1,720,969 research outputs found
Discreet Discretion and Moderate Moderation in Judicial Sentencing: A commentary on Kenya’s Sentencing Policy Guidelines, 2016
Get PDFCriminal sentencing is an integral part in any judicial system for the fair administration of justice. The process of sentencing and the standards applied by judicial officers has, however, been a notoriously difficult component in many criminal law systems. In Kenya, sentencing has been blamed as one of the sources of ‘popular dissatisfaction with the administration of justice’ to borrow from Roscoe Pound. This was the impetus for the Kenyan Judiciary to introduce the Sentencing Policy Guidelines, 2016 (SPGs). This paper is a general commentary, critique, and analysis of the SPGs. The author argues that SPGs come at an instructive epoch in Kenya’s economic, socio-political, and cultural development. This contribution is not a polemic on the Kenyan SPGs. The commentary makes sideglances to various jurisdictions that have had a longer experience with sentencing guidelines. The article forecasts that Kenyan SPGs will, despite its few shortcomings, nevertheless, prove to be important for all judicial officers involved in Kenya’s criminal justice system
Devolution as a Panacea to Deeply Divided Multi-Ethnic (National) States: The Continuing Kenyan Experiment
Get PDFThe multiple designers of Kenya’s 2010 Constitution intended that devolution should address the many years of economic exclusion that many Kenyan communities had suffered. While this paper concedes that the design of the 2010 Constitution to a large extent achieves this role, the same constitution fails at engendering national multi-ethnic unity. This paper uses three broad approaches to assess Kenya’s devolution experiment under Kenya’s 2010 Constitution and ethnic unity: the first is Daniel Posner’s Institutional Politics approach, the second is Donald Horowitz’s Constitutional Ethnic Federalism approach, and the final one is Yash Pal Ghai’s Constitutional Autonomy approach. The author argues that limiting our focus to these three approaches as applied in this paper, there is no constitutional design that can easily achieve the lofty objective of national multi-ethnic unity in Kenya. This is because Kenya has had deeply ethnicised politics and social relations that are tied to ethnic political patrons and elites who are always at the forefront of constitutional design outcomes. This explains why even with the 2010 Constitution’s attempt to weaken the imperial presidency, many Kenyans still perceive ascendancy to the presidency as the zenith of social, economic, and political actualisation. The paper, therefore, concludes that the Posner and Horowitz approaches above have merits and demerits and have also been variously applied under the 2010 Kenyan Constitution. The Ghai approach has neither been contemplated nor applied in the 2010 Kenyan Constitution. It emerges that even if the demerits under the Posner, Horowitz, and Ghai approaches were eradicated, which might be quite difficult or even impossible, and yet the zero-sum competitive politics for the presidency persists, the politicisation of ethnicity and the conflicts that stem from this will persist
TRADE REMEDIES AS EMANCIPATORY MECHANISMS FOR COMPETITIVE PRICE DIFFERENTIATION CHALLENGES WITHIN AND OUTSIDE THE AFRICAN CONTINENTAL FREE TRADE AREA (AfCFTA): Harrison Otieno Mbori
Get PDFThe question of whether international trade remedies remain economically, politically, and legally efficacious and relevant in the 21st century is still a lingering one. This paper makes two broad arguments in addressing this critical question. The first is that while trade remedies can have positive externalities for individual African states, African states should implement these actions through their larger regional trading arrangements and blocs, especially at the continental level within the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA). The second argument is embedded in the view that trade remedies, from an economic viewpoint, should first be eliminated at the multilateral level. But since the current international trading regime’s political economy and geopolitical structures might not easily allow this anytime soon, the paper assumes that trade remedies as structured in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) are here to stay. The author, thus, argues that for the first objective of regional implementation of regional trade agreements (RTAs) to work appropriately, then African states should eliminate trade remedies internally. They should thereafter focus on alternative means of addressing the negative consequences of free trade through the creation of free trade areas (FTAs) and custom unions (CUs) such as a continental competition policy. Importantly, however, these two arguments take for granted that the current international trading system is fair and ensures economic justice for African states and the peoples of Africa. The paper begins by tracing the immiseration that the current international trading system causes in order to paint a Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL) backdrop for the two arguments presented
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Benign and Radical Africanization in International Investment Law and Investor-State Dispute Settlement in Africa
No full texteditorial reviewedThe current Africanization approaches mask some nuances present in current reform efforts of international investment law (IIL) and investor-State dispute settlement (ISDS) in Africa. I adopt the categorization of international law scholarship in Africa developed elsewhere into two trends: contributionist (weak) and critical (strong) scholarship. For reforms in African IIL and ISDS, I relabel this trends benign Africanization representing the contributionist (weak) strand and radical Africanization representing the critical (strong) strand. I argue that African states must focus on wider economic justice engendered in the radical Africanization approach. I propose three lines of action that will implement radical Africanization: first African States, in their reforms, must focus on both extra and intra-African investment; second, the reforms must engage deeply seated substantive issues in addition to the current procedural reforms; and finally, African States must have a real reckoning and engagement with the imperial history of IIL generally and ISDS specifically
Devolution as panacea to deeply divided multi-ethnic (National) states: the Kenyan example
Get PDFResearch Brown Bag presentationOne of the quintessential concerns of African governance and statecraft is the management of differences. This paper contends that the appropriate theoretical paradigm for assessing post-colonial statecraft in Africa is Ali Mazrui’s Triple Heritage, rather than Max Webber’s principle of the “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force,” which has been extensively used for the purpose. According to Mazrui, Africa’s experience of state-formation should be understood at the confluence of the continent’s broader triple heritage of history and culture, which encompasses indigenous, Islamic, and Euro-Christian roots. For this reason, the paper argues that tribes or ethnicities in Kenya should be thought of as nations inhered with some semblance of the right to self-determination. It then proposes that devolution in Kenya can be a panacea to the questions of deep division associated with ethnic-based politics. Finally, it maintains that the quasi-ethnic federalism that the Kenyan devolution presents can also be a panacea to the deep tribal schisms witnessed in the country since independence.Strathmore Law Schoo
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