Mark,
In the spirit of honesty my name is Stan Wiechnik. My bio is somewhere on this site. I don't want to go all Voltaire on you, but I do like the free give and take this site offers within the realistic limits of what they can do. I would like to make three points:
1)The editorial staff of this site is limited and they have a lot to do. I know that on one of my articles (Political Legitimacy and Values) it took Dave four days to edit it for presentation on the site. That was simply converting it and correcting some simple errors. I don't know if Dave has any help, but it is a daunting job to edit everything let alone fact checking the information. Dave gets it ready.
2) on other more academic sites there is a bunch of old "know-it-alls" that have their own agenda. What gets by them is limited. Here, the members of the SWJ community are the editors. We read the papers and make comments. If we think something is BS, we can say it for all to see. Two articles after the one on the Rhodesian conflict was a article entitled "The Rule of Law: A Definition in Socio-Political Terms". While good intended, the author could not find the Rule of Law with both hands. Perhaps it should have never been published. But even in that lacking piece of scholarship were nuggets of interest. He is right that the concept of Rule of Law needs to be expanded and addressed in relation to the specific nature of the society that you are trying to apply it in. It is culturally biased to attempt to foist our ideas on the Rule of Law on others. I made my feeling known in the comments after the article. In essence, you and I are the editors of this journal and we do it by the comments we make after the article.
3) related to two, because it offers a cornucopia of articles, some good and some bad, ideas get offered here that could not be offered elsewhere. I have two articles I hope get published because they offer a different way of looking at the problem of COIN. They would never get published elsewhere ... no "academic journal" would take the risk. Here it is and open forum. It is for the members of this small community to do the work of looking at ideas for their practical value.
No, I am not defending a biased article. I can say that, since that article was published here I have learned more about the Rhodesian conflict than I knew before BECAUSE people like you called BS!
I hope you understand my position. I certainly mean no offense or disrespect.
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