British Perceptions of Ottoman Judicial Reform in the Late Nineteenth Century: Some Preliminary Insights

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Ottomans founded a new court system, the Nizamiye courts, as part of an empire‐wide ambitious project of judicial and administrative reform, which involved legal transplantation from the French model. The institutional evolution of these courts was completed with elaborate legislation introduced in 1879. This article explores British consular and diplomatic accounts dispatched in the immediate aftermath of the 1879 reforms in an attempt to assess the value of these reports for understanding the passage of Ottoman law to modernity. Comparison of British accounts with relevant Ottoman sources and recent research reveals that British consuls and diplomats produced distorted representations of Ottoman judicial reform, exhibiting lack of faith in the effectiveness of these reforms. Misrepresentation resulted from ignorance about the nature of reformed Ottoman law, prejudice, and concerns about the effect of these reforms on the ability of British consuls to interfere with Ottoman court proceedings.     

Goodbye to the Despot: Feldman on Islamic Law in the Ottoman Empire

Noah Feldman's 2008 book, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State , provides a sweeping review of the constitutional history of the Islamic polity that connects the past to developments in the Middle East today. The Ottoman Empire is vital to his argument. This essay critically evaluates Feldman's treatment of the Ottoman period, within the larger context of Islamic history, and in so doing considers the understudied constitutional history of the empire. Without denying the importance of the ulema and the shari'a , it argues that the empire was a hybrid of many different traditions and the centrality of Islamic law should not be overstated.     

Procreation,family and ‘progress’: Administrative and economic aspects of Ottoman population policies in the 19th century

The making of the modern Ottoman state in the 19th century was closely interrelated with population issues and policies. ‘Population’ became an important component of Ottoman history throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. As the state identified the ‘population’ as a source of income after the Tanzimat, it tried to protect and procreate it through certain institutional arrangements and regulations. These policies consisted of protecting the existing population, controlling population movements, promoting procreation, and giving subsidies and lending money at interest to peasant families. The procreation policies included enforcement of marriages and encouragement of reproduction within marriages while they discouraged traditional birth control methods and practices. As in any other context, Ottoman families resisted the policies of procreation and pressures coming from the central government. This paper will examine the state's policies toward families and individuals as well as the responses of the people to these policies. I will attempt to construct a model based on the protection and the procreation policies of the modern Ottoman state, which will be an important springboard toward building a basis for conducting comparative analysis with other European states. By doing this, I will try to challenge some of the established assumptions on the nature of the ‘modern state’ in the 19th century.     

Is Turkey the ‘Continuing’ State of the Ottoman Empire Under International Law?

Netherlands International Law Review - This paper examines whether Turkey should be considered under international law as the ‘continuing’ state of the Ottoman Empire or whether it...     

Family and tax registers in the Aegean Islands during the Ottoman period

This article examines types of tax registers that provide a picture of families in the Aegean Islands during the Ottoman occupation. Numerical data from the islands of Andros, Myconos, Syros, Serifos, and Patmos are emphasized. Accounts by travelers and Roman Catholic priests and other documentation of that time are also examined. The article attempts to verify the reliability of data from the registers regarding family size, number of households, the possibility of household sharing by more than one family, and number of household heads. Records of personal taxes (ispence, or poll tax) indicate that the families on the islands during the 17th and 18th centuries had only a few members. Exact data cannot be derived because the communities attempted to redistribute taxes according to their own needs rather than following official Ottoman orders. Similar indirect information is derived from another kind of register that recorded the transfer of taxpayers' properties. The number of houses for some islands seems to have steadily increased although the number of family shares did not. This phenomenon may be linked to the status of ownership of immovable property, the horizontal property that was applied, and the nonexistence of cohabitation of extended families. Another issue concerns the number of widows in the tax registers. This large number does not correspond to the family status of these women but rather to tax practices exercised by the communities and participation of these women in the economic and social life of the islands.     

Intergenerational mobility in the Ottoman Empire: Observations from eighteenth-century Kastamonu

Based on probate estate inventories from eighteenth-century Kastamonu in north Anatolia, this study examines intergenerational mobility patterns in one Ottoman provincial town. Although the topic is well-studied in many Western contexts, historical and contemporary, we still know little about the ways in which socioeconomic disparities and class identities were transmitted across subsequent generations of parents and children in the Ottoman Empire. In order to explore this issue in a sophisticated fashion, this article introduces quantitative techniques and categories of analysis tailored specifically for Ottoman sources. In addition to other findings, our analysis suggests that Kastamonu in the eighteenth century was vertically and horizontally segmented: Not only were there significant impediments to intergenerational mobility across privileged and underprivileged sectors of the society, such transitions were also infrequent across sub-groups within upper and lower classes. Despite a general lack of intergenerational fluidity at all socioeconomic levels, however, our calculations also reveal that the provincial elite were particularly immobile.     

Daily life and family in an Ottoman urban context: Historiographical stakes and new research perspectives

The Ottoman history of the family and of everyday life is presently experiencing deep theoretical and methodological renewals. Following the discovery of new archival resources, and the application of new questionings to previously known resources, the field is the object of an intense research investment. The horizon of expectation has enlarged, as renewed interpretations on tradition, Islam and their influence on everyday life, family, communal, urban and gender relations are the object of intense speculations in the contemporary intellectual panorama. The object of this article, conceived as an introduction to a thematic issue of the journal guest-edited by the authors, is first to draw a panorama of the existing literature on everyday life in an Ottoman context, with an attention to the successive methodological approaches and theoretical elaborations of which the field has been the support of, and then to identify the main stakes for today's research. The authors also argue that, in the present international panorama of research on those themes, not only is the Ottoman Empire an interesting application field for innovative methods, but might also be at the heart of a deep renewal, with at stake the discussion of the heritage of culturalist visions of history and of paradigms such as center/periphery relations and modernization.     

“东方问题”的延续与终结

在近代国际关系中,“东方问题”是指欧洲列强瓜分“奥斯曼遗产”的问题。传统观点认为,土耳其的独立标志着“东方问题”的终结。实际上,在土耳其独立时,奥斯曼帝国的“遗产”叙利亚、黎巴嫩、伊拉克等行省均在英法的殖民统治之下;由于阿拉伯民族解放斗争高涨,向委任统治提出挑战,对英法来说,“东方问题”并没有解决。《色佛尔条约》虽被废除了,但它的原则仍起作用,《洛桑条约》并没有扭转阿拉伯行省被“委任”的局面。无论从中东“弱国无自主外交”的实质来看,还是就“东方问题”一词在英法外交术语中的最后消失而言,直到中东主要民族国家独立,“东方问题”才告终结。     

Staff experiences of working in a Sexual Assault Referral Centre: the impacts and emotional tolls of working with traumatised people

This study considers the impacts on staff of supporting people who have reported sexual violence and attend a Sexual Assault Referral Centre (SARC). This paper focuses on the staff’s perspectives of the stresses and emotional tolls they experience including the coping mechanisms they utilise. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 staff, and a focus group was held with a further four staff of a SARC. The data were examined using thematic analysis. Findings indicated that staff experienced positive emotions connected to the meaningfulness of the work and team spirit as well as a range of unpleasant emotions. Staff also reported emotional numbing, in connection to the specificity, volume and sometimes unpredictable nature of the work. Coping mechanisms used by staff focused on the supportive connection to family, nature, and other team members; the value of clinical supervision; and the avoidance of topics related to work.     

Exploring the effects of work environment variables on the job satisfaction of Nigerian correctional staff

Correctional staff job satisfaction is critical for the staff’s well-being and low turnover. This study’s focus was identifying variables that predicted job satisfaction for Nigerian correctional staff and comparing the findings to past studies of US correctional staff job satisfaction. One hundred and twenty correctional staff from Nigeria were surveyed. The personal characteristics of age, gender, and tenure were not significant predictors of satisfaction in the multivariate analysis. Similar to finding for US correctional staff, job autonomy, quality of supervision, and instrumental communication all had significant positive effects on Nigerian correctional staff job satisfaction. Contrary to previous findings on US prison staff, neither job variety or role overload were significant predictors of Nigerian staff job satisfaction. Other factors may account for this discrepancy, including working conditions, the socio-economic environment and availability of job opportunities.     

Evolution of forensic autopsy and current legal procedures in Turkey

The first documented forensic autopsy in Turkey was in 1843 during the Ottoman period. In this article, the evolution and current legal procedures regarding forensic autopsies with emphasis on current legal procedures following the declaration of Turkish Republic in 1923 are delineated.     

Architecture of Sovereignty: Bosnian Constitutional Crisis,the Sarajevo Town Hall,and the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Mêlée</Emphasis>

This paper addresses the processes by which the international community intervened and participated in the defining of Bosnian identity and the corresponding constitutional framework, as well as the continuous paradoxical tension between the ethnic local and claims to universalism of supranational legal norms. In particular, the 1995 Constitution and the architecture of its sovereignty have been contested through provisions of the European Convention of Human Rights. The analysis is further supported by the discussion of the architectonic structure of the Town Hall/National Library in Sarajevo that has had an important constitutional role since the collapse of the Ottoman period. The paper thus focuses on two sites for construction/deconstruction of Bosnian sovereignty: the constitutional framework and the more concretely visible architectural symbol of the Town Hall/National Library. This importance of a visual and spatial approach to Bosnian realities is carried further by the 1993 ‘Eulogy’ that Jean-Luc Nancy wrote for Sarajevo, as a site of the Mêlée.     

“The Tree Is the Enemy Soldier”: A Sociolegal Making of War Landscapes in the Occupied West Bank

War landscapes have a particular sociology; they are also formed through distinct legal technologies. By examining the genealogy of trees as totemic displacements in the occupied West Bank I demonstrate how the Israeli/Palestinian war is deflected onto the landscape and how this deflection erodes the boundary between law and war. Dealing with issues of colonization, nationalization, and the way that these implicate landscape as a “natural alibi,” the article examines the intricate making of politics into nature. Further, it explores the ironic nesting of colonial processes from Ottoman, to British, to Zionist, and finally to the new Jewish settler society that seeks to unsettle the old colonial landscapes of this place. Utilizing a detailed interpretation of a range of interviews and participatory observations, the article unpacks the mutually constitutive relationship between law, technologies of seeing, and landscape, illustrating how this relationship is played out by various actors in the occupied West Bank.     

State ‘parenthood’ and vocational orphanages (islâhhanes): Transformation of urbanity and family life

Ottoman urban reform policies not only targeted the rehabilitation and rebuilding of provinces, cities, streets, and squares; they also aspired to refashion the inhabitants of urban spaces. Vocational orphanages (?slâhhanes) of the latter half of the nineteenth century were, in that respect, instrumental in removing minor vagrants, beggars, and street children from urban areas according to redefined borders of urban security and visibility and in reintegrating them into society through training and employment in arts and crafts. As much as this initiative was a significant step on the part of the state to intervene in family life and child-rearing practices, the research also points to the agency of poor parents in demanding and benefiting from state welfare policies.     

The medical staff structure--its role in the 21st century

Dr. Eisenberg's paper presents a vision of the medical staff from the point of view of a practicing physician and medical staff leader. Dr. Eisenberg focuses on ways the medical staff, as an independent entity, may use the collective clinical knowledge and experience of its physician membership to enhance quality. This paper also presents Dr. Eisenberg's unique insights regarding the interplay and conflict between hospitals and their associated medical staff in today's complex health care delivery system. He provides several suggestions to increase cooperation between these two important components of inpatient care.     

The influence of staffing levels on the use of seclusion

This study focussed on the relationship between the use of seclusion and staff characteristics, such as number of nurses on shift, male-female staff ratio, level of education and level of work experience. A retrospective analysis of staff characteristics was applied to administrative data from ten wards in four mid-sized general psychiatric hospitals in the Netherlands. The data show that two variables were associated with seclusion rates: the male-female staff ratio and the variability in team's work experience. More female and less male nurses in a shift and less variability in team's work experience predicted an increase in seclusion rates.     

The place of punishment: Variation in the provision of inmate services staff across the punitive turn

Despite the growing literature on the punitive turn, knowledge of how the experience of American imprisonment varied across time and place remains limited. This article begins to fill that gap, providing a nuanced portrayal of variation in the practices of rehabilitation.

Purpose

To examine how one aspect of the rehabilitative ideal in practice—the provision of staff dedicated to inmate services—varied across time and place over the past 30 years.

Methods

The article presents statistics on the inmate-to-staff ratios for inmate services staff (including teachers, counselors, doctors, etc.) between the years 1979 and 2005 for all 50 U.S. states.

Results

The analyses reveal that while there was a substantial decline in the services staff ratio during the 1990s and 2000s, this shift across time paled in comparison to variation across place. Northeastern prison systems, for example, on average maintained higher inmate services staff ratios in 2005 than Southern states in any year. In addition, results suggest state variation is related to differences in prison crowding, inmates’ racial composition, and political cultures.

Conclusions

The findings suggest the punitive turn was more variegated and partial than is often assumed and highlight the importance of exploring state variation in penal practices.     

A Tale of Two Regions: Diffusion of the Israeli "50 Percent Rule" from the Galilee to the Occupied West Bank

The "50 percent rule" is an Israeli judicial doctrine that has played a pivotal role since the early 1960s in deciding disputes between the Israeli government and Palestinian landholders under Article 78 of the Ottoman Land Code. It was first institutionalized during a government land-claiming campaign aimed at providing state land for settlement-based Judaization of Israel's predominantly Palestinian Galilee region. Two decades later, during a similar state land-claiming campaign, the doctrine diffused into the occupied West Bank. Drawing on spatial components of social science diffusion literature and work in the field of legal geography, this article offers a legal-historical-geographical analysis of the evolution and diffusion of the 50 percent rule. Its conclusions suggest a new spatialized approach to the study of legal transfers and transplants that conceptualizes law's movement across international borders as one component of a broader process of legal diffusion, in which internal diffusion also plays an important role.     

Health and social care staff responses to working with people with a learning disability who display sexual offending type behaviours

Abstract

This study found that 59% of social care staff were currently supporting a client with a learning disability who had offended or displayed an offending type behaviour. The range of behaviours was similar to that displayed by clients in a secure health facility and included rape, sexual assault and exposure. Only 22.9% of social care staff had received training in this area, while none of the health staff had. Both groups expressed low levels of confidence in supporting this client group. The areas of difficulty were common to both groups and included personal attitudes and attitudes of others to the behaviour, and concerns over risk, responsibility and safety. In respect of attitudes, social care staff were found to be significantly more likely to hold negative attitudes towards the person's behaviour, while health staff were significantly more likely to feel negatively towards the person. Health staff were significantly more likely to identify training as a means of further support, while social care staff identified professional input. Both groups identified the need for theoretical training about working with this client group. Despite this no significant differences were found between those who had and had not received training and confidence, attitudes and the need for further support.     

‘Coping with the job’: prison staff responding to self-harm in three English female prisons: a qualitative study

This study considers how those who work in prisons are affected by and respond to repetitive self-harm of imprisoned women in English prisons. This paper considers the perspectives of custodial staff working in this area on a day-to-day basis. Semi-structured face-to-face interviews were conducted with 14 prison staff and explored using techniques of thematic analysis. The interviews examined: the emotional impact of working with and witnessing self-harm incidents, coping strategies used, training and the support available to prison staff. Findings indicate the strategies used by staff to cope emotionally with such incidents and these include presenting a ‘façade of coping’, rejecting support and becoming desensitised. It is concluded that staff felt they must portray themselves as coping well with self-harm in prison even when they were troubled and emotionally affected by it. However, some did describe accepting help when outside of the prison and this has implications for how support can be offered in the future. It is recommended that more should be done to support and train staff in this area.