Search

The testimonies of witnesses who testify before criminal courts provide crucial insights into the situated experience of conflict-related sexual violence. Witness testimonies highlight the complex realities and everyday lives of individuals caught up in situations of armed conflict. The evidence presented by witnesses can provide vital insights into lived experiences of wartime violence, and reveal the seemingly mundane strategies and tactics adopted by victims to cope with, survive and resist the violent and coercive circumstances of war. This article foregrounds conflict-related sexual violence witness testimonies as highly significant sources of knowledge of everyday experiences of conflict. It sets out a bottom-up, mixed-method approach for identifying and analysing the experiential accounts of those who lived through conflict-related sexual violence, while engaging with the opportunities and challenges of using witness testimony. Our approach unsettles existing notions of 'the everyday' in Peace & Conflict Studies as a synonym for narratives and practices of violence, justice and peacebuilding that are private, informal and largely hidden from view. Understanding witness testimonies requires conceptualising the everyday as an amalgam of formal and informal practices, as accessible through both elite and lay knowledges and as documented in both public and private (e.g. redacted) sources. It requires challenging taken-for-granted dichotomies that are frequently invoked to understand conflict and peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do witnesses testify to the traumas of war before the law? What narrative forms do these testimonies to trauma take in the legal field? This paper explores three different forms of testifying to the crimes of war, focusing on conflict-related sexual violence. The first two testimonial forms appear in international criminal law. These are victim-witnessing and collective witnessing, which the paper traces through two cases before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The third form of testimony appears in alternative legal forums. This is transformative witnessing. The paper traces through the new models of testimonial practice currently developing in the Women's Court for the former Yugoslavia, showing how might they shift our understanding of the truth of testimonial evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has generated huge archival holdings. With the ICTY’s impending closure, the archive has become part of broader debates regarding its legacy for the former Yugoslavia. In particular, the memorial function of this archive has now become highly contentious. Ultimately, these concern the relationship between law and collective memory. This article uses the example of the ICTY archive to explore the relationship between law and memory in post-conflict transition. It argues that this ‘legal archive’ functions as a mnemonic system that produces ‘legal memory’ through its juridical, international, and transitional structure. It then considers the competing discourses of how the legal archive remembers or forgets the justice of law and the injustice of war. Ultimately, these discourses figure the archive as a ‘legal memorial’ that fails to produce collective memory. For this reason, I develop an alternative concept of ‘memorial law’ in order to suggest other memorial practices that can sustain legal memory as a living memory, rather than as a dead archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is now a well-established ‘spatial turn in law’. However, it remains oriented towards notions of space rather than law. How, then, to capture both the spatiality of law and the legality of space? This article draws on Bruno Latour's concept of the legal construction of the ‘social’ to explore the assemblage of the city of law. It shows how law functions as a particular form of association in urban life by tracing two key forms of urban legal association in London, the city of law. The first form is ‘legal ordering’. This seeks to order urban life through domination, and includes citadel law, police law and laws of exception. The second is ‘legal consociations’, which build new forms of urban life, such as urban rights, the rights of the city and the right to the city. Finally, the article explores the creation of a spatial justice that can build more just legal associations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Protecting victims and punishing perpetrators are now seen as integral elements of the implementation and enforcement of humanitarian norms. However, how international law constructs the victims and perpetrators of international crimes as entities with rights and duties remains insufficiently examined. This paper explores the different models of victims and perpetrators as legal persons in international criminal law. It argues that the legal person takes two forms: the victim of human rights and the perpetrator of criminal responsibility. While the legal regime presents these as autonomous and singular individuals, it also constitutes them as members of groups that criminal norms seek to protect or punish. Contemporary international criminal law resolves this tension between individual and collective rights and responsibilities by reconstituting legal subjectivity through an intersubjective conception of the universal community of humans. Ultimately, this 'legal person' relies on the idea of 'humanity', the collectivity of all humans, to hide this problematic conceptual basis of the rights and duties of victims and perpetrators in ICL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Rosi Braidotti on a radical positive project against a narrative of failure and another by Jeremy Gilbert on the notion of 1968 as signalling the defeat of the left.

This article explores the relationship between the concepts of trauma and justice in the jurisprudence of crimes against humanity of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, focusing upon cases of sexual violence. It argues that the Tribunal's jurisprudence conceives this crime as a traumatic violation of both the subject of rights and of universal humanity. The Tribunal's models of international justice as procedure, punishment, recognition and therapy understand justice as the legal suturing of this trauma. In these models, the notion of 'justice' functions as phantasy in the psychoanalytic sense of an imaginary scene that veils its impossibility. However, figuring international justice as the resolution of the trauma of crimes against humanity reiterates the traumatic wrong in humanitarian law. Humanitarian law therefore requires a new model of international justice — a model that does not reiterate the past but which can institute the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces articles on the transitional justice plan for Iraq, published in the September 2004 issue of "Social & Legal Studies."

This paper explores models of reflexive feminist science studies through the work of Donna Haraway. The paper argues that Haraway provides an important account of science studies that is both feminist and constructivist. However, her concepts of “situated knowledges” and “diffraction” need further development to be adequate models of feminist science studies. To develop this constructivist and feminist project requires a collective research program that engages with feminist reflexivity as a practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the notion of the international humanitarian law in the course of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Benefit of the establishment of the international tribunal; Means of restoring and maintaining peace; Description of the conviction of rape as a crime against humanity.

Discusses the implications of the case 'The Prosecutor v. Anto Furundzija' for the prosecution of sexual assault against women in armed conflict. Constitution of legal memory in the juridical field; Formation of justiciable, procedural and evidential memory; Recognition of sexual assault as a war crime in substantive international humanitarian law.

Examines philosopher Jacques Lacan's notion of glissement or the shift in meaning. Important questions for reading and producing theory involved in the study of glissement; Arguments supporting Lacan's claim that psychoanalysis puts people in a strange position.

A letter to the editor is presented related to plasma free metanephrines.

A response by Kristen A. Campbell and colleagues to a letter to the editor regarding their article "The Half-Lives of Plasma Free Metanephrines" in the 2011 issue is presented.

Spatial resource subsidies can alter bottom-up and top-down forces of community regulation across ecosystem boundaries. Most subsidies are temporally variable, and recent theory has suggested that consumer-resource dynamics can be stabilized if the peak timing of a subsidy is desynchronized with that of prey productivity in the recipient ecosystem. However, magnitude of consumer responses per se could depend on the subsidy timing, which may be a critical component for community dynamics and ecosystem processes., The aim of this study was to test (i) whether a recipient consumer (cutthroat trout) responds differently to a resource subsidy occurring early in its growing season than to a subsidy occurring late in the season and, if this is the case, (ii) whether the timing-dependent consumer response has cascading effects on communities and ecosystem functions in streams., To test those hypotheses, we conducted a large-scale field experiment, in which we directly manipulated the timing of augmentation of the terrestrial invertebrates that enter stream (i.e. peak timing of June-August vs. August-October), keeping constant the total amounts of the invertebrates entered., We found large increases in the individual growth rate and population biomass of the cutthroat trout, in response to the early resource pulse, but not to the late pulse. This timing-dependent consumer response cascaded down to reduce benthic invertebrates and leaf breakdown rate, and increased water nutrient concentrations. Furthermore, the early resource pulse resulted in higher maturity rate of the cutthroat trout in the following spring, demonstrating the importance of the subsidy timing on long-term community dynamics via the consumer's numerical response., Our results emphasize the need to acknowledge timing-dependent consumer responses in understanding the effects of subsidies on communities and ecosystem processes. Elucidating the mechanisms by which consumers effectively exploit pulsed subsidies is an important avenue to better understand community dynamics in spatially coupled ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Combining DSTAT with azacitidine appears feasible with no increased toxicity seen. • A 20 % response rate was observed in this patient population with HMA refractory MDS. • Mobilization of myeloblasts was not observed during the first cycle of DSTAT and azacitidine. Leukemia stem cells utilize cell adhesion molecules like CXCR4/CXCL12 to home to bone marrow stromal niches where they are maintained in a dormant, protected state. Dociparstat sodium (DSTAT, CX-01) is a low anticoagulant heparin with multiple mechanisms of action, including inhibition of the CXCR4/CXCL12 axis, blocking HMGB1, and binding platelet factor 4 (PF-4). We conducted a pilot study adding DSTAT to azacitidine for patients with AML or MDS unresponsive to or relapsed after prior hypomethylating agent therapy, hypothesizing that DSTAT may improve response rates. Twenty patients were enrolled, with a median of 2 prior lines of therapy and 6 cycles of prior hypomethylating agents. Among fifteen patients evaluable for response, there was 1 complete remission, and 3 marrow complete remissions, for a response rate of 27 % among evaluable patients (20 % overall). Hematologic improvement was observed in 5 additional patients. The median overall survival for all enrolled patients was 205 days (95 % CI 119–302). While cytopenias and infections were common, these were not out of proportion to what would be expected in this population of patients undergoing treatment with azacitidine alone. In summary, this trial demonstrated the feasibility of combining DSTAT with azacitidine, with several responses observed, suggesting this combination warrants further study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context Recent case reports detail the successful use of temozolomide in the management of aggressive pituitary tumours. O6-methylguanine-DNA methyltransferase (MGMT) is a DNA repair protein that counteracts the effect of temozolomide. Objective To study MGMT expression in pituitary tumours and consider whether MGMT expression is associated with response to temozolomide therapy in aggressive pituitary tumours. Patients We report two patients with aggressive pituitary tumours treated with temozolomide, one who responded to temozolomide and the other who did not. MGMT expression was assessed in a further 88 archived pituitary tumour samples. Design MGMT expression was assessed by immunohistochemistry. MGMT promoter methylation was studied by methylation-specific polymerase chain reaction (MSP), sequencing of MGMT was performed and loss of heterozygosity (LOH) analysis undertaken. Results Low MGMT expression and MGMT promoter methylation were found in the pituitary tumour of the patient who responded to temozolomide. Conversely, high MGMT expression was seen in the patient demonstrating a poor response to temozolomide. Eleven out of 88 archived tumour samples (13%) had low MGMT expression. Prolactinomas were more likely to have low MGMT expression compared with other pituitary tumour subtypes ( P < 0·001). There was no significant difference in MGMT expression between invasive and noninvasive tumours, or between recurrent and nonrecurrent tumours. A significant inverse correlation was found between MGMT expression and promoter methylation ( P = 0·012). Conclusion MGMT expression as assessed by immunohistochemistry may predict response to temozolomide therapy in patients with aggressive pituitary tumours. MGMT promoter methylation is likely to explain low MGMT expression in some, but not all, pituitary tumours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]