, such as fibre-reinforced polymer (FRP) reinforcement, led to an in-depth examination of the DSP of European concrete codes of practice and resulted in a new philosophy, presented in this paper. The basis of the new philosophy remains the limit-state design and achievement of target notional structural reliability levels, but aims at the attainment of a desired failure mode hierarchy. The implementation of the philosophy, through a proposed framework, utilises the concept of average measure of closeness for the determination of appropriate material partial safety factors. An example of the application of the proposed framework is presented for FRP reinforcement. © 2005 Thomas Telford and fib

Debt as Pacification

Copyright © 2021 The Author. Debt is pacification’s dirtiest little secret and its cleanest weapon. Pacification is the name we give to the fabrication of social order; it is the goal of the police power and the police wars that dominate our political landscape. To understand pacification, we need to pay close attention not only to professional violence workers, but also to the far more subtle ways in which subjects are rendered obedient to a social order of exploitation and alienation. As critical theories of police power have shown, the wage is crucial to this process. But so too is debt. This article argues that we need to understand debt as pacification. In the process, the article also aims to strengthen and deepen the concept of pacification and the idea of police power

Fibre-reinforced roller-compacted concrete transport pavements

Concrete pavements are generally more expensive to construct than asphalt pavements, and are thus mostly used in heavily trafficked sections and to reduce maintenance. The research work presented in this paper, however, indicated that the use of rapid construction techniques (such as roller compaction) and materials with lower embodied energy (such as low-energy cements, recycled aggregates and recycled steel fibres) can lead to concrete pavements that are more economical and environmentally friendly than asphalt pavements (40% less energy consumption during the life cycle of the pavement). The first part of this paper presents an overview of this research, which was undertaken as part of the EU FP6 STREP project ‘EcoLanes’ and investigated the development of long-lasting rigid pavements made with steel-fibre-reinforced roller-compacted concrete. The second part of the paper outlines the work undertaken for the development and optimisation of several trial concrete mixes. It is shown that the flexural behaviour of roller-compacted concrete, under static loads, can be enhanced by the addition of fibres. Furthermore, the results of this study demonstrated the potential of recycling concrete pavements, at the end of their life, for the construction of new pavements

Partially linear censored quantile regression

Censored regression quantile (CRQ) methods provide a powerful and flexible approach to the analysis of censored survival data when standard linear models are felt to be appropriate. In many cases however, greater flexibility is desired to go beyond the usual multiple regression paradigm. One area of common interest is that of partially linear models: one (or more) of the explanatory covariates are assumed to act on the response through a non-linear function. Here the CRQ approach of Portnoy (J Am Stat Assoc 98:1001–1012, 2003) is extended to this partially linear setting. Basic consistency results are presented. A simulation experiment and unemployment example justify the value of the partially linear approach over methods based on the Cox proportional hazards model and on methods not permitting nonlinearity