Burkina Faso: Jihadist landscape will become murkier

Significance These included the death of 53 gendarmes at Inata in November and an ambush that killed over 40 government-affiliated vigilantes near Ouahigouya in December. Public anger is producing protests and backlash that have put President Roch Marc Christian Kabore’s administration under intense pressure, including possible coup plotting exposed by arrests this week. Impacts Local dialogue efforts with jihadists may be inhibited by harder-line government policies. Kabore’s administration will struggle to define and pursue its ‘national reconciliation’ project. Burkina Faso’s 2021-25 national development plan may deliver modest improvements in growth prospects. Burkina Faso will have longer-term problems operationalising military cooperation with neighbours.

A National Legacy of Enslavement: An Overview of the Work of the Slavery, History, Memory, and Reconciliation Project

As the Jesuit mission in the United States expanded to the west in the early nineteenth century, the Society bought, owned, hired, sold, and forcibly moved enslaved people to support their activities. Enslaved people lived and labored at Jesuit schools, scholasticates, churches, and farms in Missouri, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Kansas. Aspects of their lives, including names and family relationships, can be gleaned from Jesuit and other archival materials. These records show what daily life was like for enslaved people owned by the Jesuits as they built communities, sought to protect their families, and resisted their enslavement. They negotiated with the Jesuits to be allowed to purchase their freedom; sued the Jesuits for their freedom in court; and ran away. Undertaken by the Jesuits of Canada and the United States, the Slavery, History, Memory, and Reconciliation Project endeavors to shed light on this history and its contemporary legacies while working with descendants of the people the Society of Jesus held in slavery to determine steps forward today.

Sámi Law: A Methodological Approach1

Sámi law is the law of the Indigenous Sámi people. The territory where Sámi have historically lived is called Sápmi and encompasses parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. This article builds on the premise that Sámi law exists in Sápmi, in parallel with national laws. However, in terms of methodology and content, the scope of research on Sámi law compared to research about Indigenous law in Canada is limited. This article first describes an Indigenous law research methodology which approaches stories as a source of Indigenous law. The methodology was developed in Canada and applied to the Canadian Access to Justice and Reconciliation Project. The article then discusses this research methodology in relation to Sámi law.

Burkina Faso's Kabore faces mounting public pressures

Significance Despite enhanced military efforts, jihadist groups are becoming increasingly brazen in their attacks, while labour and other social unrest is also challenging the authorities. President Roch Marc Christian Kabore and his governing coalition are facing heightened scrutiny ahead of presidential and legislative elections set for late 2020. Impacts The government will try to hold back the most militant union demands, given growing public impatience with their excessive expectations. With the high-profile coup trial over, opposition parties and civil society groups may call for a wider national reconciliation project. Despite the government's unpopularity, a divided opposition will struggle to capitalise in the short term.

Returning Marx to Kant?

Christian Lotz’s book, The Capitalist Schema: Time, Money, and the Culture of Abstraction, seeks to reconcile Marx’s logic of conceptual determination with Kant’s logic of constitution. It is in this context that Lotz reconfigures Kant’s transcendental schema as money and understands money as an a priori determination that makes the world accessible and meaningful to individuals. Furthermore the book’s point of departure is Adorno’s Kant interpretation, and in foregrounding money Lotz also wishes to ‘reconnect Adorno’s Critical Theory to Marx’. The review engages with both endeavours, discusses the, so to speak, temporal impossibility of such a reconciliation project and revisits a previous attempt to bring Kant and Marx together: Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s theory of real abstraction.

The Foole, the Shepherd, and the Knave

The Reconciliation Project, the attempt to show that justice is compatible with rational prudence, is evaluated in light of the classic challenges of Hobbes’ Foole, Plato’s Lydian Shepherd, and Hume’s Sensible Knave. Hobbes’ response to the Foole is justice-reciprocalist, emphasizing social sanctions, and is naturally interpreted in terms of folk theorem interactions of repeated games. Plato’s justice-Platonist response to the Shepherd, who has identity-concealing power, emphasizes goods allegedly inseparable from justice. A new Invisible Foole challenge is considered where an agent like the Foole who takes seriously only social sanctions acquires identity-concealment technology, and folk theorem responses are proposed for this challenge. The Invisible Foole challenge is similar to the most serious challenge, that of the Sensible Knave. The most compelling response to the Knave’s challenge combines elements of justice-reciprocalism and justice-Platonism.

Strategic Justice

This work presents a new analysis and evaluation, based upon an original game-theoretic analysis of convention, of the thesis that justice consists of systems of distinguished conventions. This thesis has ancient roots but has never been central in philosophy because convention itself has historically been so poorly understood. Given a sufficiently precise and general analysis of convention, the view that justice at bottom consists of conventions provides cogent answers to two perennial questions: (1) What is justice? (2) Why be just? Conventions are analyzed as correlated equilibria of games where the agents involved have available alternative equilibria. This analysis is sufficiently general to summarize social interactions where the interests of the agents diverge, so that a satisfactory resolution incorporates principles of justice. Agents are in circumstances of justice when (i) their underlying game has multiple optimal conventions they can achieve when all contribute to a cooperative surplus and (ii) each contributor risks being let down if this agent contributes and the others fail to contribute. Necessary and sufficient conditions are proposed for a satisfactory analysis of justice as mutual advantage that characterize justice as a special set of Baseline-Consistent conventions of agents in circumstances of justice. The origins of norms of fairness as the product of salience and inductive learning are explored. The state social contract is analyzed as a self-enforcing governing convention. The Reconciliation Project of demonstrating the compatibility of justice and rational prudence is reevaluated in light of the analysis of convention developed here.