A trade balance: litigation and negotiation in the World Trade Organization's dispute settlement system

The establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been widely accepted as representing the legalisation of world trading rules. However, it is important to reflect on the limits of this legalisation thesis in terms of the interface between international and domestic policy processes. By locating trading disputes in a political analysis of policy implementation, it is argued that it is difficult to establish conceptually how the WTO dispute settlement system could have authority separate from and above the conventional international politics of trade policy relations. Instead, the article argues that case outcomes should be expected to be largely the product of domestic political institutions and policy processes, and how these intersect with developments in the WTO dispute settlement system. Brief studies of the Australian government's dispute settlement strategy and two high-profile WTO disputes—the US upland cotton and European Union sugar cases—serve to suggest that the authority of international trade law is not as significant as assumed by the legalisation thesis. Rather, domestic politics and institutions have an important impact on the outcome of trade disputes.     

All Things Depending: Renewing Interdependence in Oceania

ABSTRACT Despite the enormous efforts made to civilize the Hawaiian, the Maori, the Samoan, and Fijian, Islanders have not forgotten all of their stories and in fact many Pacific peoples are in a position to recover much of the knowledge that sustained communities for thousands of years. There is hope in what we have done to reclaim our heritages—finding our voices in our languages, stories, and songs, our perspectives in our arts and literatures, our muscle and will in our own political advocacy and pursuit of our rights in courts and international arenas. There is need, however, for a new vision that reunites human beings with all of their relations in the world, a vision necessary to sustain a very difficult struggle.     

What Can Causal Process Tracing Offer to Policy Studies? A Review of the Literature

Causal process tracing (CPT) has emerged as an important method of causal inference in qualitative social science research, most notably in case study research designs. There is now a considerable literature on the aims, philosophical groundings, and methods of process tracing. This paper reviews the CPT literature to assess what new directions it may suggest for policy studies. The first part of the paper sets out the methodological advantages CPT offers in building and testing theories of policy change, most notably in supporting a theoretical pluralism to address the problem of complexity in policy studies. Building on recent scholarship across the social sciences, the second part examines step by step the recently minted “best practice” for undertaking CPT in policy studies. This part includes discussion of the possible pitfalls of CPT as a method; common errors involved in its use are set out and minimization strategies offered. In particular, while acknowledging the usefulness of Bayesian tests for causality as heuristic devices, we emphasize the limitations of applying such tests in practice. Possible correctives are suggested. The final part of the paper speculates more generally on the potential of CPT to improve our investigation of patterns of policy change over time.     

Different staining substances were used in decorative and therapeutic tattoos in a 1000-year-old Peruvian mummy

From a 1000-year-old mummy, found unwrapped in the sand of the desert at Chiribaya Alta in Southern Peru, two different kinds of tattoos were investigated: decorative tattoos displaying different animals and symbolic ciphers were present on the extremities and tattooed circles on the neck region.