The spoils of war

Antony Beevor's Berlin: The Downfall 1945 has been an international best-selling history of the fall of Berlin to Soviet troops in 1945. Now published in paperback, Beevor's magisterial narrative of Berlin's downfall has become a leading work of contemporary popular history. The public discussion of this book has been dominated by two themes: first, the ‘normalization’ of the suffering of German civilians and, second, the ‘disclosure’ of mass rapes by the liberating Soviet army in Germany. This review traces how key debates concerning the remembrance of the Second World War form these dominant readings of Berlin. In particular, it examines the formation of the re-remembering of the wartime rapes of Berlin women, and considers the implications of Beevor's account of the downfall of Berlin for how we understand sexual violence in armed conflict.     

Crisis (hostage) negotiators weigh in: the skills,behaviors, and qualities that characterize an expert crisis negotiator

This research identified what skills, behaviors, and qualities experienced crisis (hostage) negotiators believe enhance or harm their success during negotiation. 188 negotiators from various countries (primarily United States) voluntarily completed an online survey in which they listed the aforementioned characteristics and reported on various aspects of their own background and behaviors. Open-response questions were coded and quantitative methods revealed what qualities were listed most frequently by negotiators. Active listening, displays of empathy, effective communication, and remaining calm and collected appear at the top of their to-do lists. Conversely, being confrontational, arguing, yelling, and interrupting were reported as behaviors to be avoided. Most negotiators attend trainings multiple times a year and read on the topic of crisis negotiation. About half follow a model during negotiations, typically the FBI’s Behavioral Change Stairway Model. Findings are discussed with relevance to future research directions and improvement of negotiator trainings.     

Exploring community protection

This is an attempt to provide conceptual clarity to the community protection component of Pennsylvania’s restorative justice enterprise. After a brief background of the legislative changes to Pennsylvania’s juvenile justice system and the theoretical development of restorative justice, data from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania are utilized to define and measure what is meant by community protection.     

What were they thinking? An exploration of child sexual offenders’ beliefs using a lexical decision task

Abstract

Cognitive distortions have been afforded a key role in the offending behaviour of child sexual offenders. While the mechanisms underlying cognitive distortions are not fully understood, they are generally thought to reflect entrenched beliefs that distinguish child sexual offenders from other individuals. We investigated this hypothesis using a robust experimental technique called the lexical decision task. Child sexual offenders, offender controls, and non-offender controls completed a lexical decision task in which they responded to words that completed sentences in either an offence-supportive or nonoffence-supportive manner. Contrary to predictions, child sexual offenders did not respond faster to words that were consistent with offence-supportive beliefs, relative to controls. However, they did show accelerated recognition for word stems supporting external locus of control beliefs. These results highlight the need to use cognitive experimental methods to study child sexual offenders’ beliefs, and the importance of investigating potential alternative drivers of cognitive distortions.     

The Logic of the New Pay Systems Revisited–in the Light of Experimental and Behavioral Economics

The article questions the logic of the new pay systems introduced in the public sector in many countries. The pay systems and their goals are consistent when looked upon through the lens of standard economic theory. In addition, we find no contradictions between the goals of the pay systems. However, if findings of experimental economics and behavioral economics are included in the analysis of the pay systems, this is not necessarily the case. Experimental economics and behavioral economics contribute with knowledge which must be taken into account when pay systems are designed.     

The Possibility of Liminal Colonial Subjecthood: Yayutz Bleyh and the Search for Subaltern Histories in the Japanese Empire

ABSTRACT

This article examines whether writing histories of colonial subjects is possible. Traditional colonial histories subsume the colonial subject's individual history under a larger narrative of subjugation, which often does not allow room for people to exist outside the dichotomized role of collaborator/resister. This approach has left a gap in the scholarship for histories of colonial subjects whose lives do not easily fit either category. This article addresses this gap by detailing the life of Yayutz Bleyh, an Atayal woman who became one of the most important participants in the Japanese colonial administration of Aboriginal Affairs in Taiwan. For over six years, the author gathered fragmented pieces of information regarding Yayutz from a multitude of sources – visuals, as well as oral and written materials from inside and outside the colonial archive – in order to sketch the contours of an extraordinary woman and her life. Through the process of filtering these disparate sources, it was the silences regarding certain issues and the discrepancies that emerged among sources that proved to be the most revealing about Yayutz as someone who straddled both the world of the colonizer and the colonized.