Workshop on the Origins of Solar Systems

Topics addressed include: interstellar chemistry and primitive bodies; astronomical measurements and nebula models; solar nebula models and meteorite; and planetary accumulation and evolution

Primitive accumulation and ‘progress’ in Southeast Asia: the diverse legacies of a common(s) tragedy

More than any other scholar, James C. Scott has drawn attention to the significance of what Marx termed ‘primitive accumulation’ in the historical transformation of the societies of Southeast Asia. Taking Scott's work as its point of departure, this article sketches the broad contours of primitive accumulation across the region from the mid-nineteenth century up through the early twentieth century. The article shows how primitive accumulation unfolded in different ways in different parts of Southeast Asia and suggests how the different modalities of primitive accumulation have continued to shape the trajectories and parameters of politics across the region to this day

The Political Economy of Corporate Governance Change in Bulgaria: Washington Consensus, Primitive Accumulation of Capital, and Catching-Up in the 1990

This study examines three key determinants of corporate governance change in Bulgaria: the Washington Consensus policy, primitive accumulation of capital forces, and 'catching-up' factors. The study reveals that in the early transition (1989-96) primitive capital accumulation prevailed over the Washington Consensus impact on corporate governance transformation while since 1997 Washington Consensus has been in the process of becoming the decisive factor for institutional change. The emerging corporate governance system has been neither Anglo-American (market based) nor bank-based, but rather a 'crony' relationship-based one. The striking features of this system are as follows: (i) a dual enterprise sector, (ii) ownership heterogeneity; (iii) fragile capital markets; (iv) pervasive banks lending behavior; (v) globalization factors discretion. The challenge to policy-makers in Bulgaria is how to design institutions for 'catching-up' that would curb both managerial and globalization factors discretion.

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

Primitive accumulation and ‘progress’ in Southeast Asia: the diverse legacies of a common(s) tragedy

More than any other scholar, James C. Scott has drawn attention to the significance of what Marx termed ‘primitive accumulation’ in the historical transformation of the societies of Southeast Asia. Taking Scott's work as its point of departure, this article sketches the broad contours of primitive accumulation across the region from the mid-nineteenth century up through the early twentieth century. The article shows how primitive accumulation unfolded in different ways in different parts of Southeast Asia and suggests how the different modalities of primitive accumulation have continued to shape the trajectories and parameters of politics across the region to this day

Determinants of Corruption in Developing Countries: the Limits of Conventional Economic Analysis

Corruption takes place when public officials break the law in pursuit of their private interest. But public officials can break different laws in different ways with different implications for the public good. The factors driving corruption and the effects of corruption can therefore vary widely. Understanding the causes and consequences of corruption is particularly important in developing countries, which almost without exception suffer from high levels of corruption. The virtual uniformity of this evidence strongly suggests that developing countries must share some powerful common drivers of corruption that are different from those that affect advanced industrial countries. At the same time, the very diverse economic performance of developing countries suggests that not all developing countries suffer from the same types of corruption. These two observations, summarized in our first section, provide the backdrop to my analytical investigation. I begin this investigation by identifying the drivers of corruption implicit in most conventional neoclassical economic analysis of the topic. Although these drivers are undoubtedly important in many contexts, I next argue that a number of other drivers of corruption may be mor

Long-time dynamics of completely integrable Schr\"odinger flows on the torus

In this article, we are concerned with long-time behaviour of solutions to a semi-classical Schr\"odinger-type equation on the torus. We consider time scales which go to infinity when the semi-classical parameter goes to zero and we associate with each time-scale the set of semi-classical measures associated with all possible choices of initial data. We emphasize the existence of a threshold: for time-scales below this threshold, the set of semi-classical measures contains measures which are singular with respect to Lebesgue measure in the "position" variable, while at (and beyond) the threshold, all the semi-classical measures are absolutely continuous in the "position" variable.Comment: 41 page