Intersectoral Police Collaboration: An Exploratory View from the States

Modern policing in the United States is best conceived as a joint undertaking between public and private sectors. Over the last several decades there has been a gradual movement away from monopolistic state provision of police services toward a greater reliance on the private sector for protection and security. While the current activities of public and private police are well chronicled in the research literature, little is actually known about the coordination of policing activities across sectors. The purpose of this article is to describe the range of public-private police partnerships that have developed recently in the United States.     

Police Collapse in Authoritarian Regimes: Lessons from Tunisia

The quick unraveling of authoritarian systems specifically designed to bear social pressure during revolutions is puzzling. Building on the 2011 Tunisian revolution, this article analyzes the collapse of the police apparatus during the 2011 revolution. In line with Way and Levitsky's study of authoritarian collapse, this article shows that the low cohesion and low scope of the security forces is one of the main factors explaining the rapid collapse of one of the Arab world's seemingly most solid repressive systems. At the theoretical level, this article will demonstrate that preference falsification is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can nourish authoritarian resilience. On the other, it can also weaken repressive regimes by making core members of the regime overestimate the loyalty of the low-ranking members of the security apparatus.     

Space, Boundaries, and the Problem of Order: A View from Systems Theory

The idea our global polity is chiefly divided by territorially organized nation-states captures contemporary constellations of power and authority only insufficiently. Through a decoupling of power and the state, political spaces no longer match geographical spaces. Instead of simply acknowledging a challenge to the state, there is the need to rethink the changing meaning of space for political processes. The paper identifies three aspects, a reconceptualization of the spatial assumptions that IR needs to address: the production of space, the constitutive role of boundaries, and the problem of order. With this contribution, we argue that one avenue in understanding the production of space and the following questions of order is by converging systems theory and critical geopolitics. While the latter has already developed a conceptual apparatus to analyze the production of space, the former comes with an encompassing theoretical background, which takes "world society" as the starting point of analysis. In this respect, nation states are understood as a form of internal differentiation of a wider system, namely world society.     

The Audit Commission's View of Politics: A Critical Evaluation of the CPA Process

The Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) process introduced in the wake of the Local Government Act 2000 was in essence a managerial tool applied to a political environment. An analysis of the Commission's first tranche of CPA reports reveals a particular perspective on the role of politics and parties in local authorities which raises issues about the Commission's competence and legitimacy to make such judgements. Composite pictures of the ‘good political authority’ and the ‘poor political authority’ can be drawn up, which display a degree of political naivety and a failure to recognise the differences between political and managerial logic. It is concluded that the CPA process should have taken the political culture of an authority as a ‘given’ (at least in the short term), and evaluated the performance of the authority's management in the political circumstances in which they had to operate. Finally the role of the CPA process in contributing to the government-led pressures for depoliticisation of local decision-making is examined, with a particular concern about the substitution of the concept of ‘the good of the area’ for the different priorities and visions of different parties.     

The Impact of AIDS on the Botswana Civil Service: A Case Study of the Police and Prison Services

That HIV/AIDS has had an enormous impact on southern Africa in general, and in Botswana in particular, is not in doubt. Numerous studies have documented certain aspects of the problem—high HIV prevalence rates, increasing numbers of orphans and vulnerable children, declining average life expectancy, and a high number of deaths among adults during their most productive years. Scholars have engaged in speculation about the possible impacts that this disease might have on social relationships, economic growth and development, and governance in both the near and the long terms. But these studies are only forecasts of possible futures, not data driven analyses. This study closely examines data available from two agencies in the Botswana civil service, the police and prisons services in an effort to assess, albeit indirectly, any impact that the HIV/AIDS crisis may have had on the workforce. Although the AIDS epidemic in the country as a whole was reflected in the experience of these services, neither agency suffered the devastating effects some feared.     

A Homegrown Terrorist Cell: Observations of a Police Undercover Operative

On 10 October 2004, an improvised explosive device was detonated in bush land in the vicinity of Mount Disappointment on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia. A relatively small device, it was assembled and detonated by one of the two men present, a Victoria Police officer and undercover operative known as Security Intelligence Officer 39, or SIO39. The other person was the leader of a homegrown terrorist cell, who in the months preceding had assembled a group of a dozen individuals who became the subject of Australia's largest counterterrorism investigation known as Operation Pendennis. This article, which is based on in-depth interviews with SIO39, provides unique insights into a range of activities and behaviors peculiar to this cohort. Commencing his association with the group early in its development, SIO39 was privy to some of its key evolutionary stages, from a collection of individuals meeting more or less in the open, to a clandestine body that clearly harbored terrorist intent and undertook a number of overt acts to advance its violent objectives.     

Political Police Archives in Ukraine and Georgia: A Research Note

Abstract

After the deluge of archival declassification that took place following the collapse of the Soviet Union, historians of Soviet society, and of the political police in particular, are still denied access to the FSB archives in Russia. However, a combination of political turmoil and military conflict has led to the opening of the entire archives of other Soviet-era political police services. This article will discuss why research into the Soviet political police remains critically important, examine the opening of the archives in Georgia and Ukraine, and explain what these archives contain and how to use them. Finally, possibilities for new areas of research are explored.     

Thinking Inside the Box: A Closer Look at Financial Inclusion and Household Income

Using national representative household finance survey data covering more than 6200 Chinese households, we first construct a new multidimensional indicator for financial inclusion. Then we examine the effect of financial inclusion on household income. Our results elicit several findings. First, financial inclusion has a strong positive effect on household income. This effect can be found across all households with different levels of income. Second, low-income households are found to benefit more from financial inclusion than high and mid-level income ones. We argue that, in this sense, financial inclusion helps reduce income inequality.     

Circular Migration: A View from Destination Households in Two Urban Informal Settlements in South Africa

This article analyses dual household membership and the return intentions of migrants, using data collected from migrants living in two informal settlements in South Africa. While dual household membership is very common among the migrants we surveyed, less than half of these migrants wanted to return to their other household in the future. We explore the correlates of dual household membership and intended return migration and we consider the implications of our findings for measures of circular individual migration using existing cross-sectional datasets.     

Personality and Job Satisfaction: Evidence from a Sample of Street-Level Bureaucrats

Job satisfaction is an important component of bureaucratic success. In this article, we build on the emerging literature on the five-factor model of personality and argue that basic personality characteristics can help us understand why certain employees are more satisfied with their jobs than others. Multivariate analysis of personality and job satisfaction data from over 1,000 public servants supports this argument. We conclude with a discussion about how personality can add to our theoretical understanding of public personnel management, and help public managers identify applicants who are likely to be satisfied with work in the public sector.