Much of what has been written about East Timor’s militias has focused on their relationship with the armed forces, and on the latter’s legal responsibility for the 1999 violence. This preoccupation with culpability, while important and understandable under the circumstances, has obscured the much deeper historical origins of the violence and the militias, and has diverted attention from the not...

Proofs, both formal and informal, are documents that are intended to circulate within societies of humans and machines distributed across time and space in order to provide trust. Such trust might lead one mathematician to accept a certain statement as true or it might help convince a consumer that a certain software system is secure. Using this general characterization of proofs, we examine a ...

Recent developments in the theory of focused proof systems provide flexible means for structuring proofs within the sequent calculus. This structuring is organized around the construction of “macro” level inference rules based on the “micro” inference rules which introduce single logical connectives. After presenting focused proof systems for first-order classical logics (one with and one witho...

Stein Ringen's theory of democratic purpose cannot do the work expected of it. Ringen's own criteria oscillate between being too vague to be useful (i.e. "freedom") or, when specified more fully, conflicting, so that almost all democracies will seem to be potentially at cross-purposes with themselves rather than their purposes or sub-purposes being mutually reinforcing. This reflects a bigger a...

What is psychiatry? Such a question is increasingly important to engage with in light of the development of new diagnostic frameworks that have wide-ranging and international clinical and societal implications. I suggest in this reflective essay that 'psychiatry' is not a singular entity that enjoins consistent forms of critique along familiar axes; rather, it is a heterogeneous assemblage of i...

Extending an emerging body of work documenting the migration of technical production models into other domains of social activity, this article analyzes how “open source” works at the levels of both practice and ideology. Through interviews and analysis of public documents relating to Howard Dean’s run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2003–2004, this article reveals how many Intern...

Criticism of commercial drones as violators personal privacy or unsafe public annoyances continues to influence and academic discourse. At the same time, drone’s benefits for humanitarian, conservation, industry, emissions-reduced delivery have also become evident. That such a powerful technology which enhances vision, movement, force-from-afar could ambivalent properties appears contradictory....

Hawai’i’s multiculturalism and perceived harmonious race ethnic relations are widely celebrated in popular academic discourse. The image of Hawai’i as a “racial paradise,” rainbow peacefully coexisting groups, partially stems from the fact that among various racial groups there is no numerical majority common belief equality opportunity status. humor part parcel maintenance continued reinforcem...