Systemic evil and the international political imagination

In light of the persistence of discourses of atrocity in the post-Holocaust era, and with the resurgence of talk of evil that followed 11 September 2001, it is clear that the idea of evil still possesses a powerful hold upon the modern imagination. Yet, the interplay of evil and the political imagination – in particular, how different images of evil have shaped the discourses and practices of international politics – remains neglected. This article suggests that evil is depicted through three contending images within international politics – evil as individualistic, as statist and as systemic – and their corresponding forms of collective imagination – the juridical, the humanitarian and the political. It argues further that the dominance of the juridical and, to a lesser extent, the humanitarian imagination obscures our ability to imagine and respond to political evils of structural or systemic violence. Drawing on the example of global poverty, this article contends that the ability to portray and critically judge systemic evils in international politics today depends upon enriching our narratives about indefensible atrocities and reimagining our shared political responsibilities for them.PostprintPeer reviewe

Entanglement in Random Subspaces

The selection of random subspaces plays a role in quantum information theory analogous to the role of random strings in classical information theory. Recent applications have included protocols achieving the quantum channel capacity and methods for extending superdense coding from bits to qubits. In addition, random subspaces have proved useful for studying the structure of bipartite and multipartite entanglement.Comment: Conference proceedings submission based on a talk given at QCMC04 about quant-ph/040704

Capacity Theorems for Quantum Multiple Access Channels: Classical-Quantum and Quantum-Quantum Capacity Regions

We consider quantum channels with two senders and one receiver. For an arbitrary such channel, we give multi-letter characterizations of two different two-dimensional capacity regions. The first region is comprised of the rates at which it is possible for one sender to send classical information, while the other sends quantum information. The second region consists of the rates at which each sender can send quantum information. For each region, we give an example of a channel for which the corresponding region has a single-letter description. One of our examples relies on a new result proved here, perhaps of independent interest, stating that the coherent information over any degradable channel is concave in the input density operator. We conclude with connections to other work and a discussion on generalizations where each user simultaneously sends classical and quantum information.Comment: 38 pages, 1 figure. Fixed typos, added new example. Submitted to IEEE Tranactions on Information Theor